Marshall’s Attempt to Eject Mickey from the Drakkar

Marshall’s Attempt to Eject Mickey from the Drakkar was an early confrontation between Marshall and Mickey Barnes, exposing how criminal suspicion and religious conviction could turn Mickey’s precarious place on the mission into a near-fatal threat. The expulsion did not happen: Captain Mara Singh intervened by reminding Marshall that his command authority would not begin until the mission made landfall on Niflheim.

Causes and Background

About a week after the Drakkar had boosted out of orbit around Midgard, Marshall learned of Mickey Barnes’s run-in with Darius Blank. He interpreted the incident as evidence that a criminal element had infiltrated the colony. His response was intensified by his religious tradition, which regarded bringing people back from the tank—even one person at a time—as an abomination.

The threat came against a longer history between the two men. Marshall had been the first person from the Niflheim mission to be present when Mickey Barnes arrived at the orbital assembly plant where the Drakkar was nearing completion. That arrival came two days after Mickey Barnes’s interview with Gwen Johansen and three days after one of Darius Blank’s minions had terrorized him. Marshall was there, though Mickey Barnes later acknowledged that calling his reception a greeting overstated what happened. By the time of the ejection threat, Marshall was nevertheless one of the people Mickey Barnes had known longest on Niflheim, apart from Berto Gomez.

The Attempted Ejection

Marshall’s suspicions and beliefs brought Mickey Barnes to within roughly thirty seconds of being thrown through an air lock. The threatened expulsion was not simply a dispute over one incident: to Marshall, the encounter with Darius Blank signaled criminal infiltration, while Mickey Barnes’s very existence as a person restored from the tank violated Marshall’s religious convictions. Together, those judgments made Mickey Barnes’s continued presence aboard the Drakkar seem intolerable to him.

Intervention and Significance

Captain Mara Singh stopped the immediate threat by pointing out that Marshall was not yet in command of the mission. Although Marshall was its supreme commander, he would not formally take command until the Drakkar made landfall on Niflheim. Singh, then captain of the ship and later head of its Engineering Section, used that distinction to prevent Marshall from ejecting Mickey Barnes before arrival.

The incident established the danger in Mickey Barnes’s relationship with Marshall before the colony had even reached its destination. It also made the later discovery of a second Mickey especially combustible: Mickey Barnes already believed that Marshall regarded even one restored Mickey as an abomination, and feared that learning of two would make an already hostile commander’s response still worse.