The events of this story take place in the Starstuff Universe some years before (or after?) those of the Starstuff Trilogy.
Balta, the legend of PMC-117 was a woman. An old one at that. And crazy.
Only now did I stop and take her in completely. Her hair was gray, rather wild, like her steely eyes. Her face was a map of rivers, valleys and canyons, the deepest of which were over her nose and forehead. They gave her a perpetual scowl. She was thin. Malnourished. Bent from age.
But…there was something there. I noticed it. Everyone else did, too, despite the rough way they’d treated her. Even now, once she’d stopped her attempts to barrel forward and assault Cap, they were giving her space. A berth. And there was the golden gun she clutched at her side, finger always near the trigger.
They were afraid of her.
“You going to open it?”
Cap’s question broke the silence. Fixed on his face was the same magnanimous expression he’d worn the entire time we’d been in the tent. It was starting to look like a mask. Anyone who smiled so easily in this hell hole wasn’t to be trusted, and I didn’t.
He gestured to the rest of the crowd of people, two or three dozen of them. “We’re all dying to know what the Warden wants to tell you.”
Balta’s jaw worked, flexing at its corners. She was staring at the label on the box, the one I couldn’t read. I wondered if she couldn’t either. Cap asked her as much.
She shot him a look that said she’d like to strangle him with those steel eyes of her. “I can read,” she said.
As Balta returned her attention back to the unopened box, I realized that everyone in the tent, including myself, was waiting breathlessly to see what was inside. What was inside? I’d spent so much time focusing on just accomplishing my task, getting down to the depths, finding the mysterious captain, and getting myself back up top and redeemed…I hadn’t given much thought to what it was I carried. What did the Warden want with Balta? Particularly down here, in the depths?
The box opened with a sharp snap and a hiss that made me jump enough to startle Peep down in my pocket. He’d been fast asleep; intentionally so. I didn’t want him moving about in such unfamiliar surroundings, but my nervous jump had waken him. I slipped a hand in and out to reassure him as quickly and surreptitiously as I dared. Everyone was watching the metal box as Balta slowly slid it open.
Inside were two small objects. One I recognized immediately: it was a security chip. Guards and Administrators used them all the time to gain access to restricted areas. They were keys that opened doors. The other I didn’t recognize: it was a small metal disc attached to a silver chain, a medallion of some kind. A personal item, perhaps? But it wasn’t the medallion that sent my head spinning, it was the security chip.
Why would the Warden send a prisoner a security chip?
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who found the contents of the box to be shocking. The crowd gasped behind us, and Cap’s smiling mask dropped if even for just an instant. He stepped back.
Balta, for her part just stood and looked at the box. She smiled, and I realized it was the very first time I’d seen her wear that expression. She reached into the box, took the security chip, which was a small rectangle about the size of a palm and fingernail-thick, and slipped it into the pocket of her ragged canvas pants. The medallion she slipped over her head, tucked it into her shirt where it dangled on her chest, and she dropped the metal box into the mud.
When the box hit the ground, she locked eyes with Cap, and proceeded to punch the man in the face.
It happened so fast, faster than I’d have ever thought possible for someone at such an age—an age almost unheard of in the mines full-stop, let alone down here in the Depths—that neither Unther nor his companion had time to stop her. Cap was down on his ass in the mud, and Balta was standing over him, her fist still clenched and shaking. It was the same fist that held her gun. She’d pistol-whipped him.
Cap had a flash of murderous fury cross his face as he scrambled backward like a crab. Balta took her golden gun and leveled it at his head.
“Boss?!” Unther cried, taking a step towards Balta and raising his torch towards her. But Cap waved him to stay still.
“What are you going to do,” he said, his voice level and his face returning to its pleasant, fake mask, “use that last shot on me?” He nodded towards her gun.
‘Last shot.’ Interesting. And he said it like it was common knowledge who Balta was saving it for…and it definitely wasn’t him…like she was bluffing and he knew it. Helluva gamble to take with that barrel pointed right at his forehead, I thought.
Balta held the gun on him, jaw flexing and unflexing for so long that I thought she might actually do it. But, instead, she shook her head. “I want my last meal,” she said.
And then she turned and walked out.
The crowd parted to let her go. Cap pushed himself to his feet and watched her along with everyone else.
“Cap?” Unther asked an unspoken question once she was out of sight.
I could hear the boss’s teeth grinding before he finally said, “She’s right. It’s her due.”
“But she—”
“Just do it!”
Unther clamped his mouth shut looking none too happy, but he gave a nod, slapped the second man on the arm, and the two of them stalked off outside the tent, ostensibly to prepare this ‘last meal.’
Last meal…what just happened?
Cap interrupted me with a rough tug on my right sleeve. I turned around to face him, and his eyes were cold. “You have to remove this,” he said of the strip of red fabric, “if want to eat with us and the Captain tonight.”
I pulled my arm away from him. “I can’t do that. I need my strip.”
“Not down here, you don’t.”
“But, I’m not staying. I’m riding up tomorrow. I’ve delivered my message, and the Warden will be waiting for me.”
“You sure about that?” There was something in his tone that sent a chill over my entire body.
“Yes,” I swallowed. “I’m just a courier.”
Cap nodded, but not in a way that said he believed me. He pointed again to the stripe on my sleeve, the mark of a collaborator. “You still can’t eat with us as long as you wear that. Not down here.”
“I can’t take it off.” And it was true. You were only ever given one red stripe. If it was taken off, you could never get it back. “I need it.”
A new look flashed over Cap’s face. It looked almost like sadness. But then the smiling mask was back. “Suit yourself.” He turned to the rest of the crowd. “Well, get going,” he said. “No one without a full quote chit gets to dine tonight with the esteemed Captain Balta.”
The crowd dispersed, murmuring quietly to each other. They all sounded…shocked. Morose, even.
“Cap,” I called to him before he, too, left. He turned and squinted at me. “What is going on. What was in the box I delivered?”
“That was a security chip, and a personal item the Captain hasn’t seen in a long time,” he said.
“But what does it mean?”
“It means,” Cap said, drawing it out as if he couldn’t believe it himself, “that Captain Balta has been offered a pardon.”
My blood froze. “A…pardon?” Impossible.
“Yup,” Cap nodded.
“How…?”
“Can’t say for sure.”
A pardon. Release. Freedom. It was inconceivable. The Warden’s parting words rang in my head…’no one gets out of PMC-117.’ No one. It didn’t make sense.
Cap was starting to walk away when I called him once again. “So, then why is she getting a final meal?” Final meal sounded like something you offered to someone who was getting a death sentence.
“Because we have rules down here in the Depths, just like we do about that stripe on your arm, Squints. And the rules say that anyone with a stripe doesn’t eat, and anyone who gets a pardon…gets a last meal. Even Captain Balta.” He looked back at me one last time. “I’d stay away from the miners, topsider, long as you wear that stripe. Liable to get yourself into trouble.”
And then he left.
* * *
I could hear the last meal going all the way back in the elevator chamber. My teeth chattered from the cold and my stomach was growling up something fierce, but I could still hear it.
The miners were chanting and singing, and there was the sound of plates, silverware and glasses clinking together, the sound of hearty laughter, and the sound of shouting. It sounded joyous.
My body ached to be with them, but I couldn’t. After Cap’s warning about staying away from his people, and the fact that my way out of this dark place was somewhere they couldn’t go, it only made sense to hole up where the elevator was. But it was cold, and it was dark. The lights had dimmed, power-saving measures of some kind, perhaps, and there was a constant breeze of frigid air that blew down the empty elevator shaft and out through the metal grating that spanned the space between the forcefield-covered entrance and the top of the rock chamber. The food crates were gone. It was just me in the room and the mud, the heartless, and the crackling forcefield. And Peep.
Peep kept my hands warm.
I didn’t dare keep him out for that long, given that I’d had only minutes to plug him in topside before coming down. It was impossible to tell exactly how much charge he had, but I’d guess it was about half. A few hours. At most. I’m sure it would be enough to make the trip back up in the morning, but I had to keep him on sleep mode as much as I could. Just in case.
But at that moment, he was the only thing that kept me warm, both inside and out.
The way Cap had treated me unnerved me. He’d had this…certainty, even if he didn’t say it out loud, that I was staying down here. Maybe couriers didn’t come down here that often. I’d never heard of it, after all. I’d never met a courier who’d been down the Depths before. So maybe it was just that; they were used to whoever came down here stayed down here. But…maybe I’d never met a courier who’d delivered down in the depths because they never came back. Maybe the Warden meant me to stay down here. Maybe he was punishing me after all…
I was drifting off into that dark nightmare when Peep stirred in my hands. He went rigid on his three tiny legs, his eye wide and looking at the chamber exit that went out into the depths. Someone was standing there in the doorway.
I shot up to my feet.
It was Captain Balta. This time, however, she wasn’t pointing a gun at me.
“What do you want?” I asked.
She didn’t answer for a moment. She just wavered in the doorway. I could smell alcohol on her skin. They had alcohol down here? “You make that?” She said, pointing at my closed hand that was covering Peep. Her words were slurred.
I put my fist and Peep behind my back.
“It’s a cracker,” I said, making sure I kept my eyes on the drunk woman. I could see her golden gun hanging at her side, slung low, but easily within reach of her knobby arms. “They’re robots we use topside to—”
“I know what a Cracker is,” she slurred with a dismissive wave. “I didn’t spend all my time down here, you know. I worked topside once. And the mids.”
“Oh.”
“Quite well-known up there, in fact,” she said with a lose grin that then faded. “Kinda what got me down here, ya know? Can’t have a reputation round here without getting kicked downstairs. Warden doesn’t like that, does he? Sticking you neck out.”
“No, he doesn’t,” I said, thinking again of my nightmare. I straightened. “What do you want?”
Balta shrugged. “Might ask you the same thing.”
“I’ve completed my task,” I said. “I delivered the Warden’s message. I’m waiting for my transport back up top.”
Balta threw her head back and laughed so hard, she knocked herself back into the wall. “Just like that?” she said with a clumsy snap of her fingers.
I ground my teeth together, ignoring the laughter. “The guards said I had to deliver the box in person. Then I could go back up.”
“Did they say they were coming back for you?”
They hadn’t. He hadn’t actually said that had he. I felt a panic rising in me.
“Nobody gets out of here, kid,” Balta said.
“You’re getting out of here.” Yes. Right. She was. She’d been given a pardon, after all, right? She was having her last meal. She was leaving the depths. Warden had given that to her. I was leaving with her. She was crazy.
My mention of her freedom caused the woman to reach down into her pocket and stumble over towards the shimmering red-pink forcefield in front of the elevator. She pulled out the security card, and shuffled up to a small panel set in the stone next to the forcefield. There was a slot on that panel for a card to be swiped.
She swiped the card.
The tiny light next to the swipe burped an angry tone and flashed red. It didn’t work.
“Thought so,” she said, putting the card back into her pocket.
“Maybe it’s time-coded,” I said.
“Oh it’s time coded alright,” she said, shuffling back towards the chamber exit. “For tomorrow morning.”
My panic faded as a wave of relief rushed into me. Tomorrow morning. “That must be when they’re coming,” I said. “To get us.”
Balta shrugged and gave me a bleary look. “We’ll see,” she said.
There was a long awkward silence, me trying to push down the doubt these people had about my return to the surface, her just trying to stay upright.
“I didn’t make him,” I said finally, bringing Peep out from behind my back and opened my palm. He stretched and wiggled his head like an animal would, blinking his one small eye. He caught Balta’s attention. “You asked if I made him.”
Peep lifted one of his tripod legs to scratch at his domed head. Balta marveled.
“Never seen a Cracker act like that,” she said.
“Most people don’t spend much time with them. But I did, when I was in the Mids. They’re very social. Just took a little bit of re-programming to like to be touched and all that, and they make good friends.”
Balta shook her head. “Friends with a robot. I’d never even thought of it. There was a loader bot on my ship before I got here. Strong silent type. Couldn’t stand him.”
I pulled Peep away and put him back in my pocket, giving him a tap on the head to go to sleep and save power. “Peep’s not like that,” I said.
“You wouldn’t rather be down with them,” Balta said with a wave down the tunnel, where the sounds of the meal were still filtering. “Your own kind?”
“They’re not my kind,” I said, low, feeling the stipe around my right arm.
Balta was looking at it, too. “You’re right,” she said disdainfully. “You’re not. You’re a coward.”
She turned and started to leave.
“I am not a coward!” I yelled at her.
“Then you’re stupid,” she said turning, surprisingly red-faced and intense. “Stupid to have ever put that stripe on, and stupid not to rip it off right now and go get some food.”
“This stripe is the only thing that’s kept me alive,” I said. “The only way I have been eating.”
“Everyone eats down here.”
“I’m not staying down here!”
Balta stared at me, and then shook her head. “Suit yourself.”
She turned and started off down the tunnel, back towards the sounds of revelry. “You really should reconsider and go eat,” she said, calling back. “You’re going to need it.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that, and then she was gone.
Typical reaction from a gen-pop. Blaming us stripers for their own misery. We were all miserable. All stuck down in the hell hole together. It was the stripers who realized life didn’t have to be quite so hard. There could be regular, hot meals. Warmer beds. The freedom to have a small friend like Peep. If life was going to be spent in such a place, and there was no escape, ever…why not be as comfortable as possible.
The thoughts of losing all that slowly pushed me to sleep.
I woke once in the cold night. I don’t know how much later it was, but there was a plate of food, nearly cold, but edible enough sitting at the chamber exit.
I don’t know if it was Captain Balta who set it there, or if it was someone else.
But, as I ate it, the Captain’s words rang in my head as I tried to figure out what the hell had happened to me, and what was coming.
“Eat. You’re going to need it.”