“By Any Other Name” – Chapter 1

Captain Balta was a legend long before we ever met.

‘I heard he’s tried to escape seven hundred times!’

‘He’s eleven feet tall.’

‘His ship is still in orbit – that’s why he tries to escape so often!’

‘I heard he was twelve feet tall!’

‘He’s a pirate. I think He has an eye patch, and everything!’

‘Well, I heard he punched Warden in the face so hard, he had to replace his jaw with trititanium and that’s why he’s down in the Depths.’ I hoped this one, of all them was true.

‘He’s just biding his time down there, waiting for his next escape, and he’s gonna get it, too. Warden knows it. He’s afraid of him.’

These stories and so many more were known by any prisoner in PMC-117. That’s Penal Mining Colony one-seventeen for the uninformed. That’s what we used to call them back then, the starstuff mines, ‘PMCs.’ I’d lived on 117 for almost as long as I could remember, and I was only fifteen at the time.

I didn’t even think Balta was real until we finally met face-to-face.

But that’s getting ahead of the story.

We have to start at the beginning. And you’re going to want to hear this, because some legends are real, and though most of those stories about Balta aren’t true, some of them are.

I know the captain was so much more than anyone will ever know.

I know, because I was there…

…the day the legendary Captain Balta died.

*   *   *

“Not sure we’re gonna get out of this one, Peep.”

To anyone in earshot, I’m sure it sounded like I was talking to myself.

I cannot tell you how depressing it is to be in jail when you’re already in prison. But, there I was, sitting on a dirty, fluid-stained floor behind bars in a place from which there was already no escape.

No one ever left 117.

Ever.

As such, in this prison there were no cell blocks, no electrified fences, or plasma shields. There were only the work pits, production quotas, and the guards. Only one place was the exception: Warden’s Detention.

I was in trouble. Again. And this time, I had my doubts I’d get out of it.

I’d been in there before, but this trouble was a heap. A hole. A giant pile.

But even the deepest, darkest place is bearable if you can share it with someone.

I spent almost all my time on 117 alone. I always had, even before my current situation, which we’ll get into shortly, so there was an element of choice mixed in with circumstances. I’d come to prefer it that way. Minimal human contact. Why interact with someone who’s just going to hurt you, you know?

I didn’t have any family.

I didn’t have any friends.

But, I did have Peep.

He was wobbling on the floor, unsteady on his three tiny legs. His power was fading. He needed a recharge, a plug into a series-A socket for a good half hour and he’d be as good as new… except there weren’t sockets in jail.

Peep was a Cracker; one of the millions of tiny little robots that the mine used to explore tiny fissures in the rocks, and map the out so excavating could be done safely. They were about the size of a fist, a half-dome of squishy silicone with three spindly metal legs, a metal ball in the center that held his robot-brain and other innards, and a cute round light-scanner he could swivel 360º to see where he was going that looked like a tiny glowing eye.

I scooped him up and rubbed the very top of his head. I knew he could feel it because he half-squinted his eye shut, and he hunkered down on his three legs. His covering was tough, but soft. I knew he was made that way so he could slip into tight spaces, but I liked the way he felt.

“Take it easy,” I whispered to him. “Save your power.”

He jerked up in my hand, his eye snapping in the direction of the door.

Someone was coming.

I slipped him into my jumpsuit pocket.

“Arm,” came a growl from beyond the bars.

I looked up to see a guard standing just outside my cell. He palmed an ident scanner. His square face was waiting impatiently.

I jumped up. I held out my forearm, as requested, and pushed up my jumpsuit sleeve. His eyes caught the red stripe on it as I did so, but then he turned his attention back to my forearm, and lased it with his scanner.

The guard read the screen and grunted. “Come with me.”

My heart raced as the door to my cell cranked open.

The sound woke up the rest of the rows of cells, and their occupants moved toward their bars to see who was on the move. Dozens of faces watched me as I stepped out into the narrow walkway that lead to the only exit. A bright white line, the only that was maintained in this decaying room, went straight down the middle of it.

“Stay on the line,” the guard directed me with a shove.

I was hoping that the dim lighting and my sleeve being pushed up would hide it, but the other prisoners saw the stripe there, anyway.

My mark.

“Striper!” someone yelled from one of the cells. It was a man, or maybe a woman. I couldn’t tell, because the room erupted around me into screaming, rattling metal, and stomping feet.

“Traitor!” Someone else cried out, pointing at the band.

“I’ll kill you!”

“Filth!”

“How could you, you monster?!”

I closed my eyes, wanting to cover up the red stripe on my arm—maybe they’d stop yelling. But I knew they wouldn’t. Anyone who wasn’t yelling or trying to reach through the bars to tear me apart was staring at my clothes, my body, and my face to remember who I was so if they ever met me out in the pits unattended, they could give me what I had coming to me.

And you know what?

They were right.

I was a striper. A turncoat. A collaborator.

I deserved it.

*   *   *

I have no name.

People on 117 call me ‘Squints’ on account of my face—I worked down in the nodules for years when I first got here, you see—but that’s not my name. I don’t remember my name.

The slave traders that sold me to the Authority called me ‘squib,’ but that’s just raider slang for any kid. They don’t call their kids by names. Numbers sometimes, but no names. I think it’s supposed to keep them from getting attached? I don’t know. If you can stomach snatching a selling a four-year-old for slave labor, I’d think you could probably handle naming a kid without batting an eye.

That’s how old I was when I came to 117. Four, I think? Maybe five?

I only know that because every year, I have to go and get my photo taken for my ident scan. Everyone does; our faces change for different reasons than the adults, but no face stays the same in the mines. And if your face doesn’t match your scan, that’s a one-way ticket out an airlock, or worse: down to the Depths.

This year, I just so happened to be thrown into the Warden’s jail when it was time to renew.

“You Squints?” The officer who had taken me from my cell asked as he moved behind a holoimager. The room was dark, with a ring light around the lens of the imager that was so bright, it made my head hurt. It also made me squint. Every light made me squint. Except Peep’s.

I lifted my hand to block out some of the ring. “That’s me,” I said. I kept my other hand in my leg pocket with Peep, making sure he’d stay put.

“Warden wants a new ident photo before he sees you.”

The officer flashed up a series of images, each one they took of me over the years I’d been on 117, tracing them all the way back to when I arrived. Thirteen of them. The officer stepped in front of the rows of photos and followed them all the way up to my most recent, making sure the face stayed the ‘same.’ Fidelity, they called it.

“You’ve been here for thirteen years,” the officer said flatly.

“If you say so.”

“Pictures say so.” He stepped back behind his imager, and there was a pop and click as the imager grabbed my face.

Peep jumped in my pocket—he could be so jumpy sometimes—but I held him tight.

A second later, a new photo appeared in the holographic line-up. It played in a small loop, the second of time it captured, and if I shifted it back and forth, it appeared as though it was in full dimensions instead of flat.

A new photo of me.

It was the only chance I had each year to see what I looked like.

I looked…older.

My hair was wild, ringlets of brown smeared with black, freckles dotting my forehead and my nose, and a pair of squinting eyes hiding from the light. I hated the way my eyes did that.

I compared the image to the rest of them still hanging in mid air, projected from the imager. My face had grown even if the rest of me hadn’t. My cheekbones were starting to push out. My chin, too, and I was leaner than I used to be. But, I was still small. So many of the children I worked with had been shipped to different sections because they’d started to grow. But, not me. not yet.

My youngest photo didn’t squint. No, my eyes were big and wide in that photo…afraid. The squint showed up years later, gradually getting worse as time in 117 took its toll.

“Alright,” the guard said, turning off the imager and the holograms, plunging the room into darkness.

Light knifed inside when he opened a door. He stood, a back-lit shadow, motioning me to follow.

“Warden’s waiting.”

*   *   *

The Warden had three different holoimages waiting for me when the guard led me inside his office. They were projected to face me from the surface of his desk.

The sight of them made me sweat even though it was freezing. And let me tell you, nothing is more uncomfortable than sweating when it’s cold. I was shivering by the time the guard exited the room and we were alone.

“I expect,” the Warden started slowly, “that you know why you’re here?”

I nodded, unable to take my eyes off the images. There was a boy, older, about my age, and a boy and girl, much younger. Six or seven, probably. Their faces were pale, and their lips a lifeless blue. What told their sad tale, however, was the frost on their eyebrows and in the tips of their hair.

They hadn’t looked like that when I’d seen them. I could feel anger rising inside me, and I tried desperately to keep it down.

“You found them,” I said.

“Of course we did.”

“What did you do them?”

The Warden leaned back in his chair with a shake of his head. He was a small man with no hair and perfect hands with no dirt under their nails. He didn’t squint as he looked at the glowing images.

“See, now that’s the problem, isn’t it?” He said with a click of his tongue. “I did not do this to them, miss…um…” he stopped and looked down at a data pad that undoubtedly had my name on it. I knew what was coming before he even said it. “Squints. Squints?” He looked up at me, frowning. “Surely that can’t be your name.”

It was the same every time.

“That’s what they call me,” I said.

What was different this time were the three dead faces staring at me. I slipped a nervous, furious hand into my pocket and felt for Peep. I found him and held on to him.

“How distasteful,” the Warden said, still on about my name, as if I had a choice in the matter.

“I spent four years down in the Mids when I was young.”

The Mids were a dark place to work. It made the laser cutters easier to aim. Darkness was not good for young eyes to grow up in.

The man ignored my explanation and turned his attention back to the images. “These three were found outside the dome. They froze. Trying to escape.”

I shivered more violently. What a horrible way to go. I’d have imagined their faces to be more full of pain and misery, but written there instead was only exhaustion.

“They slipped through the back of machinery-47…where you were working.”

“That’s why I reported them,” I gulped, almost choking on the words.

“Yes. Six hours after you spotted them.”

I swallowed again and nodded.

The Warden leaned back in his chair again with a big sigh. “Squints—…oh how I hate that name, I can’t refer to you as such.” He licked his lips as though it left a bad taste in his mouth. “You are part of our Colony Watch program. You know what that entails, I can see right here that you’ve been trained. Several times, in fact; this is not your first infraction.”

“I will report what I see when I see it and keep my Colony safe.”

“Yes, see, you do know the words.” Back to the frozen trio. “So, why oh why would you wait for six hours to report these poor misguided souls?”

I closed my eyes, and I saw the three as I’d seen them that day. They saw me and the red band on my arm in the same instant I saw them, and they stopped working on the access panel they were trying to pry open. Their eyes were wide. The red band marked me as a striper, an informant, a turncoat. They thought it was over. And it should have been. I should have stopped them right there by raising the alarm.

But I didn’t.

“I don’t know.”

“Can’t you see that if you’d done your duty as a member of the program, they’d still be alive? We would have stopped them before this?” He touched the controls on his desk so that the images of the three zoomed in on their lifeless eyes, frozen open in the vacuum of space. “Because we both know this is the only outcome for someone who tries to escape this Colony.”

“Yes.”

The Warden chewed his bottom lip and shook his head. “The program is a privilege,” he said, and my stomach dropped into my toes, knowing where he was headed. “Not everyone is cut out for it. And like we both know, this is not the first trouble you’ve made.”

“No, sir,” I whispered.

I could feel Peep in my hand, wiggling. He could feel how terrified I was of what was coming next.

“I may have no choice but to send you back to general population.”

“Please, sir, no!” I said, rising to my feet, trembling like a waveform. “Please,” I said. “You can’t do that.”

It was a death sentence.

That angry mob back in the jail that was every other prisoner in 117. I was an informant for the Authority. I worked for the enemy in exchange for better housing, better clothes, better food, and there was only one thing that someone like me deserved…

The Warden was staring at me, rubbing his perfectly clean hands back and forth over the polished black surface of his desk.

I swallowed back tears. “Please.”

“There…is perhaps one thing you might do, an errand I need completed, that if you can successfully accomplish…may be a step towards me…reconsidering.”

“I’ll do it,” I said without hesitation.

“Good!” He said with a clap of his hands.

He stood from his desk and beckoned me forward. From below the surface, he pulled out a small metal case, no longer or wider than my teenage forearm.

“The boy,” he said, pointing to the oldest of the three photos still projected from the middle of the desk, “was my courier. Which means I have no one to make my deliveries.” He tapped the metal case with his thumb and then slid it over to me. “I need this delivered to section C, level 1521 of the lower depths, block A, bunk 43.” He pointed to a shipping label stamped onto the lid of the case with those details.

I froze. “The Depths, you said?”

“Correct. You can read, can’t you?”

“Yes, sir.” I could read ‘section,’ ‘level,’ ‘block,’ ‘bunk,’ the numbers, that sort of thing. There were several words on the label, however, I didn’t recognize. Not that I would mention that to the Warden.

“Good,” he said, smiling as if it was all business now, and a journey to the Depths was the most normal request in the world.

“Who…who is this for?”

“A prisoner,” the Warden answered, pointing to the label. There was a word beneath the tip of his fingernail.

B-A-L-T-A.

I looked up at the Warden. “By the name of Captain Balta,” he said with a nod, ignoring the shock on my face, and then waved his hand at me. “Off you go, then.”

I picked up the case.

It was cold in my hands—why did he keep his office so freezing?—and slippery from all the sweating.

The Captain Balta?

I turned to leave.

“While you’re gone,” the Warden called once I got to the door. “I want you to think about why you let those three leave and remember the one thing about our facility that is most-worth remembering…”

He trailed off, waiting for me to answer.

I answered.

“There is no escape.”