“You need to find a comfortable position. Perhaps hold on to something and crouch down.”

“Like what a tree?” I say, wishing for a tree to hug while I did this.

My husband stands in front of me and takes my hands. “Push when your body tells you to. You can feel it, right?”

“Of course, I can feel it,” I snap. We had decided that no medicine was best as these were hybrid children. However, the Imperial doctor had offered for me to have the children on his ship painlessly, but I didn’t trust him enough, and now I am deeply regretting that decision.

I push and think I might die. I wish I would have done more exercise. When I break, I just close my eyes. I try to imagine myself on the beach in Florida again, but that doesn’t work. Another contraction hits me, and I begin to see black.

I’m fading away from reality to accomplish this one goal. My body is telling me that nothing else matters. I hear myself groan in pain as I push, but I don’t even recognize it as my own voice. I’m in pain and but it doesn’t matter. Somehow my body, without my mind, is cooperating to get this accomplished. I must do this and have no choice in the matter. My mind has been pushed out of the process.

I can’t hear anyone. My heart is beating so loudly in my ears. I’m dying, I think. I just let go of everything, then. I cannot. It’s too much.

I wake up in sickbay. I hear babies crying. My babies. “Doctor?”

The doctor and my husband come to my bedside. Between them, they are carrying three babies. “Where are the others?” I ask.

“I am doing what we can,” the doctor says.

I nod, and tears begin to fall down my cheeks when I look at the babies we do have, “These three are healthy?”

“Yes,” the doctor confirms. “Two girls and a boy. All healthy. Future princes and princesses.”

I take the babies and inspect them in my arms, then what the doctor just said infiltrates my mind, “Did you say, princes and princesses? What do you mean?” I assume it’s what they might call all new babies on the Home Planet as a term of endearment.

However, the doctor looks from me to my husband and then says, “I think this I something that you should discuss with the Commander.”

I look at my husband expectantly because I know something is wrong.

“He said that because these children still have a right to the throne of the Home Planet.”

“But the Home Planet is a republic.”

“Yes, for the last twenty years,” he says.

And then everything makes sense. My world starts spinning, and my last words before I pass out are, “Take the children I can’t.”

* * *

“Wife,” I hear my husband say. “Wife.”

I open my eyes and see his blue ones looking down into mine.