A New Planet by Todd Thiede

Author:Todd Thiede [Thiede, Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-13T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Tal placed his hand over his wife’s swollen stomach. Beneath, he felt the baby begin to kick.

“She knows it’s me,” he said with a grin.

Jae groaned and pushed herself more into a sitting position on the bed.

“She’ll be ready to see you soon,” she said.

Tal’s grin grew wider. He couldn’t wait to see the baby, and given that Jae’s due date had already passed, he wasn’t going to be waiting too long. Jae was convinced the child was a girl, though they hadn’t had the tests to find out. Equally, she refused to have her labor induced. All natural was the way she wanted things, and he was happy to let her have her way.

“What’s the plan for today?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Nothing much.”

Jae rolled her eyes. “Tal, you can’t just hang around here waiting for me to go into labor. It’s not healthy; get out and do something.”

He snuggled closer to her, keeping his hand on her stomach. For the past several months, he’d been in his shuttle every day, chasing down the battles, staying out of the way but capturing as much as he could on stream so that the footage could be analyzed. It seemed too dangerous to do that now. The closer Jae got to having the baby, the more he found himself hanging back, choosing safe options rather than taking risks.

“Maybe I’ll go to the com center, see if they have any footage they need edited,” he said. “Or maybe I’ll go visit my parents.”

Jae nodded. She was clearly uncomfortable, and he wished there was something he could do to make her feel better, but he knew there wasn’t.

“Is this ever going to be over?” she asked.

“A few days and you’ll have a new baby, and you’ll be wondering what you were ever complaining about.”

“That’s not what I meant, Tal.”

He sighed. “I don’t know, then.”

They were weeks away from A1 now, but still the fighting continued. At the beginning, he’d thought that the combined forces would quickly overrun Rothchild’s militia but they hadn’t. Mostly because Nuwe and Elizer both balked at sending in deadly missiles when less powerful artillery was available. He understood why, understood that as leaders they found it difficult to order the destruction of their own people, but still he wished all this could be over.

“How are we supposed to build a new society when we’re all too busy fighting ourselves?” asked Jae.

“It’s not me you need to talk to,” Tal said. “It’s your mother. You’re right that this needs to come to an end. There needs to be a final push, one big attack to lay it all to rest. But neither your mother nor my father wants to be the one to order it. So we’re stuck in a constant cycle of small skirmishes hoping for a war of attrition.”

Jae sighed. “It will end sometime,” she said.

He picked up a lock of her long hair, twirling it around his finger. “Did the ancestors tell you that?” he teased.

She glared at him, then shrugged.

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