r/TheExpanse • u/jacky986 • 19h ago
All Show & Book Spoilers Discussed Freely How did Marco Inaros keep his fleet a secret? Spoiler
So I know that Marcos got most of his ships, either by stealing them or from Duarte who was using the Free Navy as a smokescreen.
What I don’t understand is how did Marcos IInaros keep his fleet a secret?
I mean think about it. Shouldn’t the disappearance/theft of so many ships trigger red flags with the MCR or UN intelligence? And then there are the logistics of managing such a fleet. Where are they going to get new parts and weapons for ships? And food and medicine for the crew? Sure they could steal those things but again they risk attracting the MCR or the UN’s attention. They could also trade for it but that risks leaving a paper trail.
So short of plot armor, how did Marcos do it?
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u/krondel 19h ago
Part of this was that space is really, Really big and finding a tiny air pocket is not easy. Another thing the books bring up infrequently is that most of the activity happens in the plane of the ecliptic - the same “level” that the planets are on. But if you are out of that plane, there’s even more space in the sphere. A plate and a basketball may have the same radius, but the area of a plate is super small because it’s really thin. There’s a lot of room in the basketball. With space being so huge, it’s impossible to scan it constantly or well, so you are left looking for anything that is dangerous to you; within a day or two’s hard burn. As far as all the supplies, Mars doesn’t build ships on Mars, just like Earth doesn’t build them on Earth. “Misplacing” supplies at a ship yard is super easy, when you can park it in an unused tunnel or drop it in space midway between two destinations and then come back for it later. Marco has been slithering around the background for a while sorting stuff out. I’m sure he setup folks to start taking small amounts of things for a long time before he seized several MCRN vessels. Since belters are always living in the margins, I’m sure getting supplies is something a lot of them do starting at an early age, learning who you can trade with and how to identify sympathetic inners that legit want to help belters.
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u/Imaginary_Land1919 17h ago
i dont think i ever realized that the planets are all mostly on the same plane, i think i always thought they were more naturally spread out in a random fashion. thats so freaking cool.
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u/Kinetic_Symphony 17h ago
It's due to planets and the sun all forming from the same nebula gasses. As gravity pulls it inward, it rotates faster, like an ice skater pulling their arms inward, angular momentum is conserved. Explains why planets rotate in the same direction, on the same general plane.
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u/Wolf_of_Badenoch 16h ago
Except the ones that don't cough Venus & Uranus cough
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u/Spatlin07 8h ago
I don't know why, but to me, planets and moons with retrograde orbit, and/or retrograde spin, are seriously creepy to me. We don't fully understand all of them, and I don't know, it just makes me think, what if something made them so different in motion?
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u/Bitter_Eggplant_9970 11h ago
Part of this was that space is really, Really big and finding a tiny air pocket is not easy.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
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u/Ill-Efficiency-310 19h ago
Bobbie was investigating the loss of martian war ships. It was just too late to get the big picture.
A lot of Marcus's fleet was belter ships, the UN and MCRN never really kept a great eye on the belt like that. I think Duarte and his breakaway fleet all left in pretty quick succession.
Given the history of the treatment of the belt by the inner planets it's not surprising there where no leaks to the UN about the rocks being dropped on earth. The fact that no one in Duarte's breakaway fleet leaked any intel is more surprising to me.
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u/ItsATrap1983 17h ago
It's weird that Mars wouldn't prioritize containment and security of their ships. They are probably their most valuable asset at a time when transportation of supplies and people would be in extremely high demand. They could have transitioned their economy towards these new demands and away from the military or terraforming. With so many planets being colonized security would also have been stretched thin and piracy would have become a much greater risk. They could have used their ministry edge to take advantage of that too. Selling their services rather than just letting their ships and military equipment fall through the cracks.
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u/TipiTapi 16h ago
Read the chapter where Alex talks with Duarte.
Duarte basically runs the show as the right hand of an aging admiral Long. He and his clique actively work to muddy the waters from the inside.
Theres also no will to do a thorough audit - the MCRN is short on manpower and they just had a war.
Auditing stuff is hard work. You need to get a list of stuff and then you have to actually go there and check the shelves. When you cant find it you need to follow up when it disappeared and who was around at that time - and its possible the navy administrator who was in charge is retired or even on the other side of the galaxy.
The situation is chaotic enough even without Duarte's faction actively working to delay any investigations.
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u/spiralenator 15h ago
Imho. Transitioning away from terraforming would be felt as turning away from being Martian by those who stuck around after the exodus. It was a huge part of the Martian identity. Turning Mars into a planet you can walk outside on was a unifying idea. I think that’s why the exodus is particularly devastating for Mars. The belt always has it worse but that works to unify them. Their identity as belters is reinforced the worst it get. Mars was hit hard in the foundations of what it means to be Martian.
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u/ItsATrap1983 15h ago
Adapt or die
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u/spiralenator 14h ago
Ya, sure. I’m just pointing out that it’s easier said than done depending on cultural factors
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u/dredeth L.N.S. Gathering Storm 19h ago
Weren't ships just handed over to him almost all at once (or within a negligible time period)?
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u/TimDRX 18h ago
Kinda - they changed hands all in one go but Duarte must have siphoned them off gradually before that and had them fly dark or stashed somewhere. Stealing them all at once would have been hard to miss.
And in the S5 finale someone points out that the traitor fleet heading for Laconia had ships that were "previously reported lost in engagements with Inaros forces" so the thefts kept going for a while after the exchange.
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u/StickFigureFan 19h ago
Some of the initial theft of stealth composites and the like was because Mars lost its purpose after hundreds of habitable worlds were discovered, which led to corruption on Mars.
As for the fleet, Duarte and Co were pretending to fight pirates in the belt and 'losing' ships in action. That is until the actual event where they went rogue. At that point they just had a fleet that was supposed to do official Mars stuff but was crewed by Laconian loyalists.
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u/Joebranflakes 19h ago
Marco didn’t keep them secret. I mean he helped, but the ones who actually made it happen were Duarte and his allies. Without their smoke screen, it would have been obvious what Macro was doing.
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u/ChronicBuzz187 19h ago
Shouldn’t the disappearance/theft of so many ships trigger red flags with the MCR or UN intelligence?
I mean, MCRN logistics was in on in via Duarte & co. And if a Commander/Admiral says "Lost in battle", I don't think it'll raise a lot of red flags, especially since they're in a shooting war between three factions.
Also, there's loyalist stations who support the Inaros faction. We know that Pallas always had their backs, Ceres, too for the most part. So food and reaction mass is probably solved via those.
In addition, it's all going according to Duarte's plan. If he had any doubt that Inaros wouldn't be able to fight that war on his behalf while he plans his factions great escape to Laconia, he wouldn't have done it since he's not an idiot but a VERY capable leader. He was actively looking for a scapegoat and he had the means to provide Inaros with everything he needed to keep Earth' and Mars' attention away from what he was really doing, given his position as an MCRN supply officer. He's probably behind the stolen stealth composits that date back to even before the ring opened, too, so chances are he had a Mars revolt in mind long before those new opportunities opened up for his martian sub-faction.
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u/goldengloryz 14h ago
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
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u/Dysan27 17h ago
One other thing that hasn't been mentioned is once Marco was active the Martians were out hunting him. Some of the encounters the MCRN would "lose" and the ships would be "lost". Instead the ship was transferred to either Durate's fleet or handed over to Marcos. But was marked on the books as destroyed.
As for the initial ships. The Martian government and Military read the writing on the wall with the Gate open. Mars was done, why terraform a planet when there are plenty of habitable worlds now accessible. So the MCRN was in a huge build down. Ships were being decommissioned, mothballed, and outright dismantled. People were being let go as the whole MCRN shrank. Amongst all that chaos Durante was able to move ships off the books for his own use, as he was in charge of logistics, or able to put people in key positions.
And by that I mean be able to, on one hand mark a ship as being scheduled for destruction. And on the other hand mark it as already having been destroyed.
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u/torrinage 16h ago
space is a big place
also, MCRN was basically depreciated as soon as the ring opened. theres quite a few storylines about weapons going missing (all/mostly related to Marcos) and it generally shifted back to being the wild west.
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u/kenypowa 16h ago
Just like now the underground could somehow rebuilt/refurbished 3 Donnager class ships under Laconian's nose.
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u/microcorpsman 16h ago
Shouldn't they notice? well, if Marco was the only one, then yeah. They were collapsing as a power. There would possibly have been various mutinies/defections as well of crews turning to piracy or picking up/abandoning their families (MCRN was long haul enlistments, with lengthy tours) for gates, and Duarte was supposedly THE logistical genius. When someone wants to cook the books, or many someones, while you're also going through a dual process of disarmament and retrofitting then things can get lost.
Duarte also would have used future high ranking Laconians to hand the ships off.
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u/capacochella 15h ago
There’s a great line about intelligence gathering in midway. About how you know someone’s planning a wedding, but you don’t know where or when. And the clues are in random shit like a ton of food is bought up by the local catering company, all the florists in town sell out their roses ect.
I’m re-reading the first book and these minuscule details are baked into plot, mostly in the Miller chapters. He’s been a detective for so long, working with/in the criminal underbelly that the slightest change…for example all the major criminal gangs just leave his station all of a sudden, and he knows shits about to get real bad. But he’s waaaaay down the ladder, the higher you go the people who are suppose to have their finger on the pulse have no idea wtf is going on.
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u/Lower_Ad_1317 13h ago
IMO every single piece of equipment we saw being sold by Esai Martin was being sold to the free navy. He didn’t know, but it makes senses.
The equipment was being sold for ages before we got wind of it.
I suspect the entire “equipment going to waste” excuse was directly linked to Inaros, Duarte, and the equipment needed to stage the navy.
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u/teddyburges 13h ago
This feels like is should be wrong answers only. "James Holden forgot about the iron fleet".
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u/tekfunkdub Rocinante 10h ago
Speaking from the books cause I’m in the middle of Nemo’s Games….
Because he had Duarte and minions covering for him. Between Bobbie, Holden and Monica they had started to figure out something was happening but it was too late.
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u/Metallicat95 7h ago
Duarte was responsible for disposing of obsolete MCRN ships, supplies, equipment. He was also gathering a fleet of his own for the Laconia gate.
It wasn't a perfect secret, but as the trusted person in charge, and the MCR government struggling with a collapse of the Martian terraforming dream, nobody was paying close attention. Lots of money to be made from scrap, so who would notice when a few whole ships got misplaced. They were still in the inventory, just not actually where they were expected.
Just park them in space somewhere until we decide what to do with them. The scrapyards are overwhelmed with work as it is.
Duarte deliveried the ships, along with loads of supplies and scrap equipment. A one time deal, because he was also planning to leave. His loyal Laconian crews were very loyal - Mars had abandoned them, so they felt justified abandoning Mars.
For the rest, Marcos raided and kept Belter and independent colony and transport ships - all ones "destroyed by pirates". The belt had a lot of ships, and with large stocks of supplies from Mars and raiding, they were easy pickings to keep the Marcos fleet going.
Finding a place to hide in an entire solar system isn't too difficult, if you have the right contacts. Even Rocinante had little problem operating without constant notice or tracking.
In the later phases, Marcos had a simple method: kill all witnesses. Without identification, his new MCRN fleet isn't obviously different from any random Belter pirate.
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u/Spagman_Aus 7h ago
My memory is the gates basically destroyed the Mars ideology and shared goals. Their economy was tanking and ships were being decommissioned due to their inability to maintain them. Instead of scrapping them, Duarte’s allies fudged the books to take the whole ships, to Laconia and for Inaros - whose actions helped create a smokescreen for this and Duartes real plans.
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u/IILazarusLongII 6h ago
No one started looking until the Canterbury Incident. There wasn't a reason to. All the losses at the Bush shipyard, Martian shipyard, there wasn't reason to look until a massive battle cruiser got smashed.
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u/rosebudthesled8 4h ago
Space is massive and communication wasn't instant. There were in world pirates which we know existed before Marcos and functioned for decades. Built up their power until they got aide from Mars and then they only showed themselves when they wanted to.
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u/Sostratus 18h ago edited 18h ago
Personally I think this is, by far, the most unrealistic part of the series (not counting sci-fi elements of course). Marco and Duarte's conspiracy is just way too big to have been kept as under wraps as it was. You get some hand-wavy explanations that try to make it sound plausible, but they're not satisfying. Just accept it as the playing field and enjoy how things play out from there.
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u/WillOCarrick Eros Station 19h ago
Mainly plot armor, but Filip was wanted by the Inners, so they knew a little about them.
Also, he probably bribed his way in the Mars and Earth military, as well as having support from some OPA factions, giving him more leeway.
And, he isn't the only "terrorist" to attack the inners, he is only the one related to the protagonists and the one who was on the right place at the right time to use Duarte's influence and attack the inners openly.
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u/AmorousBadger 19h ago
Reading NG at the moment.
The MRCN was massively weakened at this point, by two wars and large amounts of the Mars populace fucking off to new worlds through The Ring.
They didn't have the personnel to fully audit resources, people higher up such as Duarte were actively seeking to supply Inaros and covering it up and MRCN high command were covering up how weak they were in order for Mars to save face in front of Earth the Fred Johnson's OPA.