Mickey Volunteers as the Drakkar’s Expendable

Mickey Barnes’s decision to volunteer as the Drakkar’s Expendable turns a remaining vacancy into a chosen threshold: rather than being drafted into the dangerous role, he asks for it and accepts the berth after learning what it is. The choice is at once practical and unexplained. Berto Gomez warns him away, while recruiter Gwen Johansen questions why he wants a job that she would rather give to someone less decent; neither warning changes his mind.

The Only Berth Left

After a personal ordeal that leaves him unable to move for about an hour, Mickey gets up, cleans himself, and cries. That night, he opens the Drakkar recruitment page. It lists the expedition’s sections and the positions already filled. Almost every berth is taken; the Expendable position is the sole exception. The vacancy makes the job available, but the narrative does not present Mickey as passively swept into it. He contacts Berto Gomez and asks what an Expendable is, then, once Berto identifies it as the berth aboard the Drakkar that a person would least want, says he wants it.

The sequence gives the decision a sharp practical edge: Mickey is not choosing among a range of open posts. The other positions have been claimed, and the Expendable role remains. Yet he does not treat that fact as a reason to refuse. His response converts the last vacancy into a deliberate application, beginning with a question to his friend and ending with a scheduled interview.

Warning, Refusal, and Recruitment

Berto’s warning is complicated by his own wish to have Mickey on the expedition. He explains that the journey is one-way and that it would be good to have a friend along, but distinguishes that desire from approval of the Expendable job. When Mickey asks for help, Berto says he does not think help will be necessary, then ends the connection. The exchange leaves Mickey without an attempt by his friend to secure the post for him, but also without a change of course: he returns to the recruitment page and schedules an interview for the following afternoon.

The interview turns on a question about the recruiter’s conduct. Mickey asks Gwen Johansen why she is working so hard to discourage him if nobody else has applied and the expedition may otherwise have to draft someone. Gwen answers that he seems like a decent person and that she would rather the job go to someone she considers an asshole. She then stands, puts her tablet on the desk, offers her hand, and welcomes him aboard. The gesture completes the reversal: the recruiter’s stated reluctance becomes acceptance, and Mickey’s candid challenge makes the choice explicit rather than leaving it as an unexamined vacancy.

The Job’s Name and Its Risks

Mickey later emphasizes that he volunteered. The distinction matters because the recruitment pitch does not call the role becoming an Expendable; it calls it becoming an Immortal. The more attractive name recasts a position associated with grave bodily danger as something that sounds like a promise of survival. The event therefore establishes both the official language surrounding the job and the distance between that language and Mickey’s understanding of its risks.

Twelve hours after the interview, Gwen runs through the horrible things that might happen during his tenure. Mickey finds himself thinking that the dangers do not sound so bad. By then, the application and interview have become a commitment: after he has boosted up to the Drakkar, he can no longer change his mind about signing on. The expedition gives him training intended to teach him not to fear death, but he considers that preparation less influential than the experience he had during the preceding afternoon. The account links his willingness to accept the role to a recent ordeal without claiming that the ordeal fully explains his motives.

Midgard and the Unanswered Motive

Mickey’s retrospective account raises a question Gwen did not ask: what is so bad about Midgard that he would risk a lethal assignment to leave it? His description makes the question pointed. Midgard is a comfortable third-generation colony world, situated in the Goldilocks zone of a red giant whose inner system has already been consumed. Its first settlers had to terraform it, but it has no sophisticated native inhabitants for the colonists to contend with. Compared with a world where people are being eaten, Mickey suggests that Midgard’s Expendable would at least have faced a different kind of danger.

The planet is described in unthreatening particulars: little axial tilt and few seasons, warmth at the equator and cold at the poles, broad shallow oceans with low salinity, and one continent girdling the world and dividing those oceans. Its population is small beside that of a single pre-Diaspora mega-city on Old Earth; its beaches are pleasant, its cities clean, and its elected government chiefly concerned with managing the economy. Mickey even acknowledges the strange red sun without making it a grievance, though the smaller yellow sun at his present home already feels more natural to him. These details make Midgard an apparent contrast to the dangers he accepts, but they do not supply a definitive answer for why he wants to leave. The event’s significance rests partly in that gap: Mickey makes the choice plainly while leaving its deepest personal cause unresolved.