The Butcher of Anderson Station

Long before he leads the Outer Planets Alliance, Fred Johnson is a decorated colonel in the United Nations Marine Corps, and the man the Belt calls the Butcher of Anderson Station. This Expanse novelette goes back to the day that name was earned: an uprising on a remote ore refinery at the far edge of the Belt, an order from command to retake the station, and what Johnson's marines did there.

Told partly through a later conversation in which Johnson is pressed to say what really happened, it is a short, unsparing story about following orders and living with the result. It expands on the backstory shown in the first season of the television series, is set before Leviathan Wakes, and is collected in Memory's Legion.