Massoud (Massoud Chronicles Book 1)

  “Almost there,” the midwife said.

  “Elizabeth, Elizabeth...” Teloc agonized.

  “Don’t be such a wuss. It’s not painful, just incredibly hard work.” She gripped again as the overwhelming forces produced by her womb took control.

  “Baby’s head is here. Just one more push...” the midwife encouraged, although no such encouragement was necessary. Elizabeth’s body made another massive effort and she felt her child slip from her. Instinctively she reached between her legs for her daughter and suffered the frustration of waiting while the midwife cleared the child’s mouth and wiped her face. Finally, little Constance was placed on her mother’s chest while her father hung over them both with an air of shock and fright.

  “Oh, baby, baby. We love you already,” Massoud cried. Every muscle in her lower body was shaking uncontrollably. “Oh my. I can’t believe it. I’m ravenous again!” She gave a relieved laugh.

  Someone had placed a chair behind Teloc, and he sank into it. He placed his forehead on his arms on the delivery bed, utterly overcome with emotion. He had hardly looked at the infant.

  Elizabeth instinctively cooed as she held her baby to her chest. The attendants left her undisturbed only briefly before the midwife interfered to check the baby’s health. The midwife must have been a civilian; she had embedded tech and did not use a device to scan the infant. She pronounced the baby to be perfectly healthy. Massoud now turned to her husband and caressed the top his head with her free hand.

  “It’s alright, my love. Everything is fine. I’m fine. The baby is fine. You don’t have to worry anymore.” Teloc was not yet ready to be comforted.

  The attendants offered to clean Massoud and the baby. The child was washed with a gentle water- based solution; the mother was cleaned with a portable sonic-infrared shower. Massoud felt infinitely better after the shower, perhaps because she had simultaneously stuffed a sandwich into her mouth, tempering her hunger. Teloc remained motionless throughout.

  After confirming with the new mother that it was acceptable, the midwife changed the room status to ‘visitors permitted’. Massoud wanted Noor to see her daughter as soon as possible. However, within moments of the change in room status, a hologram of Admiral Biash appeared with a face that was not at all serene.

  “Teloc, what the hell were you thinking?” he demanded. “You don’t run out of a meeting like that!” Teloc remained unresponsive.

  Massoud, feeling protective towards one of her loved ones and proud of the other, called to the admiral’s image. “Admiral Biash. Look. Look at my baby. Isn’t she beautiful?”

  The irritable man was drawn by these words a step closer to the new mother. His eyes immediately fixated on the child tenderly held in its pretty mother’s arms. His expression softened, and the cantankerous lines of his face almost disappeared into a smile.

  “Why, yes. Yes, of course. She’s a fine child. A very fine child,” he said, somewhat taken aback. “Congratulations Massoud,” he added softly, transfixed by the intimate first moments of a mother with her child.

  “I need Teloc to stay with me, Admiral. We need him here.”

  With contrived gruffness, he responded. “Very well. Tomorrow morning will do. He can return to duty then.”

  Massoud gave him the sweetest of smiles. “Well, maybe the day after tomorrow will be better,” the admiral amended. “My people probably need to recharge, anyway.” He spoke softly, and reached a hoary finger towards the child’s cheek, before remembering himself and pulling away.

  Speaking in a more conventional tone he added, “Teloc, congratulations, but no more disruptions to secure meetings. Understood?”

  Teloc lifted his head partway and nodded. The admiral disappeared without remarking that Teloc had displayed emotion beyond that expected of his race. Admiral Biash, despite his reputation for prejudice, accepted Teloc for what he was.

  By the time Teloc had collected himself and pulled himself upright, Massoud was feeding little Constance. He looked at his child for the first time and asked redundantly if she was in good health. She was so very tiny. Massoud nodded, contentedly.

  “But what of you, Elizabeth Massoud? You were in so much distress.”

  “No distress. It all went perfectly.”

  “But I smell blood.”

  Massoud cringed. “Teloc, I’m going to bleed for a while. It’s normal. I’m shedding the lining of my womb. Please don’t be squeamish about that. I need you near me.”

  “It is not dangerous?”

  “No. It’s normal. Don’t you remember that from the birthing classes?”

  He shook his head. His incredible memory had abandoned him during this moment of stress.

  The midwife returned and asked if Dad had held the baby yet. She encouraged him to do so and placed the blanket-bundled infant into her father’s arms. Teloc held the child uncertainly, with an expression that was a cross between wonder and terror. He gazed in fascination at his daughter, her mouth gently mawing and her tiny fists bumping her delicate face. Gradually, his expression softened into one of pure adoration.

  “Well,” said the midwife. “That girl knows her Dada. Both his and her heart rate just dropped and synchronized! I don’t think I’ve ever seen the like.” Her embedded tech must have shown her these things, which were invisible to Massoud who only saw two people sharing a deep bond that excluded her. The child had come from her body but belonged to him.

  “Allah, let me accept this. I love them both. Please let that be enough,” she prayed silently—the first time she had done so in many years.

  In an office, not too far away, William Biash struggled to explain his tenderhearted reaction to the young mother and her child. Yes, he liked Massoud. He knew that. He even liked her odd husband or, at least, he respected her odd husband. That wasn’t enough to explain the longing in his heart when she smiled at him and turned her arm to reveal her newborn. He shook his head, perplexed. It was confusing, and he was too old for such confusion. He had experienced too much of life.

  Suddenly, a wrenching understanding hit him. If he had had a child when he first married thirty years ago...if he had a child, he would have been visiting his own daughter after she had given birth. Then he would have had a right to be there, to be proud, to marvel, and to delight in being a grandfather. Instead, he had the sad and ersatz feeling of an interloper stealing into someone else’s family.

  Massoud and Teloc had no parents on the planet. Maybe the child needed a grandfather, he mused. Foolish thought! He was not the type. His relationship with the parents did not justify such notions. But if he had a daughter, he lamented, if he had a daughter, she would have been just like Massoud!

  He shook away the old pain. Suzette had not wanted children; had never wanted children. When she was approaching forty, some fifteen years ago, he raised the issue again, reminded her that she said she would consider it later, pointed out that later never came, that they should have a child now or never. She had balked, and then firmly said no. It was the end for them, the end of their marriage. Of course, he could have still had a child by another means—with another woman or by himself through artificial methods—but he had wanted to father Suzette’s child, no one else’s. He had yearned for a child with Suzette.

  He looked about him, to discover he was wandering the corridors of the administration wing. There was little traffic in the building at this time of day and the lighting was at twilight setting. A strong moon shone through the window that formed the wall at the end of the corridor. He wandered towards it and looked out at the city illuminated by the steely lunar light. This placed him outside Williams’ office, as he half knew it would and, on a self-conscious impulse, he went in.

  Her weary aide snapped to attention, and Biash gestured for the man to leave. Williams had noticed the admiral’s entry immediately, since her confidential work shut down automatically. Placing himself by the large windows, Biash studied another view of the capital of the planet he was charged with protecting
. Williams waited silently for an explanation of his presence.

  “Williams, our constant bickering is unprofessional. It sets a terrible example for the junior ranks.”

  There was no way to disagree with this statement, but Rear Admiral Williams was so little in the habit of concurring with the base commander that she remained silent.

  He left the window and placed himself directly in front of her, causing her to raise a neatly tended eyebrow in surprise.

  “I want to come home,” he said simply.

  She dropped her slate and it clattered on the floor. “After all these years?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you never forgave me.”

  “I forgave you years ago.”

  “Then why do you bait me all the time?”

  He grinned unabashedly. “I like to see the fire in your eyes.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Well, can I come home, Suzie?”

  Suzette Williams bit her lip for several seconds, struggling with atypical uncertainty.

  “Not with those eyebrows. You have to do something about them first.” She was as astonished by her own answer as she was by his request.

  Biash rubbed his bushy friends. “Ah, you drive a hard bargain. But how about a kiss to seal the deal?” he asked with a mischievous look.

  “Eyebrows first.”

  “Kiss first.”

  “Damn it, Bill. Are we going to always disagree?”

  “Yes. And it’s going to be magnificent. How about that kiss, then?”

  15. Death

  F ive months of motherhood, and three months of instructing at the academy, had worn Massoud’s endurance to the thinnest. Her Gnostian newborn slept only seven hours a day and needed unceasing attention while awake. A constant attachment to her mother’s hip, she had to be ferried from bed to bath, from living room to play pen, from inside to outside. There was the continual acquisition of new supplies, the disposal of dirty and mangled items, in addition to the intimate care of a little person who could do nothing for herself. Worst of all, there was the infant’s persistent demand for interaction, sucking the very essence from her mother. Nothing Massoud did satisfied the child’s voracious appetite for notice, announced by shrill screaming whenever the infant was set down while mother peed, or cleaned her teeth, or put food into her own mouth.

  And what of the father? The pernickety child gave him peace. His hours were so taxing that he was rarely home during waking hours, but when he was, the child settled immediately. He would place her tiny form into his massive arms, resting her fragile head on his solid chest, and she would do nothing—no fidgeting, no irritable sounds, just sweet silence for her father. Massoud could have wailed with envy.

  Massoud’s work was barely a respite. Working with academics was reminiscent of speaking a foreign language learnt from a textbook. You thought you were communicating but, in reality, you were not.

  Her department’s mission was to retrain scientists to be weapons officers. Massoud had advocated for hands-on training, focused on the pragmatic. Her more established colleagues insisted that theory be taught first. The departmental director was astute, found a middle way, and ultimately earned Massoud’s respect. She relinquished her own strident opinions in favor of the director’s more balanced approach.

  The trainees themselves were recalcitrant, deeply unhappy that their chosen careers had been stripped away from them, and they vented their frustrations on their instructors, usually in a difficult to discipline, passively aggressive manner. Massoud had her child at home and her children at work.

  In the decades immediately following the Last War, the greater fleet had been fragmented into three parts. Now, with war impending, the fleet was being reintegrated. It pained Massoud to see the end of the science fleet. She had been brought up in the old way: C was for science, B was for bandit raiders—so named for their policing of pirates, and A was for arrogant assholes. For over ninety years, the B and C fleets had done real work, ensuring public safety and pursuing science, but the A Fleet, a purely military organization, had done nothing but wait for war. Their moment was coming, and they were more exasperatingly arrogant than ever.

  The reintegration of the fleet included rationalizing the different officer ranks that had complicated the old system. The alphabetic layering in the ranks was being eliminated. An annoyance, that Massoud could not complain about because it really was too petty, was the change in her title. She had worn the bronze pips of a Commander Third Class quite proudly; now she wore the equivalent, but less impressively titled, silver pips of a Lieutenant. She was one step further from the rank of captain.

  For those Class C ships that were still in service—now used for reconnaissance and courier duties—the senior officer was cumbersomely titled a Lt. Captain. To Massoud, this designation was another insult to the undervalued science fleet that had served humanity so well by mapping space hazards and searching out new homes for a burgeoning population. Despite this, she recognized that the divisions within the fleet, appropriate in peacetime, would be obstructive in war. The Alliance forces, protecting each sector of human-occupied space, would need vessels of all classes to function together, and personnel movement between the vessels would be facilitated by a common system of rank. Flexibility was to be the key. Indeed, to achieve that flexibility, she herself had been cross-trained in the weapons systems of Class A and B ships. Someone with her skills could operate any weapons console in the Alliance Fleet.

  Massoud’s days were long because she had to ferry her child to and from her sister’s apartment each day. Early on, she had had the temerity to suggest sending Constance to the base’s crèche for childcare, but Noor’s extreme negative reaction to that wonderfully convenient idea put an end to it. Family takes care of family was Noor’s strongly expressed belief. As a result, Massoud’s daily commute included travel in the wrong direction to reach Noor’s apartment. However, there was no denying that Noor loved Constance as dearly as her own children, despite her complaint that the baby “never, ever, slept”. Unfortunately, this childcare arrangement, though excellent for Constance, was fatiguing for her mother.

  Today, however, had started positively. Massoud was to spend four days in space. It was to be a veritable vacation; there would be nothing to do but work.

  The trainees were to participate in war games. A flotilla of soon to be decommissioned Class C ships was to travel to an area of space near the Denison Wormhole not frequented by commercial craft. Operating the Class C ships was an opportunity for the trainees to experience a ship’s systems in a way that no simulation could replicate. Simulations modelled systems as they were designed to function but could not reflect how they worked in practice—bugged, as they were, by the accumulated errors in manufacturing tolerances and software subroutines. Blank ammunition was to be used during the games, but each ship had a single complement of live rounds to fire at the end of the exercise. After the first day’s games, the self-dubbed Training Fleet was to be joined for further exercises by the newly formed and highly professional Delta Sector Unified Fleet, or D-SUF, which consisted of both Class A and B ships.

  Teloc had told Massoud of Admiral Biash’s displeasure with the command structure under which the D-SUF was to operate. Although Biash retained overall command of the Delta Sector, and direct responsibility for the base, command of the Unified Fleet fell to a vain upstart—to use Biash’s words—a certain Vice Admiral Lightfoot. This up and coming admiral had been recently reassigned from the Alpha Sector. Lightfoot was nominally answerable to Biash but, in practice, would operate independently.

  Biash had placed himself on the trainee fleet for these war games, perhaps to make it clear that he was not chained to a desk. Williams and the tactical team, including Teloc, were distributed throughout the Training Fleet as observers. Massoud was confident they would not like what they saw. Her trainees were not ready for this; their schooling had been rushed. Biash was responsible for the compression of the usual training
period. The intel from the micro-probes in Xeno space was known to him, and he knew that time was about to become a luxury.

  About an hour after waking up in excellent spirits on the first day of the war games, Massoud found herself frowning at her apartment’s holo-viewer. The background behind her sister’s image was not Noor’s cozy home, but the waiting room of her doctor’s office.

  “I’m so sorry, Elizabeth,” Noor stated, “but Hammie was throwing up. I had to get him to the doctor to be cured. I’m next in the queue. I’ll be home in an hour.”

  Although it was wonderful that Massoud’s sister was willing to take care of baby Constance for four uninterrupted days, it was not wonderful that she could not take the baby right now. Only uber-mother Noor would insist her child was seen by a human doctor rather than trusting a home med-bot to treat him. Massoud sighed wearily. She should have registered with the crèche at the base, but she hadn’t had the time or the energy to do it—and neither had Teloc. They were both operating at their limits.

  “Why don’t you take Constance to that neighbor who is always offering to mind her? I can pick her up when I’m finished,” Noor suggested.

  “I don’t want to do that. That woman is a little odd,” grumbled Massoud.

  “No, no. It’s just her artificial eyes. They make anyone look a little creepy. She seems quite nice otherwise. Your only other option is to wait for me to finish here.”

  “And get disciplined for failing to report. Ugh! I don’t have any choice, do I? I’ll let her know that you’ll be here later this morning.”

  Massoud negotiated the baby transfer with her neighbor, gathered the massive volume of supplies a five-month old needs to survive an entire hour in a modern apartment, and dropped the child off with the snappy-eyed neighbor. The child was delivered with detailed care instructions that a woman with four grown children did not need to hear from an anxious new mother. The helpful neighbor listened graciously but was absolutely inattentive. Massoud was now late.