Prison Pit

Martha Jane "Big Bird" Canary

Martha was born on Shuford, a staunchly independent world in the Vanguard Reaches, and an altogether peculiar place. Combining an Imperial-grade starport with no atmosphere or hydrosphere, Shuford none the less supported a population of seventy million, mainly human. What seemed like infinite layers of bureaucracy, committees, offices and boards governed the planet with less an iron fist, more a netting embrace. Resistance was not crushed; it was exhausted. However much one circumvented, there was always another grey little man with a clipboard to tell you 'no'.

No-one expects the big, gawky kid to be sly and cunning. Martha grew up very tall and strong, but rather than using her muscles she learned a million ways to be where she wasn't expected, to make off with things she wasn't supposed to have, to get into places she wasn't supposed to be. Inevitably, from time to time, she was caught or outwitted, and it was then that she had to resort to simple violence. She killed her first man at the age of fourteen, and was rather surprised at how easy it was and how little it bothered her. In the four years that followed she accounted for over a dozen more before it all caught up with her and she was brought to book.

By chance, at the time a recruiting party from the Imperial Marines was on Shuford, and the judicial committee dealing with the case saw a possible way to save some money on prison upkeep. Martha was offered a choice between life imprisonment and enlistment in the Marine Corps - with a blank record - and lifetime exile from Shuford. She chose the military life...

Early on in her career with the Marines, Martha learned two things. First, being big and strong even compared to most of the men meant she was rather good at most of the soldier's trade. Secondly, that garrison life on a backwater was a fabulous arena for personal enrichment. For four years she served on a garrison base on the edge of Zhodani space, keeping her head down and adding extramural burglary to her daytime military activities. Sneaking into the admin office and tweaking her assignments to keep her here and away from any fighting was fairly straightforward.

Something went wrong with the latter process towards the end of her first hitch, however, and much to her annoyance she found herself posted to OCS, trained as an officer, and shuttled onward to Commando School as a lieutenant. It took her exactly a week to realize the even greater opportunities for larceny within a training establishment packed with displaced people engaged in unusual activities, and by the time she left she was determined not to go back on the line. At the end of her year at Commando Training, she once again fritzed her orders - by bribery this time - and got herself posted as a flag officer's aide, then to Intelligence School, which while far less easy to steal in allowed her to greatly increase certain useful skills.

Re-upping again she missed the chance to tweak her assignment and found herself back in a garrison, this time as the CO. The benefits of command duty proved even better, though, because now people were bribing her and this meant they started to owe her favours and she collected these with relish. So good was her cover that the following year she was actually put in command of investigating the trail of thefts and murders she herself had perpetrated. Needless to say, someone else was 'shot while resisting arrest' and the 'successful investigation' earned her promotion to Captain.

This seemed about as much excitement as she felt inclined to cope with, and she pulled some of her increasing collection of strings to get herself assigned back to a nice dull garrison on Edi Gresu, with a year out to attend staff office training with the usual results. After two years in command of the garrison on Vandelstarn, the increase in crime levels was so noticeable that Internal Affairs took a direct interest. Martha found herself promoted to Force Commander and put in command of a full-blown gangbusters unit dedicated to shutting down the scams, rackets and robberies for which she herself was responsible. Setting up the unit and delivering a few scapegoats went quite well, but unfortunately Internal Affairs were not as easy to put off as the regular Marine command. Martha was working like a one-armed paper-hanger to deflect their attentions when a border flare-up with the Zhodani on Detamina saw her and her company drafted off and sent to put it down.

In all her fifteen years of military service, this was Martha's first experience of actual battle, and the first time she had killed men she was really supposed to. The planning of the raid was hasty and imperfect and the Imperial force was badly mauled; Martha learned a fair bit about tactics simply from observing what had been done wrong on Detamina. When she returned to her 'home base' on Edi Gresu, she didn't have enough men left under her control to keep up with the IA investigators and she was finally unmasked and cashiered.

Court-martialled, she was found guilty - of everything; the IA investigators proved incredibly good at unraveling a trail of events once they'd found an opening. The trial was spectacular; new charges kept being added to the heap as xMail came in from more distant worlds she'd operated on. In the end, her sentence computed out at four hundred and seventy-two years, and the judge had no option but to exile her to life imprisonment on Odegra. Every last credit of the ill-gotten gains of her life of crime was identified and confiscated.

Martha's arrival in the Pit looked like a gift to the authorities; half a head taller than pretty much anyone else and built proportionately, she looked like the perfect mine-worker. Her attitude put an end to that, however, as she balked, resisted and fought her way through three years of systematic abuse. Her bitterness at the loss of everything was compounded by her treatment in the prison to harden her psyche. In her last year she'd been in seven fights and had received a groin wound which would remain painfully scarred until it was regrown - a facility not offered to prisoners. Hurker's last set of odds on her chances matched against Alice Abernathy had shortened considerably, although Martha had no grudge against the other woman, only respect for surviving the hell of Odegra as well.

At the time of the disaster, then, Martha was very ready to cut her way out of prison with extreme prejudice.