Marlisa only had to wait a very short time before finding out not only whether she would have a child, but the sex and genetics of said child as well. After the insemination, she had been booked into the hospital for three days. Arthur did not come to see her during those days, but he had carefully monitored her whereabouts and doctors’ notes by accessing her chip remotely. He had commandeered a civilian liner and set off to a remote colony under construction and was not expected to return too soon. Knowing how busy he would be with the surveying and testing of the colony’s operating systems, she didn’t try to contact him at all until the word came, on day three, that she had successfully conceived.
“Arthur speaking.” His voice on the TeleComm was small-sounding, as if he was speaking through a pillow. “Voice only.”
“Arthur…where are you? You should be here for this.” She had the look and air about her of a bright and happy woman. Her face was warm and eager, betraying none of the aloofness that she was known for. He hadn’t seen her radiate like this since her last birthday when he’d bought her a dome on Earth, complete with a stable of Arabian horses. “Arthur…I can barely hear you.”
“I’m on 327-AG. ” His voice was crackly as it came through. The colony was his pet project, the latest in a line of Coalition stake-outs along the border of the neutral zone, where real estate was cheap. “I’m sorry for the connection. We’re scrambling the signal. What does your doctor say?”
She ignored his direct question, relishing the gift she finally had to give to him. Tilting her face away from him, she shrugged minutely.
“Are the boys there? “
The boys were Arthur’s old friends from his days of piloting aerojets for his own father’s army. There were three of them left out of the original seven; the others were dead or, being prisoners of war, would soon be. Once in a while Arthur got the ones that were left together when he went to work coercing engineers to build for him, mostly for the skills they could offer him when it came to persuading military men. There was also the unspoken fact of trust between them. They had flown, fought, and lived together for five intense years before discharging from the army to pursue their eventual places in Coalition society. Arthur had risen to be the boss of all of them, but he deeply appreciated that they didn’t seem to value that very much. Even the granite man needed companions he could trust.
“Just Markie,” he rushed. “Tell me what’s happening, Marlisa. What have they told you?” He regarded her face on his own screen, glad she couldn’t see the earnest hope in his eyes. She looked as regally impassive as ever.
“Oh Arthur,” she sighed breathily, twisting her pale fingers together in a spasm of emotion,“Arthur, we’re going to have a baby! And not just a baby, a boy! A little boy!”
Though he wanted to hear it, the news hit him in the gut with the full force of nausea. He was silent, swallowing back the emotion that a smile would have let creep into his voice. In a way, he understood that the victory was also his deepest loss—that of his lover and partner. Was the exchange for a male child of indeterminate character and personality worth it?
“My love. I’m so happy,” he murmured, but his eyes were closed and his head was hanging low. “Just what we always wanted.”
Marcus “Markie” Phillips, arms crossed, waited until Arthur hung up to glance over his shoulder. He was an unremarkable man of average build, but his face was friendly, with a wide mouth and big, quick eyes that all too well betrayed his intelligence. The hair that tumbled off of his head was kept long as per family tradition, and pulled into a tousled ponytail that kept it out of his way. Only the hard, sad set to the muscles of his face left an impression of what he might have done and seen.
“So? How’s the old lady?” He tried not to sound too interested, as Arthur was famously mum about his family life.
“She’s fine,” Arthur droned. “We’re having a baby.” He crossed the room—bare except for a large window and two chairs—and busied himself with a pile of papers he had left in a messy sheaf on the ground. Markie watched him do it, taking in the barely discernable stoop to his old friend’s shoulders. There were very few things that could shake Arthur.
“Hey pal, that’s great!” Markie turned back to the window. “I think this guy too.” He was referring to the man on the other side of the glass: a tall, thin, and prematurely graying man with grey eyes who was seated at a long, skinny table. The table was covered with hundreds of blueprints. “His wife is having a kid sometime in September. Or something.”
“Hm,” Arthur grunted, bending over his work. Markie faced him once more and regarded him silently for a moment. He couldn’t fathom the tension in the room, not being a very tense person by nature.
“Maybe our kids could have playdates, or whatever people do with babies these days. The wives would love that. You know—” He stopped, aware of the awkward silence that Arthur was letting fester. “I wish you’d just say what’s on your mind, pal,” Markie pleaded. “You’re supposed to be happy about this. The two of us with boys of our own…and you know how old we’re getting. You know how excited we used to get when we were just some harebrained kids about having friends to kick the shit out of the Feds with? That’s going to be our boys.” There was an almost pleading element to his voice. “That’s exciting.”
Arthur raised himself heavily out of a crouch to face his partner, the famous ice blue eyes steely with suppressed emotion. “My wife is going to die a horrible death delivering this boy of mine,” whispered the man who had personally and knowingly signed away the gruesome deaths of many innocents in the name of war. “I knew that getting into it. It’s what she wanted, to have a son, any son. I couldn’t stop her. I was—and remain—powerless.” He shook a shock of golden hair out of his face, squinting hard at a drawing in his hand of an aerojet wing. There was resentfulness in the way he gripped the paper. “She’s going to die, Markie. And it’s going to be me, and this kid. And what if I hate him for it?”
Markie stared at him with a look of pained attention on his face, and stuffed his hands into his pockets, rocking on his heels. He was sorry to think it, but there was little pity in his heart for Arthur. Markie had always been a faithful friend to him, but that had extended once to quietly accepting the death of his own loved ones. There was little he was willing to say in this situation that he felt he could say honestly.
“Nah, don’t think that way, Arth. This is the boy who will run the Coalition army someday.”
“Maybe,” interjected Arthur strongly, glancing at Markie sharply.
“Maybe,” Markie agreed with a shrug. “Don’t brood. Hey, I think that our pal is ready to talk.” A muffled knocking was vibrating through the wall. The engineer looked like an empty shell of a man. They walked to the side of the glass, to a small instrument panel with two buttons on it. Arthur pressed the left one and the walls that held them suddenly thrummed with the engineer’s desperate voice.
“Sir, Mr. Phillips, please, this is impossible. This thing you’re asking. I’ve never seen anything like it. These drawings are impossible. No one can build this. There’s nothing that could with hold the tension of this much weaponry, no building material that could stand the launch into space as well as the recoil of more than one of these thermal guns ever being fired.” The man looked ragged and tired. His eyes bulged out of his head as he continued to speak, darting from one shadowy figure to the next through the barrier. “I’ve never heard of anything like this.”
Arthur sighed audibly, his frustration showing in the thin line of his lips.
“I can be a very patient man, Dr. Blanchard. I can also be an angry one. I advise you to tread carefully in the places you aren’t sure are sensitive.”
“Sir, I don’t mean to insult—“
“But you do, because what kind of a person have I hired to man my research and development laboratory on 327-AG, if not one I consider to be the best? And my best is standing here and telling me that he finds some aspect of development impossible. Please, I can’t help but feel insult.”
Markie clasped his hands behind his back and kept his mouth shut. Arthur was boring into Blanchard as if he would set him on fire just by looking at him. The engineer simply gestured helplessly toward the papers on the table behind him, his face plainly showing his frustration and a touch of anxiety.
“Would you like to try again?” Arthur patiently inquired, his face impassive. “I know that it is possible, because I have in my possession just such an aerojet. It’s incomplete, but if you looked at my—rather rudimentary—drawings of it, you would have seen that it did once fly.”
The specialist screwed up his face as if he was trying to keep inside what he truly wanted to say. His hands were clammy with sweat; he knew that there was nothing he could do or say that would make his conclusion any less true. Maybe once, the aerojet that Arthur had had flown, but the technology was lost now, as many things had been to the ravages of war.
“Sir. I’m asking you to see it my way, for just a second—“
But Arthur had stopped listening. He glanced sideways at Markie as he turned his back to the window, pressing the other button on the box by the glass as he did so, shutting off sound to the room beyond.
“Wrong again, Marcus,” he muttered, giving his friend a look as if to say, Well, I wasn’t really expecting this one to work out either. Markie shrugged and smiled, spreading his hands to the side of his body helplessly, palms up. His eyes sparkled innocently.
“Hey, not like I didn’t try or anything. I thought he would know how to fix up that clunker for you…but maybe my judgement’s not what it used to be. You know how it gets, you’re old too.” When Arthur didn’t respond to the jest, he immediately became serious. “Arth. Let’s get out of here. Your guys’ll get him home alright, they know what they’re doing by now. Let’s go to my place and catch up. I haven’t seen you in half a year.”
“I’m busy, Markie,” Arthur said, but his mind was occupied with the ticking time bomb that was now going to be sleeping in his bed with him. His wife, whom he had trusted completely with everything on his mind since they had first met, was going to die like any common person. He felt enraged, not knowing that it was because Marlisa was his last shred of humanity in the sea of war that he had been born into, was living in, and would die in. What would be left to keep him sane after she was gone? Who would be there to even notice his sanity? “But thanks for the offer.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the other pilot said gravely, stuffing his hands in his pockets again. He turned his gaze onto the engineer, who was frantically pacing the room beyond the glass. “What do you want to do with him.”
“Just fire the jackass,” Arthur snapped, waving a hand over his shoulder impatiently. “Maybe after he goes hungry for a while he’ll get what it means to work for your food. I have no place in my labs for people like that. “
“He’s got a kid on the way, Arth,” his friend iterated quietly, a cord in his voice like steel. There was a long silence that led Markie to finally look beside him, but Arthur had already gone.
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