I knew the tone of that voice. Kaley had a problem. It did not take a genius to guess the problem.
“Labor pain?”
Dr. Von Hamon took two steps and joined us. “Is he right, Ms. Sellers?”
She gulped audibly, moaned. “Worse than that. A really hard pop, and I think my water broke.”
As we were in the medical lab, he eased her to a patient bed. “I know you were suited up just in case, but I think we need to strip you out of it now, to check on the situation.”
I stepped up beside him. “To hell with that, Dr. Von Hamon. Let’s just keep her buttoned up, grab one of the cargo trams near the portals, and we can run her back to Ganymede and then Earth ASAP.”
Kaley gasped and grabbed me. “Something’s wrong, Scotty. I’m getting contractions one after the other, way too fast. I’m not sure I can make it back.” She was already opening her face plate.
Together we helped Kaley out of her suit and onto the lab bed. It was intended for medical exams, but I figured it was suitable for birth if need be.
Dr. Von Hamon looked Kaley over, then said, “Ms. Sellers—”
She interrupted him with a gasp. “Just Kaley, Doctor. What now?”
“I need to make a careful exam. Aimee, you’ve had children, can you assist?”
“Certainly.” Dr. McCullough didn’t even sound flustered. Unfortunately, you couldn’t say the same about me.
“Ms . . . Kaley, I need Aimee to help you undress. Mary, head back to Ganymede and request a couple of ob-gyn practitioners from IC headquarters. They have some good ones there, and I definitely want backup.”
Together, we got Kaley undressed below the waist, as Mary all but fled on her errand of mercy. Aimee even found drapes to give Kaley a feeling of privacy. By this time, Kaley was gasping and groaning a lot, and I wondered, not for the first time, why the human evolutionary path had included painful births for most women.
Von Hamon finished quickly. “Well, I see that you are more than halfway dilated, Kaley. I think you’ve been undergoing what we call silent labor, you uterus undergoing contractions for perhaps two or three days. Sometimes a woman won’t feel them at all. Tell me, this is not your first birth, right?”
“No.” More gasp than word.
“As I thought. I’m not sure that your baby will wait around for help to arrive. Do you know if the baby is boy or girl?”
“Girl,” I supplied.
“Very good. Listen, Kaley, as a mother, you know that the more births a woman has, the quicker subsequent births can be. How many children do you have?”
“Two.” Another panted response.
“Ah. Then number three should arrive all the quicker. We’ve been preparing for inevitable births on E-Two as more settlers arrive, so we have a good deal of support medication and equipment here. In this case we have some pain reducing treatments that are quite good.”
He smiled brightly, and I felt grateful that he could manage it, because I certainly couldn’t. “Our pain treatments are far from the more primitive anesthetic capabilities of even a few years ago. I’ll give you an injection in a few moments that will dramatically reduce your labor and delivery pain. You’ll still feel it a bit—just enough to understand what is going on. But nothing like you probably remember from your first births—especially early on, if you were given an epidural or somethings similar as labor progressed.”
Kaley managed another short reply. “Good to hear.”
I took her hand. Kaley was sweating now, her face oily, hair askew. “How can I help?”
“Not that much to help with, Scotty. Why don’t you just stay right there for emotional support while we make some preparations. But first, that injection, Kaley. To give you a bit of relief.”
That only took a moment, and then he and Dr. McCullough began to make some arrangements for what was to come. Meanwhile, Kaley had subsided a bit, and seemed more relaxed.
I bent over to kiss her forehead. “Is it better now?”
She even managed a smile. “Yeah. You’d think with a third baby, the pains would be easier, or at least I’d be more used to them. Definitely not. Whoops, coming again.”
She breathed deeper and longer, grunting a bit, but I could tell she was in a good deal less pain. As the contraction ended, she said, “Well, whatever that stuff is, it helps. Not nearly so bad this time.”
In only minutes, the doctors returned.
“Good news,” Von Hamon said. “We should have a couple of colleagues here before too long.
He and McCullough set about getting equipment ready, some of it entirely new and strange to me. The good doctor wired Kaley up to several monitoring devices, including blood pressure and pulse monitors, a blood monitor that worked via some sort of sensor that did not include any sort of needle, a new gadget called a “brain discomfort monitor,” that I had never even heard of, designed to indicate a potential hemorrhage and take steps to prevent it. Even in this comparatively primitive outpost on E2, it appeared to me that Kaley had quite good care. At least, I hoped so.
She grunted abruptly. “Uh-oh.”
And there came another contraction. This one was tougher, but other than a sort of extended gasp, she bore the pain silently. After it was over, she muttered, “That one was a bit tougher. It’s been a while since I did this, but I think we’re getting close.”
Von Hamon returned about this time to observe, and he evinced surprise, as he announced, “Kaley, you’re ahead of schedule. You’re about fully dilated. It won’t be long now.”
As I wiped her brow with a cool cloth, she announced, “I think I’ll do my next baby with a surrogate delivery. Save some wear and tear.”
Since that was the most Kaley had said in about an hour, I said, “I’ll vote for that. We can go out for dinner and drinks during the labor.”
I think that might have gotten a smile out of her, but just then another contraction occurred. I held Kaley’s hand as she struggled through it. Dr. McCullough brought a fresh cool, damp cloth as it ended, and I wiped Kaley’s face again.
“Mmm. Even with the pain meds, that last one was not fun.”
“I could tell.” I kissed her cheek again. “You are way braver than me. I’d probably just tell the doc to knock me out and take the baby any way they could.”
I meant it. I had survived a firefight on Mars against a bunch of Bugs, had some other harrowing experiences, including manning gun turrets on Rhea and Ganymede during Bug attacks. Nothing seemed as excruciating as standing by my true love as she fought through the agony of birthing my first ever child.
Mary stuck her head back into the medical lab. “Doctor Hays, could you spare a moment?”
Kaley patted my hand. “Go ahead, but hurry back.”
“I will.” I rushed to the door, went through. The med lab adjoined the portal facility, which contained not only our regular and jumbo portals, but also all the control instruments in cabinets as well as the monstrous power supplies off to the far left in enclosed screen rooms. The room now teemed with people, including techs, engineers, and a few miscellaneous volunteers who must be needed simply as extra pairs of hands. Kyle, from the Fort Worth IC Headquarters facility, plus our own Thuan, were directing the organized chaos.
Thuan spied me and rushed over. “Is it true? Kaley is having her baby right this minute?”
I shook my head ruefully. “Yeah. My fault—I shudda stopped her.”
He grinned. “Uh-huh. Like you could ever control Kaley when her mind was made up. I can’t believe she found the problem.”
“Neither can I. What do you need? I need to be in the hospital room with her.”
“Got it. Okay, Bobby says we have to replace everything electrical. Also examine anything made of plastics, even cases, to check for the infestation of whatever that micro-life is. But he says first thing is get at least one portal back running. Since the power circuits are very heavy duty, he suggested simply using anti-bacterial sprays on them, replacing the systems with circuit boards and smaller wires. We’ll get to the bigger pieces later. He said check with you.”
So Bobby was back on our end, having heard the diagnosis of the electronic problems and trying to organize the most effective repair activity. “I agree. And anything brought in new must be sanitized now and then regularly in the future. Eventually we can probably come up with materials to build the printed circuit boards and use as coatings for the wires that can be made amoeba-proof.”
“Sounds good to me. Go on back to Kaley—we can handle this.”
I thanked him and headed back.
Again by Kaley’s side, I arrived just in time to wipe her face and catch Von Hamon’s words to her. “Okay, Kaley, we need you to push hard next time, because you’re about to have the first birth on E-Two.”
“How long?” she gasped.
“Minutes, I suspect. These later births go fast. Hang in there.”
I took Kaley’s hand, which she held hard, and then she really got down to business. It was brief, painful despite the meds, and though she never screamed or yelled, Kaley let out several loud groans. It was really tough on me, so distressing that I’m surprised that I didn’t develop sympathetic labor pains.
It didn’t last long, as Von Hamon said. In thirty minutes, with a final, grunted moan, Kaley presented E2 with the first live birth of a human in its existence. I stared in awe and dumbstruck love as the tiny creature was revealed.
Newborns aren’t all that pretty, to be frank. Still covered with blood and mucus, her lower body still purple-blue from lack of oxygen due to the final struggle out of the birth canal, my daughter—my daughter—stared vaguely up at me, held in a towel by Aimee McCullough. She had wailed at first, but now simply gasped for breath, trying to figure out this strange new world (literally!) that confronted her.
“Your daughter is quite vigorous and healthy,” she announced happily. “I’m going to give her a little warm bath, and then we’ll bring her to you and Kaley.”
We waited quietly, Kaley simply relaxing a bit, now able to draw a long breath without pain or discomfort. In minutes, Von Hamon’s colleague returned with a freshly washed baby, swaddled in a blanket, to lay beside her mother. Kaley gathered her in, smiling a tired but triumphant smile. I finally got a good, long perusal of my new daughter.
She was beautiful.
She had Kaley’s dark eyes and hair, plus a pertly turned-up nose that I knew would resemble her mom’s someday. Thank goodness, I managed to think, she looked nothing like me. She had subsided now, staring around a bit and finally slipping off into exhausted slumber, as she began to recover from a strenuous battle to be born that had been every bit as hard on her as on her mother.
Looking down on her, I thought how lucky for children that mothers bore them. Let’s face it, we men are far too big a set of crybabies to ever stand the rigor and pain of childbirth. Leave it to our wonderful mothers and wives to handle the hard stuff. About all we can do is maybe a plumbing repair or replacing a light switch—or maybe volunteer to clean the bathrooms occasionally or vacuum from time to time. Or at least maybe paying to have it done.
“I can’t believe it. We have a daughter.”
Kaley managed a tired laugh. “I can believe it.”
“I’m sure you can.” Looking down at our daughter, I repeated the observations about moms and birthing I made to myself.
“Well, of course,” Kaley said. “Most men are total wimps when it comes to pain. I gotta admit, though, this one seemed tougher. I think age came into it this time. I mean it—I wouldn’t mind us having another baby. I’d like you to have the same chance Dan and I had to have a couple of kids. Next time, though, I think we ought to do the surrogate thing. Don’t think I want to be pregnant again at sixty or so.”
I leaned over to kiss her. “Sounds like a plan to me. Now what about that name?”
We’d talked a bit about it, but never really nailed it down.
“I have a suggestion.”
“Let’s have it,” I said.
“We sort of touched on this. I need some rest before we head home, so I’ll be quick: Olivia Elizabeth. My mom’s name and yours. Or it can be Elizabeth Olivia.”
“No. Olivia Elizabeth. Your mom’s name first. You did the hard work here; you get the first name.”
“Aw, that’s sweet. Okay, Olivia Elizabeth it is.”
Our MD, and now officially our Ob/Gyn, appeared. “Kaley, I know you’re exhausted. We’ve had a bed made up for you to rest for a while. Good news; the small portal is now operational and your experts think the jumbo will be operating soon. Then we can get you back to Earth no worse for the wear. I hope you can get a bit of sleep before the time comes . . . ”
He paused, looking down, as did I.
Kaley was already asleep.