Expendable is a clever twist on the Star Trek Away Team/Red Shirt. Being the first person on an unexplored planet is very dangerous. Deaths impact crew morale. Except if the dead person is different, disfigured, or otherwise odd, then people are happy to see them go. The human Technocracy uses people with unsightly but non-crippling birth defects as Explorers, Expendable Crew Members. It's all for the greater good.

Festina is one such Expendable. She and her partner are assigned to take a senile admiral to Melaquin, a sure one way ticket to out of contact. The story unveils the hidden crimes of the Fleet Admirals, the brutal logic of "that's what Expendable means", and the strange rules of the interstellar League of People, which enforces strict non-violence on humanity. What she finds on Melaquin is an exile community of Explorers, trying to get back into space, and a strange and dying primitive race of transparent humans, created in the distant past by super-powerful aliens.

I loved the style of the short chapters, and Gardner's keen eye for frailties of human nature, from Festina's unrequited romantic problems, to calling the alien super tech drive system the Sperm (sailors. sailors never change), to the simple brutality of the "Oh Shit!", an Explorer term for dying on mission. Explorers all listen to audio-recordings of other away teams, but the Technocracy doesn't bother to inform the Explorers if they're about to listen to a friend's violent death.