Cat Chen

Cat Chen is a Security corporal whose loyalty to the colony repeatedly collides with her personal attachment to Mickey Barnes. Introduced as one of the armed guards on a dangerous perimeter sortie, she first becomes important by saving Mickey’s life. Their relationship develops from a practical partnership into intimacy, then is tested by the discovery that two versions of Mickey exist and by Cat’s decision to report that fact to Command. At the crisis’s end, she refuses to let her duty become an execution and accepts Mickey’s apology as they make peace, for the moment.

Identity and Introduction

Cat is part of the colony’s Security Section, and Mickey initially knows little about her beyond her role in the first armored sortie since landfall. He remembers her name while struggling to recall those of the other guards, a small sign of how readily he places the armed team into an anonymous group. The narrative later gives that anonymity a personal cost: Cat reveals that Gillian Branch, one of the guards killed in the sortie, was her bunkmate, and sharply objects to Mickey’s failure to know who she was. Cat is not merely another uniform in the perimeter detail; she has a specific bond with one of the dead.

The sortie takes place beyond the lock and colony perimeter, amid deep snow and the threat of creepers. Cat notices that Mickey carries a Linear accelerator rather than the burners the rest of the team brought. He does not explain his aversion to burners, which is tied to Jemma and still feels painful to him. Cat’s question marks an early difference between them: she is alert to his unusual equipment, while he is reluctant to disclose the personal history behind it.

The Perimeter Sortie

When a creeper attacks Dugan, the other guards use burners on the creature while it clings to Dugan’s armored leg. Their fire heats the armor, but does not stop the attack; Dugan’s cries escalate as the creeper keeps chewing at the seam behind his knee. Mickey runs for a granite outcrop and falls face-first in the snow. Cat grabs his arm with a powered gauntlet, hauls him upright, and urges him onward. Her intervention is immediate and physical: she does not leave him to recover alone while the attack continues around them.

Mickey reaches the rock and fires the Linear accelerator at a creeper that rises almost within arm’s reach. The blast destroys its first three segments. When Berto asks over the comm whether they have a sample, Mickey jumps down to retrieve what remains. Cat takes the specimen, then Mickey secures Berto’s descending grapple to her armor. She wraps an arm around Mickey’s chest as they are hauled upward. Below them, the rock is soon covered with creepers; Nasha arrives at low altitude, launches missiles, and carries them away in the cargo bay amid expanding plasma. Cat’s part in the escape is practical as well as courageous: she helps preserve the sample and gets both herself and Mickey off the exposed rock.

Afterward, Marshall reprimands Cat and Mickey. He suspects that they have a preexisting relationship that Cat should have disclosed before the sortie, and warns her to tell Command in future if personal matters could affect a mission. Cat tries to answer, but Marshall cuts her off. In the cafeteria later, she treats the day’s events with dry humor, while Mickey notes that Marshall did not actually have them killed. The grim joke sits against the deaths of five colonists that day and the fear spreading through the beachhead.

Partnership, Intimacy, and Discovery

The next morning, Cat contacts Mickey after seeing his name on the perimeter roster and asks to partner with him, referring to the previous day’s team effort. Mickey is uncertain how to respond, in part because Mickey8 warns that an extended interaction could expose their secret. Cat’s request therefore carries a risk Mickey understands but she does not yet appear to know: the person she partnered with is one of two existing Mickeys.

Later, Cat finds Mickey lying on his back in a Medical exam cube and leans over him, visibly worried. Their relationship has by then moved beyond professional contact. Cat eventually identifies the differences between the two versions: she had breakfast with one, shared her bed with him the previous night, and knows he has a broken hand and was off shift; the other has an uninjured hand and spent the day growing tomatoes. From those concrete contrasts, she concludes that Mickey is a multiple. Her knowledge is not abstract suspicion: it arises from the closeness and attention of someone who has spent time with him.

Cat asks whether he is truly Mickey Barnes or another man wearing Mickey’s identity. He cannot settle the question. He knows what Jemma told him on Himmel Station and feels continuous with the person he was on Midgard, but admits that he has no way to prove whether he is the same person. Cat presses the uncertainty without pretending to resolve it. She reflects that she has been thinking about death despite being only thirty-four, and tells Mickey that she likes him and thinks he is a good man, while acknowledging that the multiple situation complicates what might otherwise develop between them. Their exchange makes the danger of the colony personal: the question of Mickey’s identity is also a question about whether Cat can love and trust him.

Duty and the Choice to Report

Cat’s intimacy with Mickey does not keep her from reporting his multiple status to Command. When Marshall later says she became aware through Mickey’s actions and was bound by duty to report, he presents that obligation as the reason she had no alternative. Cat herself apologizes for her role in what follows and says that it was for the good of the colony. Her decision is consequential: Marshall uses the disclosure to threaten Mickey with termination and identifies Cat as a willing replacement for his Expendable berth.

When Mickey confronts her, Cat looks down rather than meeting his eyes. He accuses her of having made the situation happen and reminds her of their earlier conversation about whether he considered himself immortal. Cat meets his gaze, and the anguish on her face drains some of his anger. The scene does not erase the breach of trust; it shows the cost of a choice she believes she made on the colony’s behalf. Her apology and distress coexist with the fact that she has acted against the person she likes.

The Order to Kill Mickey

The conflict reaches its sharpest point when Marshall orders a guard to kill Mickey. Cat is the person in the armor beside him, and Marshall specifically commands Corporal Chen to carry out the execution, denouncing Mickey as a traitor to the colony, the Union, and humanity. Another guard warns Marshall that Mickey is carrying a bubble bomb. Mickey argues that killing him would also destroy the possibility of diplomacy with the intelligent species on the planet, since he is the only person able to negotiate with them. Marshall stares at him, then leaves without carrying out the order himself.

After the outer door cycles shut, Mickey asks Cat whether they are all right. The burner nearest them goes dark and sinks back onto its bearings. Cat answers cautiously that she thinks so, at least for the moment. She then approaches and offers Mickey her hand. He puts away the trigger cord, takes it, and pulls her into a hug. Cat apologizes with tears in her voice; Mickey accepts that she did what she thought she had to do. The reconciliation is real but qualified by Cat’s own phrase, for the moment: the crisis has brought them together again without making the danger or the conflict disappear.

Cat’s arc is defined by competing forms of responsibility. In the snow, she acts on immediate solidarity, rescuing Mickey and helping him escape. Later, intimacy does not override her duty to report his secret, and she accepts the possibility of replacing him as Expendable. Yet when Marshall’s demand turns that duty into a direct order to kill, the scene ends not with an execution but with Cat offering her hand. Her choices keep the relationship from resolving into simple loyalty or betrayal: she can wound Mickey in service of the colony, grieve over what that choice costs, and still stand with him when the order becomes murder.