Mickey7 arrives on time for his meeting with Marshall and sees that Berto is already there. Marshall interrogates them about Mickey7’s supposed death, and Mickey7 claims to be Mickey8, even as Marshall and Berto both seem suspicious. 

Marshall chastises Berto for failing to retrieve Mickey7’s corpse, as the wasted protein and calcium mean calories are missing from the system. As punishment, he deducts 20% of Beto and Mickey’s calories. After the meeting, Mickey7 is angry at Berto for lying about his death, and Berto apologizes. Mickey7 accepts Berto for who he is, even if he lies, as he thinks it’s important to be realistic about the people in his life.

He returns to his room and explains their caloric reduction to Mickey8. It is a problem, considering that they’re already splitting the calories of one person. Mickey7 explains Berto’s suspicion, and Mickey8 thinks they’ll have to tell Berto the truth soon. He also demands that Mickey7 take on any missions that are sure to result in death, though they’ll split the grunt work. They both get an ocular ping from Command about an issue at the edge of the dome, and Mickey7 goes while Mickey8 rests.

Mickey7 recalls his Expendable orientation on the Himmel Station with a woman named Jemma. She trained him in all the different mechanical and scientific processes that he would perform as an Expendable. She also engaged him in philosophical conversations. She explained the concept of the Ship of Theseus after Mickey finished his physical backup, a thought experiment in which a ship is replaced piece by piece over time, raising the question of whether, at the end, it is the same ship. With this concept, she hoped to guide him to understand that even when he is in a freshly printed body, he is still Mickey. 

His emotional backup is difficult, as he freshly faces memories of his mother, who died when he was young, and he comes out of the experience sobbing. As the final act of his orientation, Jemma gives Mickey a burner, a type of gun, and demands that he kill himself with it to demonstrate that he accepts the role of Expendable. Mickey hesitates, but he does it. The burner doesn’t fire, and Jemma welcomes him to the Drakkar and gives him the title of Mickey1.

Now, Mickey7 gets to the main air lock and sees that there is a hole in the floor, alongside a mangled body. Creepers broke through into the main lock, and security vented plasma into the lock, killing the creepers and the security guard. Dugan, the biologist, is worried that they have no data on the creepers, and since Mickey has allegedly been killed by creepers twice, he asks him for information. 

Mickey has no intel on the creepers, which Berto and Marshall find suspicious, but they move past it quickly as Marshall orders Mickey, Dugan, and three security officers to go looking for creepers with Berto and Nasha as air support. Mickey7 prepares with Dugan, who wears armor, despite Mickey7’s insistence that it’s a bad idea because the creepers can get through metal with their mandibles.

Mickey thinks back to his research into failed, small starter, or “beachhead,” colonies. The only one that encountered locals who opposed colonization was Roanoke. The Roanoke expedition made landfall on a planet with only a thin habitable zone between an unsurvivable cold pole and an unsurvivable hot pole. When the colonists brought water to the habitable zone, horrific and sentient creatures arrived and killed the colonists. 

People kept dying until all that was left were duplicates of the Expendable named Jerrol. Jerrol wrote in his diary, “I am not paranoid. Someone here really is out to get me” (107). Mickey notes that Roanoke failed because the colonists didn’t notice the sentient creatures until it was too late; Mickey worries that the giant creeper he encountered was sentient and that he led it back to the dome.

Mickey7, Dugan, and three security officers trudge through the snow. One of the officers, named Cat, makes conversation with Mickey7 before they’re attacked by creepers. A creeper drags Dugan under the snow, presumably killing him. Creepers attack the other two security guards, leaving only Mickey7 and Cat. Before Nasha and Berto rescue them, Mickey7 grabs part of a dead creeper as a specimen.

Mickey thinks back to his past deaths, especially his first two. The early part of the journey through space was rather uneventful. However, after a while, something hit the ship and broke a hole in the nose. Mickey1 was sent outside the ship to fix it and then died of radiation poisoning. He felt his body boil as they forced him to upload his memories for the possible data. He died again soon after, when he had to fix another damaged part of the ship, but instead of waiting for the radiation to kill him, he popped open his collar seals and let himself suffocate in space.