Joe opened the letter from Mary and began grinning as he read. His roommate looked at him with interest. “Good news from home?”

“Yeah,” Joe said without looking up. “My stepmother is pregnant again.”

“I thought she just had a baby.”

“Two years ago. This is their third.”

His roommate, Bill Stolsky, watched Joe finish the letter. Privately he was a little awed by the calm, remote half-breed. Even when they’d been doolies, first-year cadets, and normally regarded as lower than the low, there had been something about Joe Mackenzie that had kept the upper-classmen from dealing him too much misery. He’d been at the top of his class from the beginning, and it was already known that he was moving on to flight training after graduation. Mackenzie was on the fast track to the top, and even his instructors knew it.

“How old is your stepmother?” Stolsky asked in curiosity. He knew Mackenzie was twenty-one, a year younger than himself, though they were both seniors in the Academy.

Joe shrugged and reached for a picture he kept in his locker. “Young enough. My dad’s pretty young, too. He was just a kid when I was born.”

Stolsky took the picture and looked at the four people in it. It wasn’t a posed photograph, which made it more intimate. Three adults were playing with a baby. The woman was small and delicate, and was looking up from the baby in her lap to smile at a big, dark, eagle-featured man. The man was one tough-looking dude. Stolsky wouldn’t want to meet him in an alley, dark or otherwise. He glanced quickly at Joe and saw the strong resemblance.

But the baby was clinging to the big man’s finger with a dimpled fist and laughing while Joe tickled his neck. It was a revealing and strangely disturbing look into Mackenzie’s private life, into his tightly knit family.

Stolsky cleared his throat. “Is that the newest baby?”

“No, that picture was made when I was a senior in high school. That’s Michael. He’s four years old now, and Joshua is two.” Joe couldn’t help grinning and feeling worried at the same time when he thought of Mary’s letter. Both his little brothers had been delivered by cesarean, because Mary was simply too slender to have them. After Joshua’s birth, Wolf had said there would be no more babies, because Mary had had such a hard time carrying Josh. But Mary had won, as usual. He’d have to make a point of getting off on leave when this baby was due.

“Your stepmother isn’t—uh—”

“Indian? No.”

“Do you like her?”

Joe smiled. “I love her. I wouldn’t be here without her.” He stood and walked to the window. Six years of hard work, and he was on the verge of getting what he’d lived for: fighter jets. First there was flight training, then Fighter Training School. More years of hard work loomed before him, but he was eager for them. Only a small percentage made it to fighters, but he was going to be one of them.

The cadets in his class who were going on to flight training had already been thinking of fighter call signs, picking theirs out even though they knew some of them would wash out of flight training, and an even greater number would never make it to fighters. But they never thought it would be them; it was always the other guy who washed out, the other guy who didn’t have the stuff.

They’d had a lot of fun thinking up those signs, and Joe had sat quietly, a little apart as he always was. Then Richards had pointed at him and said, “You’ll be Chief.”

Joe had looked up, his face calm and remote. “I’m not a chief.” His tone had been even, but Richards had felt a chill.

“All right,” he’d agreed. “What do you want to be called?”

Joe had shrugged. “Call me ‘Breed.’ It’s what I am.”

Already, though they hadn’t even graduated yet, people were calling him Breed Mackenzie. The name would be painted on his helmet, and a lot of people would forget his real name.

Mary had given him this. She’d pushed and prodded, fought for him, taught him. She’d given him his life, up in the blue.

Mary turned into Wolf’s arms. She was nude, and his big hand kept stroking down her pale body as if searching out signs of her as-yet-invisible pregnancy. She knew he was worried, but she felt wonderful and tried to reassure him. “I’ve never felt better. Face it, pregnancy agrees with me.”

He chuckled and stroked her breasts, lifting each one in turn in his palm. They were fuller now, and more sensitive. He could almost bring her to satisfaction just with his mouth on her nipples.

“But this is the last one,” he said.

“What if it’s another boy? Wouldn’t you like to try for a girl just once more?”

He groaned, because that was the argument she’d used to talk him into getting her pregnant this time. She was determined to have her four children.

“Let’s make a deal. If this one is a girl, there won’t be any more. If it’s a boy, we’ll have one more baby, but that’s the limit, regardless of its sex.”

“It’s a deal,” she agreed. She paused. “Have you thought that it’s possible you could father a hundred children and they’d all be boys? You may not have any female sperm. Look at your track record, three boys in a row—”

He put his hand on her mouth. “No more. Four is the absolute limit.”

She laughed at him and arched her slender body against him. His response was immediate, even after five years of marriage. Later, when he slept, Mary smiled into the darkness and stroked his strong back. This baby was a boy, too, she felt. But the next one—ah, the next one would be the daughter he craved. She was certain of it.