“That’s Lincoln. I saw Clinton and Kennedy, too. They were on the Valiant4.”
Dalia glanced over at Camile. “The craft that managed to get away?”
Camile grimaced. “Obviously not.”
Dalia settled back against the bunk, staring at the ceiling while she fought to still the frantic pounding of her heart. Reuel had come back. She hadn’t realized how worried she’d been that he wouldn’t until that moment, until she felt the terrible need to give vent to tears. She was still struggling with it when a stray thought abruptly popped into her mind. Amusement replaced the desire to cry and a chuckle escaped her.
“What?”
“The presidents. They named the males after presidents.”
Camile stared at her blankly for several moments and finally chuckled. She sobered almost at once. “It’s true, isn’t it? What you said?”
Dalia sighed. “If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have said it. Sometimes, I’m still not sure I do, but maybe it’s because I don’t want to, not because there’s any room for doubt.”
They’d just finished what Dalia thought was their evening meal when the bulkheads began to shudder and the sound of revving engines drowned the conversations within the hold. Almost as one, they looked around and then up at the ceiling, watching the lights above them flicker as power was diverted into the launch engines. The shuddering increased, became a hard rattle as the ship sluggishly lifted from the ground.
An invisible weight settled over them, pressing harder and harder until, abruptly, it ceased as they broke the planet’s gravity. For a handful of seconds disorientation set in and then artificial gravity kicked in and the sickening sense of imbalance disappeared.
Thereafter, the days seemed to meld one into another. Once they’d taken off, guards came through the room and released those who’d been restrained, including, unfortunately, Zenia. They were allowed to roam the hold, but not beyond it, except for twice a day when they were herded through the particle showers.
After perhaps a week, they began allowing the hunters to leave the hold in small groups to spend part of the day in the recreation room, but it was strictly for the hunters. Except for the guards in the viewing rooms above them, they saw none of the cyborgs. Dalia was disappointed, but not really surprised. She thought it was probably just as well. She didn’t particularly relish the thought of another encounter with Reuel. She would’ve liked, however, to know for certain that he’d survived.
She tried not to think about the baby as the weeks passed. Reuel had indicated that she’d forfeited her right to have anything to do with it after its birth. It was almost a relief. Until he’d pointed out how unfit she was to mother a child, she’d been afraid to acknowledge her self-doubts, but the truth was, she hadn’t been designed for such a thing and she was not only afraid it wasn’t something she could learn, she was fearful of the results of any efforts on her part. She didn’t know much about infants, but she did know that they were fragile and easily damaged.
What if she were to drop it? What if she fed it too much or fed it the wrong thing? What if it became ill? They couldn’t talk, not at first, anyway. What if it needed something and she couldn’t figure out what that was?
Just thinking about it scared her worse than anything had ever frightened her in her life. She was afraid of the birthing part, too, but not nearly as much. She knew how to deal with pain. She had engaged in fifty battles over the past three years and she hadn’t come out of all of them completely unscathed.
Apart from the fear, thinking about the baby made her feel indescribably sad. It seemed grossly unfair that nature had seen fit to give her the ability to reproduce and not given her any of the instincts or knowledge for mothering it. She had only to reference other living organisms in nature, however, to know that that wasn’t altogether uncommon even in other creatures. Reptiles didn’t nurture their young. There were even some species of mammals and birds that had little or no nurturing instincts, and, as often as not, failed to rear their offspring to maturity.
Shuddering at the thought, she realized that the best tact was to simply ignore it as much as she could.
That became more and more difficult as the weeks passed, however. The gestation didn’t follow the rules of human gestation. The fetus was developing at an accelerated rate. Her onboard computer calculated maturity in little more than twenty weeks at its current rate and possibly less.
Not only was her belly ballooning almost before her eyes, but the odd little flutters she’d first felt quickly became uncomfortable punches in some very sensitive internal areas. By the time they’d been in the hold by her best guess, a month, the activity beneath her shift was sufficient to draw all eyes as she passed, even if they were polite enough to ignore the growing bulge.
Boredom, sadness and worry weren’t her only companions, unfortunately. Zenia had focused all of her fear of her situation, and all of her grief over her loss of ‘humanity’ into a fixated hatred of Dalia. After the incident when the guards had sedated her, she’d made it a point to keep her distance, but she stared at Dalia with hatred in her eyes, leaving her in no doubt that, sooner or later, Zenia would strike.
At any other time, she would almost have relished a physical confrontation, if only to relieve her boredom, but she’d learned her lesson. Danger for her meant danger for the fetus and she couldn’t risk it. Beyond that, she shuddered to think what Reuel would do to her if she were to find herself in the middle of another battle, whether it was of her making or not. At any rate, it was impossible to ignore the fact that the bigger the infant grew, the slower, clumsier and more vulnerable she became. If she were not burdened by the infant, she knew she could best Zenia in any contest of skills. In her current condition, she couldn’t.
Camile was friendly enough, but Dalia doubted it would occur to her to help if Zenia crossed the line and attacked. The same was true of most of the others. They were trained warriors. They might watch two warriors battle it out with interest, but it certainly wouldn’t occur to them to feel any need to intervene.
There was also the insurmountable fact that, on varying levels, she wasn’t particularly popular, even among the hunters. Some of the resentment predated her involvement in the affairs of the cyborgs, to her hunting days, and was directly proportional to her success as a hunter--professional jealousy. Zenia wasn’t by any means the only one who’d viewed her helping the cyborgs as treachery, either, and then there were those who resented her merely for being the bearer of bad tidings.
All in all, it was only the fact that they were constantly watched, and knew it, that had kept any number of them from working out their fears and frustrations on her.
Pierce was the exception. They’d been in the hold almost three weeks before she even realized that he was among those captured. He hadn’t approached her, but when she’d finally emerged from her abstraction enough to notice, she realized that he had been watching her for some time.
They’d come as close to being friends in their early days of training as anyone ever did, and even for a while after they’d emerged from training and begun assignments. The company didn’t encourage friendships. And their training and the demands of the job made it nearly impossible anyway. She’d scarcely seen him in the past two years and usually only then in passing.
She knew, however, that Pierce felt more than friendship toward her. If anyone would be willing to help her, he would.
The thoughts had barely formed in her mind before doubts crept in. She might never have considered him in a sexual light, but she liked Pierce, very much, and it wasn’t right to use him, even knowing it might be a matter of survival. There was also the little matter of Reuel. It seemed unlikely he would care. It seemed unlikely, now, that anything would come of what had happened between them before, but she still felt bound to him, felt like it would be betraying him to even consider becoming friendly with another man.
She wrestled with it for almost two weeks, but in the end she knew she had no choice. The trip seemed interminable. The ship had been designed for long hauls of huge cargoes, not speed, and there was no telling how long they would be imprisoned together in the hold.
Finally, nerving herself, she approached Pierce in the rec room. Almost from the moment she started in his direction, his gaze fell to her bulging abdomen and remained fixed there until she felt so awkward and hideous it took all she could do to refrain from whirling and bolting in the other direction. “Hi,” she said, smiling with an effort.
