Escaping the Butcher’s Pit

How did I get here? It’s not how you’d expect.

Woah, be careful where you point that thing!

Most people take starships to get places or underground transit in more industrialized worlds. Horses are a tried and true transport for galactic colonists worried about their next meal and their EV’s next charge. I’ve taken them all at one point or another. But to get here, I came through a womb like most mammalian beasts and some alien beasts, as long as you don’t hold too strict a definition.

I came from my father’s womb, born on a distant planet where everything was legal. My parents fled there to be themselves. Who could blame them? But with no laws, the powerful let the horrors in their hearts leech into the world. Being ourselves under their looming towers did little to protect us.

My fathers provided what they could for as long as they could. Unfortunately, like many people on our planet, they disappeared into the darkness one night. Captured by some dark pursuit or lured into a trap set by others.

As an orphaned boy, a generous butcher adopted me. She wasn’t the kind of butcher that sliced into cattle or alien reptiles. Kids were what she maimed. Not with knives but with explosives. The lot of us under her care worked the mines. We squeezed into gaps grown men couldn’t reach. We set handmade explosives and sifted through the rubble for anything she might find valuable. The fingers of my right hand were lost one day, never to be recovered since they didn’t fetch a price in the butcher’s market.

I was considered a man when I no longer fit into the cracks and crevices despite being a few years shy of 18. The city’s terror and lures were advertised to me as I searched for a shelter to sleep under each night. I wonder if one of my fathers is sitting comfortably in a high tower. He had an uncanny knack for getting his way. I have no doubt the one who nurtured me for nine months and another nine years fell victim to one of the city’s many cruelties.

To escape the dangers of the night, I joined the navy. They were happy to forge the paperwork for the extra credits that came with my recruitment. I did not know the dangers service held in and of itself. Their training was no worse than the butcher’s beatings and berating. They provided me with two nutritious meals a day and one new bionic hand. They’ll likely want back if they ever catch me.

Once assigned to the powerful warship Mafaldine — yes, the one you just faced off against.

The captain and crew were more interested in the comforts of the Central System than bringing pirates and smugglers to justice. They’d attack you all the same, but the justice you saw at the end of their blasters was far from what the judges of the Central System intended. From the captain’s perspective, extra comforts and credits were due to us, especially if the haul was twice the listed bounty. I learned that a few additional credits went far on the frontier worlds where we occasionally stopped. And I saw that laws did little to hinder corruption. They merely produce hoops too high for us little guys to jump through.

I soon found I had more in common with the captured criminals than the crew. They were just people from homeworlds like mine. Many were living on a ship that didn’t have the blessing of the navy. Soon I put my mining experience to good use and lay homemade explosives through the lower corridors of the Mafaldine.

Surely you didn’t think your rail guns were what opened the stock rooms into the void of space. I slipped onto this ship in the chaos of repairs and fighting. I hope that, despite the laser cutlasses singing my neck hairs, you’ll consider how that encounter might have gone without my help.

Sure, you could have handled it. The world turned us into capable fighters. How else would we claw our way out of the pit we were born into? I hope to serve on this honest crew of pirates. Since only a criminal genuinely acts out the role society wrote for us.