Talbot shut the radio down and unplugged the power. He’d made a habit of disconnecting it in a way that Damien couldn’t figure out.
Not that the boy would go out of his way to disobey, but, hell, Talbot had to be honest. It was one thing for a kid to keep his mitts off if the act of hooking up the radio was a complicated and potentially dangerous process. It was something else if the forbidden world was just a flip of the switch away. No harm, no foul if no one figured it out, right?
Or at least, that’s how Talbot would have thought of it when he was Damien’s age.
Talbot stepped out of the radio room door and closed it. The hallway was quiet, the last of the children gone to bed a half hour ago.
He padded into the main room, finding his wives all sitting at the dinner table, cups of tea steaming as they talked.
Walking to the pot, he took down a cup and poured one himself before seating himself across from Rebecca.
“Anything new?” she asked.
“Supervisor Aguila is having trouble with her mine and smelter. They can’t keep the trees out of their agricultural ground. She’s desperately trying to get some kind of poison from Cheng up at Port Authority.”
“Won’t work,” Dya told him.
“God, no.” Rebecca thoughtfully rubbed her long shins, then straightened. “We stumbled upon the timber belt by accident.”
“Think we should tell them?” Dya asked, gaze distant. “Maybe a random radio call? Just a short announcement? Then shut the set down?”
“No!” Su and Rebecca snapped in unison.
Dya smiled, as if amused by herself. “It’s not like they’d know where it came from. Not if it was quick.”
“They’d know someone had a radio,” Rebecca countered. “Just them asking the question: ‘Who was that?’ That might be all it takes for them to start thinking back. Counting off all the bases. Wondering which of them called in. Now that they’ve got these shuttles, it’s more than just aircars that we have to worry about. They’re not going to risk an aircar on a long-distance trip to check out the old bases, but they might with a shuttle.”
“It’s a whole new capability,” Su agreed as she pulled her legs up and clasped her arms around her knees. She glanced at Talbot. “You’re sure they’re not going to use Freelander as an orbital platform?”
“I doubt it. For one thing, I don’t think Aguila has the people to spare. Not if she’s trying to make this mine of hers a success. Second, she’d have to put a gun to someone’s head to get them to stay on that bucket.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ve never been so freaking scared in all my life as I was when I was aboard. I’m not kidding. I don’t buy the notion of ghosts and heebie-jeebies, but there’s something unnatural on that ship. Something that sends a chill through your very soul.”
“Well, at least there’s that,” Rebecca said thoughtfully. “Still, it’s unnerving that your Supervisor Aguila is only a little more than two hundred kilometers north of us.”
“Someday,” Dya said, “they will figure out that we’re here.”
“Not necessarily,” Su countered. “The colony is at a high-water mark. This is as good as it gets for Port Authority and this Corporate Mine. From here on out, Donovan is going to start doing what it always does. It’s going to start whittling the numbers down. Day by day those people are going to be finding themselves more and more concerned with just staying alive. The technology is going to slowly fail. They won’t have time to look for us.”
“Speaking of which,” Talbot said, “I put the last fuse in the main pump. Note the key word: last. If it goes, well, I’m not sure I’ve got the electrical chops to concoct a substitute that will allow the pump to work without frying the whole thing in the event we have another lightning strike.”
Su glanced at Rebecca. “I know the dribble of water kept you in the bathroom this morning. If the pump goes, the rest of us will have to take the lift and go outside in the morning.”
Rebecca arched a canny eyebrow, glanced at Dya. “Won’t be a problem for long. If the past is any indication, the morning sickness will pass in a couple of months.”
Dya’s smile consisted of a smug quirk of the lips. Su and Talbot stared at each other, then at Rebecca.
“You’re pregnant?” Talbot asked, apparently the last to know.
“You’re quite the guy, Mark. Three for three.” Rebecca made a dismissive gesture. “If this little girl goes to term, she’ll most likely be my last. But in the meantime, we had better give the coming months some serious thought.”
Talbot took a sip from his cup of tea to still the flutter in his stomach. Crap. How did a fellow come to terms with the notion that he had three women pregnant with his children at once? The thought of it left him shocked and stunned.
“How’s that?” Su asked.
Dya said, “Three women, coming to term within a couple of months of each other. We’re going to be waddling around like zeppelins during that last trimester. All of our activities are going to be significantly curtailed. Mark and the kids are going to have a lot to shoulder.”
“More so after the babies are born,” Rebecca mused. “Remember how pressed we were when Shine was a neonatal?”
“Sure, we had two newborns to deal with,” Dya said. “But there were still seven adults here. Things are different now.”
Talbot chewed his lips as he tried to anticipate what was coming. Back home, his mother had been part of a community, and, of course, The Corporation with its clinics and obstetricians took care of everything. Mum’s pregnancies had almost been a nonissue, almost a remote phenomenon.
“We can start preparing,” Talbot said. “The farm pretty much takes care of itself. Between me, Damien, and Kylee, we can keep the food production up and do most of the maintenance. But anything that needs your strenuous physical attention should be addressed between now and then.”
Su was watching Rebecca. “You are in your forties. What if there’s a complication?”
“Dya will know what to do.”
Dya lifted an eyebrow. “Up to a point.”
“What do you mean? Complications?” Talbot asked.
Dya fixed her cool blue stare on him. “Mark, it’s probably nothing. We’ve all carried to term before. But we’re out here on our own.”
“Used to be that more women died of childbirth than any other cause,” Su said absently. “But that was back before modern medicine.”
Which was when it sank in that if anything did happen, it was going to be up to just the four of them to somehow deal with it. That there was no clinic to call. No hospital.
They’d done it before, right?
But if something goes wrong, how the hell am I going to keep them alive?