David held the mining blaster to Myra's distended belly.

Myra felt the cold steel press against her abdomen. She shook her head, weakly, and brushed the blaster aside.

"Don't. You'd kill us both."

She was right. He couldn't. It was insane. He holstered the blaster.

All three of them were dying. Myra was dying faster than David or the baby. She was dying because her body was doing exactly what it was programmed to do. Her genetic structure was designed to allow the fruit of her body to ripen quickly under an alien sun, where she could help to populate a whole new world. It worked less well in the collapsed corridor of an asteroid mine, where a metabolically-enhanced fetus sucked the life out of its mother.

The cave-in had been catastrophic. Somehow, though, the airlock had held. The couple sat together, silently, in the dimly-lit cave, in their flannels and boots. Their empty space suits were piled up against the walls. There was water in their little cave, melted from the asteroid's walls. There was oxygen, in the canisters that fed the now-useless machinery, destroyed beyond repair in the cave-in. There was warmth, from the portable heating units.

There was no food. None at all.

Forty meters above them, on the surface, in the shack where they lived alone under the stars, there was food. Food, and music, and supplies for the baby. They had already decorated a little room for him.

It was supposed to have been their final trip down into the mine together before the baby was born. With the arrival of the next ship, they were scheduled to be rotated to the colonies to finish raising their family.

For the thousandth time, David tortured himself by ticking off the scenario in his head. He bit his lip. Myra would die first. As she died, their baby would be born from her dying womb. Without food, the baby would die. David would die last, finally, surrounded by the corpses of his little family, before the relief ship arrived in four weeks.

He lay with his back pressed against a vein of gold in the rock wall, trying to expend as little energy as possible.

He awoke with a start, realizing what had to be done. Why hadn't he seen it before?

The feeling grew inside of him. A feeling of conviction, of rightness, of duty.

He shuddered as he realized the consequences of his thoughts. This moment, he sensed, was the most real moment of his entire life. Perhaps the only moment he had ever lived at all.

Knowing what he had to do, he suddenly burst into tears. Myra misunderstood, and reached out a hand to comfort him.

David moved her hand and pulled out the blaster. He held it to his head.

"I love you," he said, his lower lip trembling.

Myra had no time to scream before he pulled the trigger.

Myra resisted the cravings for a night and a day. Her stomach and the baby inside of her growled and screamed with hunger while she mourned for her husband. In the end, though, her programming won out. Just as David had known it would.

On the second night, she dragged herself painfully over to his corpse, loathing herself, and began lapping up the congealed blood that surrounded her dead husband, on the floor of the cave. Her lips sucked and slurped, greedily, while she moaned and wept bitter tears that left streaks in the red wetness that coated her cheeks.

The baby was born. She named it after him. David. It had his eyes.

By the time the relief party arrived, Myra had consumed nearly all of the flesh from her husband's body. She dragged the body to a tiny side tunnel, far from the heating units, where it would keep better. After most of the flesh was gone, she cracked open each of the long bones of the corpse, one by one, and sucked out the marrow.

Her breasts flowed with milk. She survived. The baby survived.

Captain Jarmond surveyed the scene in the collapsed tunnel. He decided there would be no debriefing.

Had Myra murdered her husband? He felt he already knew the answer. The answer lay in the programming Captain Jarmond shared with David Marsh, and with every other man who had ever served in the colonial corps. It was an answer programmed into them genetically and memetically, through socialization and teaching, from the time their eyes first opened to the light. The programming told a man of his ultimate duty: to die if needed for his woman and for their children. To make the ultimate sacrifice.

David Marsh had followed his programming. Myra had, as well. In her own way, she had suffered more than he had. Captain Jarmond admired that fact. He was programmed, in fact, to admire it.

They were married one month later, after he carried her away from the dark and airless cave littered with her husband's bones.