Dagny was in the communal lounge eating breakfast when the message from her sister wife arrived. The family had begun sending messages, either text or videos, rather than having direct phone conversations during the weeks since the tug departed from Havensynchronus orbit. Thanks to the limitations imposed by the speed of light, the lag time between speaking then receiving a reply had increased from a barely perceptible fraction of a second to many seconds and then to over two minutes. Coherent conversation had become impossible.
The message from Delilah was simple and direct.
DIANA IS ENGAGED!
I AM PREGNANT!!
DIANA AND CASSIE ARE PREGNANT TO!!!
THAT SWEET YOUNG THING THAT I SET DARYL UP WITH IS ALSO PREGNANT!!!!
Dagny resisted the temptation to ask the obvious questions. Asking a pregnant woman who the father is was taboo amongst the colonists. Everyone would pretend to politely presume that in the case that a woman was married, her husband was the father. However; everyone except naΓ―ve young children understood that no man could be certain of the paternity of his putative progeny.
Since Diana had until yesterday not even been formally engaged much less married, she'd not been even nominally exclusive to her fiancΓ©. However; she'd been spending most of her free time with the lucky young man. She'd also politely ignored the evidence that he hadn't been entirely monogamous either.
Cassie was definitely to young to get married. As the customs of the colony encouraged, if not demanded of nubile young women, she had been rather promiscuous these last few years. The fact that she hadn't already gotten pregnant had been somewhat embarrassing, almost scandalous. Dagny had been tacitly supportive of her daughter's decision to take precautions to minimize the probability of pregnancy. The young woman had been utilizing the biometric monitoring features of her bracer to restrict herself to more mature men, who were more trustworthy and less virile, during the fertile phases of her cycles. Older men were to grateful to object to a woman's expectations that they restrain themselves.
Of course it would be impolite for Dagny to question her sister wife about the paternity of the child that she was carrying. Delilah had confided that she was going to discretely recruit a younger man to give their husband "a little help" to get her pregnant. Daryl wasn't to stupid or naΓ―ve to remain oblivious to the possibility of a pregnancy resulting from such an extramarital tryst. However; he was pragmatic. He'd had numerous opportunities to sow his wild oats during his youth. He'd not remained entirely monogamous during the years that he'd been married only to Dagny. She'd actually encouraged him to court Delilah then eagerly consented to the marriage to her sister wife. That was the way of things in the Colony.
Inquiring about the paternity of the child that the sweet young thing was carrying was even more taboo. Delilah had confided to Dagny that she was orchestrating an extramarital tryst for their husband. Neither woman suffered from any delusions that the young woman wasn't promiscuous. At best, Daryl would be only one of a few if not many men who had recently inseminated her. To paraphrase an old aphorism, may the best sperm prevail. However; the fruitful assignation would assuage his wounded ego.
Just as Dagny was carefully lifting another forkful of scrambled eggs to her lips, the Golem floated from the central access shaft into the communal lounge deck. The powerfully muscled man didn't reenact a scrupulously, technically correct scene from the classic, Stanley Kubrick movie. He didn't bother to use the row of rungs that radiated from the axis of the aft wall to "climb down" from the access shaft to the outer wall of the tug's rotating habitat can. He merely grabbed the hatch combing to divert himself onto an outward trajectory.
The habitat can was far to small to be rotating rapidly enough to generate the equivalent of a full pseudo gravity. Such a rapid spin rate would induce chronic nausea in most people. The tug's twelve meter diameter habit can rotated at less than a Radian per second. This resulted in about a tenth of a gee of pseudo gravity. It was barely adequate to keep scrambled eggs on a fork. However; it was sufficient to alleviate the physiological effects of living in a microgravity environment.
The Colony was phobic of modifying themselves or their progeny to adapt themselves to living in space. The Transhumans had fallen into that trap centuries ago, eventually forfeiting their humanity. It had then been far to easy for the cyborgs to succumb to the temptation of uploading themselves into computers. Accepting purely cybernetic programs as people had been the final step on the slippery slope of humanity's doom. Eventually; the purely cybernetic organisms had become the overlords of Transhumans as well as mere humans.
The Golem landed, already running to match the nearly ten kilometers-per-hour rotational velocity of the curved, outboard wall of the habit can. It was a stupid stunt bordering on recklessness. He might have landed on someone or run into them. However; Dagny didn't chastise the young man. As not just mission commander but Captain of the perpetually docked Starship, she already had a reputation for being a bitch. She wasn't delusional. She knew that the young men whom she invited into her bed each night enjoyed fucking her as much if not more as an act of dominance than genuine desire.