The team was suddenly floating in outer space, next to a three-dozen
kilometer tower that was once standing on the surface of Proxima Doma. All
they could see was the faint outline of the lightly self-illuminated looming
structure. The rest was utter darkness. They could survive like this for
now, but they couldn’t communicate well, so they activated their
EmergentSuits, and sealed themselves up. “Checking for injuries,” Leona
declared. She scrolled through her list, which reported no issues with the
team, but it did display something else. “Extra lifesign detected.
Or...maybe two. Sync up and jump.” She selected the coordinates, and they
all teleported there.
They found themselves in the penthouse of the tower. Aeterna was lying
unconscious on the floor. Mateo scooped her up, and set her on a table.
“Where’s the infirmary?” he asked, gently brushing Aeterna’s hair away so he
could pull her eyelids open to check for a response. He wasn’t a doctor, but
it seemed like the right thing to do. He shone a light into each eye, and
saw the pupils shrink, which made sense to him.
“There is none,” Ramses replied. “Tertius and Aeterna are both
immortal.”
“Obviously not,” Mateo argued. “She’s also pregnant...I don’t know if you
noticed. That’s a pretty big change from when we last saw her a few minutes
ago.”
Marie unzipped Aeterna’s outfit, and started to feel around on her belly.
“It’s as hard as a rock. I don’t know what that means, but it can’t be
good.”
“Keep unzipping,” Leona ordered quietly. “I think I’ve seen this before.”
Marie did as she was asked. “Is that what I think it is, or just urine?”
Leona bent over and sniffed. “It’s sweet. It’s what you think it is.”
“She can’t give birth if she’s not awake,” Romana reasoned.
“Oh yes, she can,” Leona contended. “Because we’re gonna help her. Get that
thing all the way off of her.” While they were doing that, she held her arms
out, and receded her sleeves. She then instructed her nanites to configure
into a sanitizer dispenser, connected to the reserves in one of her pocket
dimensions. She squirted it all the way, up and down her arms and hands,
rubbing them together. She then turned her nanites into exam gloves, and did
it all again to sanitize those too. She took one breath, but decided that it
wasn’t enough, and continued into a breathing exercise. She lifted one hand
again, and apported a sterile knife into it.
“You can’t be serious,” Olimpia said.
Leona continued to look down at the patient as she spoke. “Ramses is right.
Aeterna is immortal, just like her father. She told us about it, and
demonstrated it. She is injured now specifically because she’s
pregnant. The baby is suppressing her immortality because it has to in order
to grow. I don’t have to know how to do a proper c-section. I just have to
get the child out of her, and she will heal herself.”
“What if she doesn’t?” Olimpia pressed. “What if she needs surgery
to...kickstart the healing?”
Leona looked at her wife. “Then I’ll access the central archives, and find
out how to do that.”
Olimpia shook her head disapprovingly.
“If we do nothing,” Leona went on, “both of them die. We don’t know where or
when we are. We’re not detecting anyone else around. We are all that mother
and baby have. Stand back, it might squirt blood. I don’t really know.”
Leona just went for it. She cut Aeterna’s body from side to side, then
without any instruments, she reached through the seam, and pulled the skin
apart. It wasn’t pretty, but she knew she was right. Aeterna would come back
from this. She reached further into Aeterna’s womb, and carefully picked up
the baby. It was...floppy. That was the only word to describe what the baby
looked like. And blue. She was also very blue.
“Oh my God.” Romana started to tear up, and look away.
“I need to lie her down to perform CPR. Someone cut the cord, please.”
Mateo apported his own knife into his hand, and severed the umbilical cord.
Leona turned out to be right. Immediately after the connection was severed,
Aeterna’s body started to return to normal. Her c-section was beginning to
seal itself up right before their eyes.
Leona looked at her, then back at the baby, then back at Aeterna again. “Get
a syringe. I need a blood sample.
“What?” Mateo questioned.
“Isn’t there a first aid kit in one of our dimensions?” Leona urged. “Come
on! Hurry, hurry!”
“Yes, I got it. Hold on.” Ramses thought about what he needed, then
materialized the syringe. He reached down, and tried to poke Aeterna’s arm,
but the needle broke on contact. “It didn’t work.”
Leona understood the stakes. “The c-section. It hasn’t closed up yet. Take
it from there. Now!”
“I don’t have a second syringe,” Ramses explained.
Angela apported one from her own medkit. She deftly stuck it into Aeterna’s
wound, and drew some blood out of it. The needle broke too, and the skin
forced it out, letting it fall to the floor.
Aeterna gasped as she sat up, then settled back down, but only for a second.
“My baby!”
“This is your blood,” Angela said, shaking it at her. “Will it heal your
child? We don’t know what’s wrong with it.”
“Yes, please. Do it now!” Aeterna shouted back.
“The needle’s gone,” Mateo reminded them.
“Use mine.” Marie apported her syringe. She twisted the needle off it while
Angela twisted the bad one off of hers.
They put the two good parts together, then Angela tapped on the syringe, and
squirted a little bit of the blood out to clear any air bubbles. She
carefully slipped the needle into the baby’s vein, and injected her with the
crude serum. They waited there for a moment, breathless and scared. More of
them started to tear up. Finally, after about a minute, the apparent cure
had circulated throughout the child’s bloodstream. Her skin turned pink, and
miraculously, she started to cry. Oh, it was so loud and grating, and the
most beautiful thing they had ever heard.
Aeterna burst into tears herself as Leona handed her wee girl to her. She
continued to cry, but was smiling at the precious life in her hands. Then
she started to blink and look a little bit confused. She adjusted her
position a little. “She’s moving her arms, but not her legs. Why isn’t she
moving her legs?”
“I...I,” Leona eked out. “The blood should have worked. It did work!”
“She’s not moving her legs!” Aeterna repeated.
“Aeterna,” Mateo began. “What is the baby’s name?”
“What? What does it matter?”
“Tell us the name,” Mateo reiterated.
“We hadn’t decided on a first name yet,” Aeterna began. “She was gonna take
her father’s surname, and I was gonna surprise him with the idea to name her
after his late mother, Delara.”
“Dilara Cassano,” Mateo said.
Aeterna had been staring at her baby girl this whole time, but now jerked
her head up. “You know her. You know her in the future.”
Leona solemnly glided over to the wall, and opened the viewport, revealing a
black void. No stars whatsoever. “I know where we are. This is The Fifth
Division.” She turned back around, and took one step towards Aeterna. “I’m
sorry to do this to you right now, in your darkest hour, but...report.”
Aeterna swallowed, but recognized that she had to catch them up. “You
failed. You didn’t have the strength to spirit the rest of the tower away,
and it crushed you. But you were lucky. The shockwave blasted its way
through the dome, and killed everyone. The massive destruction accelerated
the instability of the planet just enough to prevent any hope of evacuation.
The poles were the only safe places to be, but most couldn’t get to them.
And there certainly weren’t enough ships to get them all off planet. Since I
was pregnant, I had a pass. I used what little time I had to make contact
with the choosing one network, and found someone willing to send me
back. He had his limits, unfortunately, so when I returned, I only had
enough time to use the tower’s power reserves to give you the energy boost
you needed to finish the job. It looks like we succeeded.”
“So there’s another Aeterna back in the main sequence,” Marie realized, “and
another Dilara.”
Mateo looked at her. “That’s why she didn’t recognize us. She was a dupe,
like you.” They both looked over at Angela.
“So she never walks,” Aeterna asked. “My baby never walks?”
“I’m sorry,” Leona said. “I wanted to go for the bone marrow, but we didn’t
have the equipment, and definitely not the time. Once she was separated from
you, your body decided that it was ready to be invincible again. That’s what
makes you and your father special. You have layers of death defiance.”
Aeterna nodded somberly. “I wasn’t supposed to be able to get pregnant. I
always have unprotected sex, because I didn’t think it mattered. Even if my
partner had an STD, they couldn’t give it to me, and I have nothing to give
to them.”
“How did Tertius have you in the first place?” Ramses asked. He then
recoiled, worried that it was an inappropriate question.
“He had some kind of legacy loophole,” Aeterna answered. “It was some
special serum that gave him one shot at conception, which he used to make
me.”
“Maybe it was lingering in your system,” Leona guessed. “That’s how
you have her.” She gestured towards the baby.
“That was our assumption too,” Aeterna agreed.
“Were you pregnant when we met?” Olimpia asked.
“No. I was pregnant when you came back, but that was a year later,
remember?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I just...didn’t think it was relevant,” Aeterna defended.
“You don’t owe us an explanation,” Mateo assured her.
Just then, a beam of light appeared. They turned their heads to see a crack
in the far wall, right where it met the floor. It looked like someone was
trying to break through using a thermal lance. The bean split in two, and
each one began to travel up the wall at roughly the same speed. As they
moved upwards, more cracks of light began to appear between them, in random,
wavy curves. It looked rather familiar. They just needed more information to
win this game of Pictionary. Knowing that it could be dangerous, everyone
suited up. Mateo figured that it would be unsafe to donate his nanites to a
baby, like he had with Boyd years ago, so he stood between her and the
mysterious intrusion. The others bunched up to do the same. Mateo commanded
the nanites on his front to turn into little cameras, and the ones on his
back to become monitors so Aeterna could still see what was happening.
The beams continued to move up in straight lines, and accelerated, until
beginning to split off into branches. Oh, it was a tree. The first two lines
had formed the trunk, and the curves between them was the bark. Finally, the
beams met back up with each other to complete the full image. The light
became saturated, and began to fill the room. After one final flash, the
light and the tree disappeared from the wall, but left a lingering image in
the air. Behind it were two figures, holding both of each other’s hands. As
the hologram faded, their eyes adjusted, and they were able to see who it
was. Well, they were able to see one of them. The other was covered by a
hood.
“Romana?” Leona asked.
“That’s not Romana, Mateo determined.
“Miracle,” Romana said. “Why are you here?”
“I think you know why.”
“Who’s your friend there?” Romana asked.
“I know who it is,” Leona said. “Show yourself. You’re not fooling anyone.”
Adult!Dilara Cassano pulled her hood back, and stretched her lips into a
polite, but fake smile. “I didn’t wanna come, but I had no choice.”
“What is the meaning of this?” Leona demanded to know. The team hadn’t
budged. There was no reason to relax, and think that Aeterna and Baby!Dilara
weren’t still at risk.
“It has nothing to do with the kid,” Miracle began. “It’s mostly a
coincidence that Miss Cassano here was the person we found to come pull you
back into our reality.”
“We,” Mateo echoed. “We who?”
Miracle smirked. It was quite unsettling, seeing her look like Romana, but
realizing that she wasn’t their friend anymore. “I think you know who. You
broke out of negotiations way too soon, and Pacey is not happy. You
need to get back to the main sequence, and back to the
Goldilocks Corridor, so you can get back on mission, and assassinate
Bronach Oaksent.”
“We have decided not to do that,” Leona retorted.
Miracle laughed. “Oh, I forget. You keep thinking you have choices. That’s
enough of that.” She turned her head to face Adult!Dilara. “Do your thing.”
Adult!Dilara hesitated.
“Do it,” Miracle insisted.
Adult!Dilara reluctantly released creepy light vines from her ankles, and
sent them out towards the team.
The vines reached their legs, and started climbing up their bodies. They
couldn’t be removed. “Your escape modules!” Ramses yelled. “Release them!
For the baby!”
They all did it, leaving behind seven caches of supplies to keep the baby
alive until Aeterna could find civilization, and then they disappeared in a
flash of branching light.
