Chris loses his left arm and leg while saving seven sailors, then uses mordant humor to help Anna separate heroic outcome from conscious intent.
During the Slow Zone Catastrophe, Chris happens to be beside a pressure hatch and falls into it unconscious. His body prevents the hatch from closing and trapping seven sailors in a compromised section of the Thomas Prince, but the mechanism takes his left arm and leg at the middle joints. He will receive a medal for the rescue and, if the survivors reach civilization, full regrowth therapy. He rejects pity with jokes about hopping over to kick Anna and admits he was not conscious enough to choose heroism.
From a cot in the Behemoth refugee camp, Chris welcomes Anna Volovodov and teases her about the supposed commando raid that captured Clarissa. Their discussion turns his mutilation into a moral analogy: identical injuries can make someone a drunken idiot or a hero depending on context. Anna applies the lesson to the alien station, which has taken every gun and killed many people without finishing humanity off. Chris listens as she wonders whether the disaster was pacification rather than evil. He also tells her that Tara, the short-haired marine in their congregation, died, making their intellectual generosity costly rather than abstract.
Chris is a very tall young Earther with short blond hair, thick shoulders, and a narrow waist. His left arm and left leg now end at the elbow and knee while he recovers in a refugee cot.
Chris is a wounded survivor whose accidental rescue complicates easy definitions of heroism, intent, and the station's apparently hostile acts.