The fluorescent panels in the delivery room flickered and almost died. There was nothing anyone could do about it. The fortress of Angband at the mouth of the Tallinn Valley was half a continent away from the Citadel, center of Sauron power. The last supply shipment had reached the Base six Haven years—forty-six Terran-years—before. The last shipment of men had been considerably more recent, but none of them had been engineers; the Citadel guarded those like precious gems. Soldiers in Angband and the other Bases were Soldiers only. When the panels finally quit for good, they would do without. It was three hundred T-years since most high technology on Haven had died in a burst of nuclear fire, as the Dol Guldur's crew made the planet safe for the last fleeing remnants of the Race. The Sauron refugees' descent into barbarism was taking much longer, but it was just as sure.
This time, though, the silvery light came back. The woman—girl, really; she could not have had more than fourteen T-years—writhing in the stirrups noticed neither dimming nor return. Eyes screwed shut, she pushed with all her might.
Her partner, a Chief Assault Leader named Dagor, touched her cheek. "Soon now, Badri," he murmured. "Soon it will be done."
Angband Base's Breedmaster stood between Badri's legs, ready to receive the baby when it came. "Don't worry. This is what the cattle women are for," he told Dagor. "And if she dies giving birth to a Soldier, well, fair exchange."
The scar under Dagor's left eye went pale. Almost, he grabbed for the Breedmaster's throat. "Shut up, Grima," he growled.
He made himself subside. They were far from friends, but he needed Grima's skill to bring Badri through safe. On Haven, no birth was ever easy. And despite his harsh words, the Breedmaster knew his obstetrics. He would not let a successful breeder die if he could prevent it. Especially one like Badri, who was probably between a quarter and a half of Soldier blood herself; it was not only among the tribute maidens taken to the Base that the Soldiers of Angband sowed the genes of the Race.
Badri shrieked. Dagor squeezed her hand, willing himself not to use his enhanced strength to crush it. She was very strong, more evidence of Soldier ancestry—but he was full-blood, and immensely stronger.
Grima grunted in satisfaction. "Here we are." His hands reached where, Dagor thought, only he himself had any business touching. But the Breedmaster knew what he was doing. He guided the baby out, sponged mucus from its mouth. It began to cry.
"A girl," Grima said, with a faint sneer Dagor's way.
The Chief Assault Leader's iron shoulders sagged. Soldiers always wanted—Soldiers always needed—to breed more Soldiers. Dagor knew the chromosome that decided the baby's sex came from him. He could not help frowning at Badri even so. Well, the girl will be useful for the crossback breeding program, he consoled himself. One female to every three males was the Soldier norm; that, and the lethal recessives, were the reason they levied breeding-stock from their subjects.
Grima delivered the raw-liver horror of the afterbirth. Dagor expected his woman's travail to end then, but her belly still rippled with contractions. Grima palpated it, stared, palpated again. "There's another baby in there," he exclaimed, startled out of his usual air of omniscience.
Badri's struggle to give birth began again. She was close to exhaustion now; Dagor was learning firsthand why the process was called labor. "You should have known she was carrying twins," he snarled at Grima.
Above a linen mask, the Breedmaster's eyes were harassed. "More than half the time, the first indication of twins is birth," he said. "If this were the Citadel, with the technology they still have there, maybe. As is, keep quiet and let me—and your woman—work. Just be thankful I hadn't started sewing up the episiotomy yet." Dagor scowled, but nodded.
Not too much later, as the Chief Assault Leader reckoned time—an age went by for Badri—another baby let out its first indignant cry. "A boy this time," Grima said, with a faint air of satisfaction. "Now I sew."
"Well done," Dagor told Badri. He doubted she heard. Her head lolled, her eyes were half-closed, her breath came slow and deep. She was, the Chief Assault Leader thought, falling asleep. He did not blame her a bit.
First one newborn, then the other squalled as Grima stabbed tiny heels to draw blood. "Don't let your woman get too attached to them yet," he warned. "The genetics have to check out."
"Get on with it, then," Dagor snarled, though the Breedmaster outranked him. Scowling, Grima stalked out of the delivery room. Dagor shouted for a servant to see to the twins.
Back in the laboratory where only he was allowed to go, Grima frowned as he ran his checks. The babies' blood clotted Soldier-fast, that was certain. The rest of his test had to be more indirect. Some—too many—reagents were not changing color as they should when they found Soldier genes.
But almost all his reagents were old. For some, his predecessors had found equivalents brewed from Haven's plant life. For most, there were none. And so he made do with tiny driblets of the chemicals the last shipment from the Citadel had brought, hoping the driblets were enough to react to genes whose presence they were supposed to mark, hoping also that the complex chemicals had not decayed too much over the decades.
His frown deepened. If the reagents told the truth—if—these twins were marginal Soldiers at best. He suspected some of the chemicals were too far gone to be useful any more, but what were his suspicions against the hard evidence of the test tubes? It was not likely that a pair as genetically compatible as Dagor and Badri had produced offspring who were simply deficient in Soldier genes—more probable that they would hand on a lethal overdose of augmented traits. Dagor was Citadel-born, sent out as part of the breeding program himself. Nearly pure-strain, of high quality.
It was possible that the recombination had selected only cattle traits, however; breeding was a lottery.
"Marginal, marginal, marginal," he said under his breath. That meant the decision lay in his hands. He enjoyed the strength accruing to him from this power of life and death, but with power went risks. Chief Assault Leader Dagor, for instance, was up and coming, and would not take kindly to having two of his children ordered set out for stobor. Never mind that he had several more by unassigned breeders; his primary bond was with Badri.
On the other hand, Brigade Leader Azog, Battlemaster of Angband Base, had been looking askance at the rising young Chief Assault Leader lately. Subordinates with too much ambition could be dangerous; every senior officer knew that.
Grima pondered, rubbing his chin. Breedmasters, by the nature of things, had to be conservative; conserving genes was their job. Given the choice between displeasing Dagor and displeasing Brigade Leader Azog, Grima hesitated only a moment.
"There is no choice," he told the Chief Assault Leader a few minutes later. There was a choice, he knew, but he had already made it. He spoke only to salve Dagor's anger. "These newborns do not meet our standards. They must be culled."
Badri wept helplessly. Dagor soothed her as best he could, which was none too well: "They have only cattle genes in them. They could never serve the Base, serve the Race, as they must."
"They are my children!" Badri screamed. She clawed at his face. He seized her wrist with the thoughtless, automatic speed his enhanced reflexes gave him. She wept louder, turned her nails against her own cheeks.
Dagor offered the only promise he could: "Maybe some woman of the cattle will take them in."
Badri stared, hope wild in her eyes. Better than she, Dagor knew how forlorn it was. Stobor, cliff lions, and cold claimed exposed babies, not cattle women. But every Base's exposure ground was unpatrolled, to give each mother the chance to think her infant might be the lucky one, rescued by people instead of death. Nobody counted the small bones, for the same reason.
Dagor had once thought that weakness: simple euthanasia of unacceptable infants would have been quicker and cleaner. Now he saw for himself the wisdom of the scheme. Even Soldiers had to be able to live at peace with their women.