Let the flesh be counted.
Let the function be assessed.
Let no useful thing be wasted.
—Canticle of Allocation, Forge World Alecto-Delta
The child entered the world during the changing of the shifts.
No bells announced him.
No priest raised a hand in blessing.
No father waited outside the birthing cell, and no family gathered to hear his first cry.
There was only the sound of machinery.
It came through the walls as a deep and endless vibration, too constant to be called noise. Great pistons descended somewhere beyond the chamber. Turbines turned in the dark. Metal screamed beneath stamping hammers, and furnaces breathed through ducts wide enough to swallow hab-blocks.
The walls shook.
The floor shook.
The steel table beneath his mother shook.
The infant felt the forge before he saw it.
“Contraction interval irregular,” said the medicae servitor.
Its voice was flat and sexless. Three articulated arms extended from its hunched body. One held a suction tube. One carried a cluster of surgical instruments. The last ended in a tarnished brass sensor that moved over the labouring woman’s abdomen.
The woman’s name was Mara Venn.
According to the brass plate attached to the foot of the table, she was:
MENIAL-TECHNIC AUXILIA
MANUFACTORUM COMPLEX 18-THETA
COOLANT DISTRIBUTION, SECONDARY GRADE
BIOLOGICAL AGE: 22 STANDARD TERRAN YEARS
EXPECTED PRODUCTIVITY REMAINING: 31.4 YEARS
She had been in labour for eleven hours.
Her work shift had lasted fourteen.
They had taken her directly from Coolant Hall Seven when the contractions became too severe for her to remain standing.
She still wore her grey labour tunic. It had been cut open below the waist, but the upper half remained stiff with dried chemical residue. Her palms were burned. One of her fingernails had been torn away two days earlier when a pressure wheel jammed, and the wound had not yet been treated.
“Is it alive?” Mara asked.
The servitor did not answer.
She turned her head toward the only other conscious being in the room.
A junior biologis adept stood beside a bank of humming instruments. He wore dull crimson robes beneath a stained white apron. The lower half of his face had been replaced by a respirator grille, and a green-glass lens occupied his left eye.
He was called Adept Nilos-7.
He had overseen eight hundred and nineteen births.
He remembered none of them.
“Is it alive?” Mara asked again.
Nilos-7 tilted his head. Data moved across his optical display.
“Vital signs remain within acceptable parameters.”
“Will it live?”
“Your question is imprecise.”
Mara cried out as another contraction came.
The medicae servitor leaned closer. Its tools clicked.
Nilos-7 observed the numbers.
“Clarification,” he said. “Neonatal viability is projected at eighty-one point six per cent. Probability of survival to labour assignment age is fifty-eight point nine per cent, assuming standard ration provision and no major respiratory complications.”
Mara stared at him.
Sweat ran into her eyes.
“Will my baby live?”
The adept’s organic eye narrowed slightly.
Somewhere within the layers of doctrine and calculation that filled his mind, he appeared to understand.
“Probably,” he said.
The child was born six minutes later.
He emerged blue, wet and silent.
The servitor lifted him by one leg.
Mara tried to raise her head.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the servitor struck the infant once between the shoulder blades.
The child coughed.
He drew his first breath from air that tasted of antiseptic, hot iron and distant smoke.
Then he screamed.
The sound was weak beside the thunder of the forge, but Mara heard it.
Her face changed.
Until that moment, she had looked exhausted, frightened and small. Now something moved through her expression that none of the chamber’s instruments could measure.
“My son,” she whispered.
The servitor carried the child to a weighing cradle.
“Male,” Nilos-7 recorded. “Mass: three point zero four kilograms. External formation: acceptable. Cranial symmetry: acceptable. Limb count: standard. Visible mutation: absent. Respiratory function—”
“My son,” Mara said again.
Nilos-7 glanced at her.
“Genetic relation confirmed.”
“Let me hold him.”
The adept paused.
The request was not forbidden. Maternal contact after delivery was permitted for a maximum of one hundred and twenty seconds under Forge Natality Directive 44-Gamma, provided no sanitation alarm was active and neither party required immediate intervention.
It was, however, inefficient.
The child needed to be cleaned, marked, sampled, vaccinated and transferred to the communal neonate ward. The mother required suturing and a stimulant dose. Her labour overseer had already submitted a return-to-duty estimate.
Nilos-7 looked toward the cogitator.
Then back at Mara.
“One hundred and twenty seconds,” he said.
The medicae servitor wrapped the infant in a square of coarse cloth and placed him against her chest.
Mara’s arms closed around him.
The child continued to cry.
She touched his head with two burned fingers.
He was warm.
That surprised her. Nearly everything in her life was either too hot to touch or cold enough to ache. The pipes were hot. The coolant tanks were cold. The hab corridors were cold. The machinery housings were hot. Her bunk was cold when she entered it and warm only moments before she was required to leave.
But the child’s warmth was different.
It did not come from combustion, friction or electrical resistance.
It simply belonged to him.
“Hello,” she whispered.
His eyes remained shut.
“I wondered what you’d look like.”
Nilos-7 entered the neonatal measurements.
The cogitator requested a designation.
“Do I name him?” Mara asked.
“Maternal designation may be submitted. Acceptance is subject to registry duplication protocols.”
She had thought about the name during her shifts.
Not often. There was little room for unnecessary thought in Coolant Hall Seven. The pressure gauges had to be checked. The valve sequence had to be followed. The litany had to be spoken exactly, even when Mara no longer believed the words affected anything.
But sometimes, while standing beneath the great pipes, she had placed a hand against her abdomen and imagined speaking to someone who could hear her.
“Cael,” she said.
Nilos-7’s fingers stopped above the keys.
“Repeat.”
“Cael.”
“Etymological origin?”
“I don’t know.”
“Familial inheritance?”
“No.”
“Occupational reference?”
“No.”
“Why was this designation selected?”
Mara looked down at the child.
“Because it sounds like an open place.”
Nilos-7 waited.
The explanation did not correspond to a useful registry category.
“Clarify.”
“I heard an off-worlder say it once. Years ago. He said there were worlds where, above the ground, there was nothing. No ceiling. Just air that went on forever.”
“The term you seek is sky.”
“Yes.”
“Alecto-Delta possesses a sky.”
“No,” Mara said. “We have smoke.”
The adept’s respirator emitted a faint click.
Mara stroked the child’s cheek.
“The off-worlder called the open blue above his world caelum. Or something like it. I don’t remember properly.”
“Caelum is an archaic Low Gothic derivative.”
“Then call him Cael.”
Nilos-7 submitted the designation.
The cogitator considered it.
A green rune appeared.
DESIGNATION ACCEPTED.
“Cael Venn,” the adept said. “Provisional citizen-menial registration ALECTO-DELTA/EIGHTE-REGION/NATAL-CYCLE-991/44118.”
Mara smiled.
It was the only time Cael would ever see her do so.
He did not remember it.
At the end of one hundred and twenty seconds, the medicae servitor removed him from her arms.
Mara resisted.
Not much.
She was exhausted, and the machine was stronger.
“Wait.”
“Contact interval complete,” Nilos-7 said.
“Just another minute.”
“Denied.”
“When will I see him?”
“Dependent upon ward assignment, work compatibility and future productivity.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means no reunion is scheduled.”
The servitor carried Cael toward the transfer hatch.
His crying grew louder.
Mara tried to sit up. The restraint strap across her waist tightened automatically.
“Please.”
Nilos-7 looked at her.
For the first time that night, the calculations behind his green lens slowed.
He could have said that attachment was biologically predictable.
He could have reminded her that the child belonged first to the Omnissiah, second to the forge world and only incidentally to the body that had produced him.
He could have recited the Sixth Maxim:
Sentiment is the corrosion of purpose.
Instead, he turned toward the servitor.
“Pause.”
It stopped.
Mara could no longer reach the child, but she could see the small shape in its metal arms.
Cael’s face was red. His fists opened and closed. His cries sounded thin and furious.
“He is viable,” Nilos-7 said. “His lungs are functional. His genome shows no immediate disqualifying anomaly. His probability of reaching assignment age exceeds regional mean.”
Mara swallowed.
“Is that meant to comfort me?”
Nilos-7 considered the question.
“Yes.”
The servitor passed through the hatch.
The steel door closed.
Cael Venn’s first separation from another human being occurred eleven minutes after his birth.
It would not be his last.