The events of this story take place in the Starstuff Universe some years before (or after?) those of the Starstuff Trilogy.
Peep woke me when the first of the crowd showed up.
One by one, they came shuffling into the elevator chamber, hardly even looking at me. They were fixated on the elevator, and the forcefield that covered it. The lights had brightened. A semblance of daytime? They used to something similar in the mids. Topside was always bright, much to my annoyance. Peep watched the first few walk in like an animal on alert, staring at a new, unknown creature. I put him away and tapped him to sleep.
Balta showed up a good hour or so later. Cap was trailing behind her.
She looked over the crowd as she worked her way through them. Her expression was cynical, as if their presence was the funniest, oddest thing she’d ever seen.
“What are you all doing here?” Her tone was mocking. “It’s not like you’re coming with me, is it?”
The crowd gasped, collectively. Cap put a hand up. “Nobody is going anywhere,” he said, reassuringly, “except for Captain Balta.”
“And me!” I said, jumping up to rise above the heads of the adults in the room. I pushed my way forward from the back of the chamber, up to where Balta was standing in front of the elevator forcefield. “And me,” I repeated once I reached them, breathless.
“You don’t have to go,” Cap said to me. “You may remain here, if you wish, for the rest of your days.”
He said it like it was an offer, like it was something I should consider rather than returning to the surface.
He could see the confusion on my face. “You’re never returning the topside,” he said plainly, though I still didn’t understand. “Nobody that’s left here in the Depths ever returns to the topside.” He held up a hand, anticipating my objection. “Not even a courier. We’ve had several of your kind,” and again I knew he meant the stripe on my sleeve, that I was a collaborator. “They’ve all been welcome to our community, but only if they renounce the symbol of their oppression, of our oppression, and accept their fate.”
“Accept fate,” the crowd of miners repeated in unison.
Cap smiled his mask-smile. “See?” He said. “Our fate is that we will never leave this place.”
I shook my head. I didn’t believe what he was saying. I pointed at Balta. “But, she’s been pardoned. She’s leaving.”
“She doesn’t have to,” and now Cap turned to address her. “You’re welcome to stay. You don’t have to follow the pardon.”
Balta gave him the same look I had on my face: one of incredulity…though perhaps hers was more solid, and resolute. I felt anything but. “You’re all fools,” she said. “All of you. You’re all going to stay down here, and I’m walking through, and I’m going free.”
“You don’t have to choose that fate,” Cap pushed, again as though he were offering a kindness. I didn’t understand.
In front of us, the forcefield suddenly snapped off. A small gust of cold, wet air whispered in from the open shaft. But, that was all that came through. There was no elevator, nor the sound of one. Just the empty, open shaft.
Balta stepped inside, and headed straight for something on the far side of the shaft, something I’d never really seen. It was a door. She approached it with the security card in her hand. She was shaking. She slid the card through a lock panel. It clicked green, and the door swung open.
I stepped forward, away from the crowd, into the open shaft.
Balta turned back to look at me. “It’s time I flew this roost,” she said. “You coming?”
“Child,” Cap said behind me, urgently. “You do no have to go out there. Stay here. Safe.”
I looked up the elevator shaft, listening hard for the sound of a coming elevator, ready to stop here, take me in and up, back to my home.
“He’s right about one thing, kid,” Balta said to me. “There is no elevator coming for you, and the Warden never intended to send one. I don’t know what you did to piss him off, but he means you to stay down here, like Cap says.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s not true.”
“It is true,” Cap said. “And there are worse fates, child. Accept it, and stay here.”
I couldn’t do that. “There will be a lift,” I said. “It just hasn’t arrived yet.”
“Not happening, kid,” Balta said, still standing in the doorway. Her foot was on the door, keeping it open. She then gestured to everyone in the chamber. “Anyone coming with me needs to come now.”
“Nobody here has a pardon except you,” Cap said, sickly sweet.
Balta guffawed. “Come on, Cap,” she said. “We all know the pardon is just the Warden’s bait for the climb. I’m sure he’d be happy to see all of us go through this door.”
Cap shook his head and covered his ears. The rest of the crowd behind him did the same. “This is our fate,” he said. “Not dying on the climb, trying to reach a place we were never meant to go to. We accept our fate.”
“Accept fate,” the rest of the miners said, and they stayed where they were.
“That leaves you, Squints,” Balta said to me.
I looked up the elevator shaft, wishing one last time that I’d see the lift rushing down towards me, any sign that Balta was wrong, that I hadn’t been left down here.
“You’ll die in there,” Cap said behind me, making a final plea.
“You’ll die down here,” Balta said with a shrug. “Eventually.”
“What is the climb?” I asked the captain.
“What I’ve been waiting twenty years for,” she said. “Come and see.”
I took a deep breath. There was no elevator. What if she was right, and one never came? Was it safer to stay here with these…fate creeps…or to go with the woman who’d been given a way out? Put that way, it was easy.
I stepped forward and through the open doorway.
Behind me, just before Balta let the door swing shut, I could hear Cap and his crowd wail for our lost souls.
Then, there was silence.