“Anyway, Keira came along nine months later, as per regs. I got an official reprimand and three days off to give birth. That was the plan anyway. But they had to give me a C-section and the dipshit who sewed me up afterwards didn’t know his arse from his elbow. Story short, it was ten days, not three. Long enough for me and Key to get to know each other a bit, and for me to realise there were other things in the world besides service.
“The three other women on my ward had all dropped boys, and they never had any problems with feeding. I think it’s instinctive, you know. Show a man a boob, at any age, and bang! He’ll go for it. Key had no idea. None. She showed more interest in my hospital band than she did in my breasts.
“A couple of the nurses said I should just throw my hand in and bottle-feed, but I’m a stubborn bitch, me. I kept at it. And finally this one old biddy gave me a different steer. She said I should dissolve sugar in port wine, dip a finger into it and rub it around my nipple. It sounds wrong, I know. But Key went for it big time. I never had any problem after that. Although, you know, I did have a little alcoholic on my hands.”
There was a silence, that grew longer. “What happened to her?” I asked at last. “To Keira?”
“I don’t know.” Elaine’s voice was quiet. “I saw her a couple more times, when I was on leave. There was a nursery in Petra’s Fields for the kids of serving soldiers. A shithole, if I’m honest. I hated her being there, but I didn’t have any family that could take her. My mum and dad died in the Schismatic Breach, and my sister… we didn’t get on, let’s say.
“Then there was the Spring offensive. The big one, that was going to give us back the north. That was what we were told anyway. One last fight and we’d have Albion whole again, exactly the way it used to be. The entire island under one rule.”
“Did it work? Was it the last fight?”
Elaine gave a laugh that had its fill of sorrow inside it. “It was for me, Spinner.”
I didn’t know what port wine might have been. I used mead instead, which worked well enough. Vallen saw that breasts were more than just a warm pillow to sleep on, and once she was well begun she never gave me any trouble that way again.
I was grateful to Elaine for her good advice, and drawn to her besides because she was a lot of the things I needed to be now. I admired how brave she was, and how she always had done what was needful to be done without making any big noise or fuss about it. She reminded me of Catrin Vennastin, except Elaine was closer to my own age and she was somebody I could laugh and talk with. Some of her jokes made me blush redder than a radish at lock-tide, but they also made me giggle until I near to peed myself.
I think Jon got a little jealous of how much time I spent inside Challenger. He never reproached me, but like I said he never could hide his hurt from me and I read it in his face. “Come with us,” I said one afternoon, taking him by the hand. It was at the end of another day of making ready for Half-Ax, and we were both of us more sweat than sense, but I wouldn’t take any arguments. A bath could wait, and so could supper.
“Val’s got to eat though.”
“I’m carrying her supper with me, wooden-head.”
“But where are we going?”
“To meet someone. A friend. We’re all sergeants together, so you got to meet her.”
It had been my joke to call Jon my sergeant when we came back from our fight by the river, and now we called each other that all the time. “Will you have an egg on that bread, sergeant?” “I will, sergeant, if it’s not too much trouble.” “Why I’d do anything for a sergeant, sergeant.” And a lot more in that wise. So I thought I could joke him into liking Elaine as much as I did.
It didn’t work. Jon hated the cramped space inside Challenger, and he misliked talking with people that was tech. Even back when the database was the onliest tech we had that could talk, Jon didn’t spend any more time around it than he had to. “I can’t say what it is that tasks me,” he told me. “It’s like I keep thinking if there’s someone in there… how dark and narrow must it be? And then it’s like I’m in there my own self and I can’t breathe and I got to run from it, far and fast.”
And that was how it was when I introduced him to Elaine. She was as gentle as she knew how to be, though her talk was still full of oaths and bawdy jests that Jon didn’t know what to do with. But mostly it was that she was a woman that lived inside the memory of a big machine, like a ghost in a fireside tale that thought itself still alive. Jon sat as if he was frozen the whole time we was in the cockpit, said nothing unless something was said to him and even then only mumbled a word or two.
Then Elaine asked him what I was like between the sheets, meaning when the two of us tumbled together, and Jon fled right out of there.
“She didn’t have no right to talk about what goes between us!” he said afterwards in our kitchen, when Val was put to bed and all was peaceful, or at least should have been.
“She didn’t mean nothing by it, Jon. It was a joke between friends.”
“She’s not your friend, Spin! You can’t be friends with such as that!”
I frowned. “Such as what? And keep your voice down, or it’s you that will have to walk up and down here coaxing Val back to sleep again.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t though. Explain it to me.”
Jon clapped his hands to his head, then flung them in the air. “You got to know it. Everybody knows it. Being a Rampart means being a master, and tech’s what serves you. Tech wakes on your calling and works to your will. It’s not ‘I got this gun in my hands so I wonder what it would like to talk about’. You just point it the right way and pull the trigger.”
“I think you’re halfway right,” I said, a whole lot quieter than he had been talking. “That’s how it used to be. But I don’t think it’s that way any more.” Jon got ready to break in, but I held my finger up to stop him. “Humankind was masters of the whole world once, wasn’t they? That’s what the database says. We was masters of trees, masters of tech, masters of birds and beasts and earth and sky and everything.
“And look what we did, Jon. Look what a dead-god-damned mess we made of it. The world we got now is one we builded with our own hands, and as far as I can see it’s in a pretty sorry state. That’s what comes of thinking you’re the master, and the world’s just there to serve you. And when I look on Challenger I see one thing more on top of that. We thought we was so clever, we even give some of that cleverness to our tools. Give them wits to think with and voices to speak their thoughts. After we done all that, I don’t believe we get to turn around and say ‘oh hey now I don’t believe I like your fucking language’.”
Jon shook his head in disgust. “You’re even talking like her,” he said. He got up, turned his back on me and walked to the door.
In all the time we’d been together, we’d never yet had an argument run so hot that one or other of us walked out of it to cool themselves. “Jon, stay!” I called. “I didn’t mean to vex you.”
He was at the door and had his hand half-raised to the latch, but just then it opened without him touching it, slapping him in the shoulder. As he stepped aside, Gendel Stepjack came into the room all in a rush. His eye went quickly over Haijon and found me.