I was in heavy labor, about to give birth. The crew of my starship sealed me up inside the escape pod's duplicator and turned the duper on. The next thing I knew, the duper was open and I was blinking at sunshine. Natural sunshine, not the ship's artificial light. Someone was standing in the doorway of the pod, and behind her, instead of my ship, was the cracked sunlit surface of a planet. I couldn't see her clearly, silhouetted like she was. She came into the pod and took me by the arm.
"We're going to take good care of you," she said. Her voice sounded familiar.
I was a little dazed. You're always dazed coming out of a duper. I blinked as she brought me out into the sunshine, where I came face to face with a woman wearing a ragged, threadbare dress that fit her like a tent. "Get her on the table," she told the other one. I thought, Who is this bitch and why is she wearing such a rag? I looked at the woman who was holding my arm. She was dressed in animal skins. She had my face. Another contraction hit me, and I said "Oh shit" not just because of the pain but because it all came together for me then. These women, the one wearing animal skins and the one wearing the raggedy dress, they were both me, only older. The ragged dress was a dirty, worn-out version of the gold lamé maternity dress I was wearing.
The "table" was a large, flat boulder. There were some other boulders scattered about, but the landscape was generally flat, except for some distant hills. And everything was barren. No plants, except for little patches of reddish moss. Not a stick of wood. The crumpled escape pod, the boulders, the hills. That was everything.
"Lie down," said the one in the tattered dress.
"Those bastards!" I said. The crew had marooned me somewhere. They must have put the duper on stasis, then dropped the pod on the first likely planet. Just because I was expecting a little service for my money!
"Come on," said the me in animal skins. "Be a good girl. Make this easy. Lie down."
"Make what easy!" I said. "Stop telling me what to do!"
The me in the tattered dress stepped close enough for me to see the tiny wrinkles around her eyes. She pricked my neck with something. It must have been a dermal. I felt warm. My knees buckled, and the two of them laid me on their "table." The sky darkened, went black.
I heard one say to the other, "She figured it out a lot faster than you did."
"Yeah. Well, I have at least figured out this."
"Ouch! You bitch!"
"Oh, shut up. It's about time I had something nice."
Then I was out.
)
The wealthy and influential Maura Voss suffers the consequences of mutiny when she orders the crew of her spaceship on a suicidal detour through a battle zone. Pregnant with the captain's baby, she is forced into a landing pod and banished to a deserted planet just as her contractions begin. She survives the crash with her new baby, but the impact damages the pod's duplicator, causing a new version of herself in childbirth to appear every eight years. The power struggle among the 8-year-interval Mauras and their sons takes on a new twist with the newest arrival, who decides to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the original Maura.
