Free Star Force: Empire (SF58) by Aer-ki Jyr

minutes, and all done in ceremonious glory. The mother would
then be allowed to rest, with her responsibilities complete, and would be
showered with attention and gifts as a show of compensation for the duty to her
people that she had just acquitted.
    And it wasn’t a pleasant one, for a Nestafar womb
could hold up to as many as five infants simultaneously, turning the mother
into more or less a fleshy orb in the final stages. Naru hadn’t liked that at all and didn’t intend to go through the process again, but
she recognized the importance of it and figured that the four Nestafar she had
acted as a conduit to bring into the universe were enough to acquit her
duty…but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to support and praise those that
continued to reproduce, knowing the toll it took on them.
    With that thought stuck firmly in her mind she flew as
quickly as she could, arriving at the ceremony as the first of the younglings
was born. No one could see the actual birthing, for those involved were behind
a screen, but the first of the transition canisters came out with the youngling
inside and ceremonial guards flanking it as the hover pod was taken across the
chamber for all those gathered to see, then off down a special hallway to the
nearby maturia where the little one would begin his life and eventual training.
    Naru cheered along with the
others, then did the same as the other two came out in sequence. Once they were
gone and a few minutes passed the screens lowered with the mother now visible
and clearly fatigued, but the onslaught of well-wishers surrounded her and she
received them with joy and thanks.
    Naru was relieved she’d made
it in time and gave her sister the gift she’d been working to make for the past
three weeks. It was a head piece with an ornate script across the front and
sides with several jewels inset, and it had cost her quite a few credits to
acquire the pieces, after which she’d done the construction and inscribing
herself.
    The gift went over well and Naru was pleased, then she excused herself from the remainder of the ceremony and
rushed over to another part of the city…the bioharvest zone, where she had
taken a short break from work to attend. The Nestafar dropped to the floor at
the entrance and proceeded on foot the rest of the way into the harvesting
center, then made her way over to the section she’d been working on before and
stepped up to the control cupola that had another two people inside working the
remote controls.
    “That was fast,” one of them said, his attention
focused on the displays.
    “The ceremony is still continuing, but the younglings
have been born and I didn’t want to delay things here so I hurried back.”
    “Good, because we lost one harvester already.”
    “What happened?” Naru asked,
activating the controls to one of the full growth pods.
    “One of the tines snapped. First one I’ve had in years
do that.”
    “What did it hit?”
    “I don’t know. We couldn’t find anything in the pod.
Must have just been a freak thing.”
    “I don’t like that. How far behind are we?”
    “Enough,” the other Nestafar said, taking a brief
break to move his harvester from one pod to another.
    “Let’s get to it then,” Naru said, passing her armature that was attached to the ceiling down through the
open top of the pod, which now only had a thin energy shield keeping the
concentrated CO2 environment inside. The Tanazi bushes within were stacked thick against one another, but with just enough of a
gap that Naru could push the harvester down between
them, bending aside some of the supple branches. Using camera relays she began
cutting off certain branches and leaving others, with the severed pieces going
into the harvester and being transported up a conduit and into the ceiling.
    The trick of it was to cut the right branches without
killing the Tanazi , and to date computerized
harvesters had a less than stellar success rate than guided ones. It was