Lois Bujold - Barrayar

The colonel stared at him, and spat disgust. “Corporal, you’re perverted.”

Cordelia realized with a shock that Bothari’s riveted attention to the scene before them was no longer tactical. He was deeply aroused. His eyes seemed to glaze as she watched; his lips parted.

The guard colonel pocketed his comm link, and drew his nerve disruptor. “No.” He shook his head. “We make this quick and clean. Step aside, Corporal.”

Strange mercies …

The guard expertly popped Alys’s knees and shoved her down, stepping back. Her hands flung out to the pavement, too late to save her swollen belly from a hard smack. Padma Vorpatril moaned through his fast-penta haze. The guard colonel raised his nerve disruptor and hesitated, as if uncertain whether to aim it at her head or torso.

“Kill them,” Cordelia hissed in Bothari’s ear, jerked out her stunner, and fired.

Bothari snapped not only awake, but over into some berserker mode; his nerve disruptor bolt hit the guard colonel at the same moment as Cordelias stunner beam did, though she had drawn first. Then he was moving, a dark blur leaping behind a parked vehicle. He snapped off shots, blue crackles that electrified the air; two more guards fell as the rest took cover behind their groundcars.

Alys Vorpatril, still on the pavement, curled up in a tight ball, trying to cover her abdomen with her arms and legs. Padma Vorpatril, penta-drunk, staggered bewilderedly toward her, arms out, apparently with some similar idea in mind. The guard lieutenant, rolling on the pavement toward cover, aimed his nerve disruptor at the distraught man.

The guard lieutenant’s pause for accuracy was fatal; Droushnakovi’s nerve disruptor cross-fire and Cordelias stunner beam intersected upon his body—a millisecond too late. His nerve disruptor bolt took Padma Vorpatril squarely in the back of his head. Blue sparks danced, dark hair sparked orange, and Padma’s body arced in a violent convulsion and fell twitching. Alys Vorpatril wailed, a short sharp cry cut off by a gasp. On her hands and knees, she seemed momentarily frozen between trying to crawl toward him, or away.

Droushnakovi’s cross-fire vantage was perfect. The last guard was killed while still trying to raise the canopy of the armored groundcar. A driver, shielded inside the second vehicle, prudently chose to try and speed away. Koudelka’s plasma arc bolt, set on high power, blasted into the groundcar as it accelerated past the corner. It skidded wildly, dragging an edge and trailing sparks, and crashed into the side of a brick building.

Yes, and didn’t my whole strategy for this mission turn on our staying invisible? Cordelia thought dizzily, and ran forward. She and Droushnakovi reached Alys Vorpatril at the same moment; together they hoisted the shuddering woman to her feet.

“We have to get out of here,” said Bothari, rising from his firing-crouch and coming toward them.

“No shit,” agreed Koudelka, limping up and staring around at the sudden and spectacular carnage. The street was amazingly quiet. Not for long, Cordelia suspected.

“This way.” Bothari pointed up an alley, narrow and dark. “Run.”

“Shouldn’t we try to take that car?” Cordelia gestured to the body-draped vehicle.

“No. Traceable. And it can’t fit where we’re going.”

Cordelia was not sure if the wild-faced, weeping Alys was able to run anywhere, but she stuck her stunner back in her waistband and took one of the pregnant woman’s arms. Drou took the other, and together they guided her in the sergeant’s wake. At least Koudelka was no longer the slowest of the party.

Alys was crying, yet not hysterical; she glanced only once over her shoulder at her husband’s body, then concentrated grimly on trying to run. She did not run well. She was hopelessly unbalanced, her arms wrapping her belly in an attempt to take up the shocks of her heavy footsteps. “Cordelia,” she gasped. An acknowledgment of recognition; there was no time or breath for demands of explanation.

They had not lurched more than three blocks when Cordelia began to hear sirens from the area they were fleeing. But Bothari seemed controlled again, unpanicked. They traversed another narrow alley, and Cordelia realized they had crossed into a region of the city with no streetlights, or indeed any lights at all. Her eyes strained in the misty shadows.

Alys stopped suddenly, and Cordelia skidded to a halt, almost jerking the woman off her feet. Alys stood for half a minute, bent over, gasping.

Cordelia realized that beneath its deceptive padding of fat, Alys’s abdomen was hard as a rock; the back of her robe was soaking wet. “Are you going into labor?” she asked. She didn’t know why she made that a question, the answer was obvious.

“This has been going on—for a day and a half,” Alys blurted. She seemed unable to straighten. “I think my water broke back there, when that bastard knocked me down. Unless it’s blood—should have passed out by now, if all that was blood—it hurts so much worse, now… .” Her breath slowed; she pulled her shoulders back with effort.

“How much longer?” asked Kou in alarm.

“How should I know? I’ve never done this before. Your guess is as good as mine,” Lady Vorpatril snapped. Hot anger to warm cold fear. It wasn’t enough warmth, a candle against a blizzard.

“Not much longer, I’d say,” came Bothari’s voice out of the dark. “We’d better go to ground. Come on.”

Lady Vorpatril could no longer run, but managed a rapid waddle, stopping helplessly every two minutes. Then every one minute.

“Not going to make it all the way,” muttered Bothari. “Wait here.” He disappeared up a side—alley? The passages all seemed alleys here, cold and stinking, much too narrow for groundcars. They had passed exactly two people in the maze, huddled to one side of a passage in a heap, and stepped carefully around them.

“Can you do anything to, like, hold back?” asked Kou, watching Lady Vorpatril double over again. “We ought to … try and get a doctor or something.”

“That’s what that idiot Padma went out for,” Alys ground out. “I begged him not to go … oh, God!” After another moment she added, in a surprisingly conversational tone, “The next time you’re vomiting your guts out, Kou, let me suggest you just close your mouth and swallow hard … it’s not exactly a voluntary reflex!” She straightened again, shivering violently.

“She doesn’t need a doctor, she needs a flat spot,” Bothari spoke from the shadows. “This way.”

He led them a short distance to a wooden door, formerly nailed shut in an ancient solid stuccoed wall. Judging from the fresh splinters, he’d just kicked it open. Once inside, with the door pulled tight-shut again, Droushnakovi at last dared pull a hand-light from the satchel. It illuminated a small, empty, dirty room. Bothari swiftly prowled its perimeters. Two inner doors had been broken open long ago, but beyond them all was soundless and lightless and apparently deserted. “It’ll have to do,” said Bothari.

Cordelia wondered what the hell to do next. She knew all about placental transfers and surgical sections now, but for so-called normal births she had only theory to go on. Alys Vorpatril probably had even less grasp of the biology, Drou less still, and Kou was downright useless. “Has anyone here ever actually been in on one of these, before?”

“Not I,” muttered Alys. Their looks met in rather too clear an understanding.

“You’re not alone,” said Cordelia stoutly. Confidence should lead to relaxation, should lead to something. “We’ll all help.”

Bothari said—oddly reluctantly—”My mother used to do a spot of midwifery. Sometimes she’d drag me along to help. There’s not that much to it.”