Page 15 of Defiance (The Intersolar Union #7)

I reclined in my bunk with my holotab’s screen hovering in front of my knees like I was balancing a book against my thighs. The narrow bed, the porthole, the hum of the ship… It was like a lullaby, putting me in the mood to lose track of time. Only the occasional bark of laughter and mottled conversations of the crew walking through the halls reminded me of where I was or that my lower back was starting to ache.

I’d spent all day holed up, convinced that if anyone needed me, they’d come find me. Instead of scrutinizing my confused loins and grappling with the feelings I couldn’t have, I looked through all my luggage and studied what I was bringing purely out of curiosity. One of the “lesser”

gifts—Zufi’s description in his very thorough diplomatic primer—was a dried and shredded squid from Dharatee that left me with pressing questions. Was a shilpakaari eating a squid like a chicken eating nuggets?

Inquiring minds had to know.

I was tempted to risk an anaphylactic response to give it a try, which told me it was probably well past dinner. I closed my holoscreen and rubbed my straining eyes as the door binged and the lights dimmed for a beat.

“Commander Xata has requested entrance,”

the ship sounded in a female voice.

I lifted one corner of my upper lip.

“Brilliant. Let her in.”

The door slid into the wall as I climbed off my bed and Xata strode in, her tendrils roiling around her shoulders as she examined the room with her hands on her hips.

“Sakharel?”

she said by way of greeting. I crossed my arms over my chest, bra discarded hours ago.

“Yup.”

She raised one brow. “Smart.”

“How can I help you, Commander?”

I asked.

“Came to see if I know how to use the foodbay? Latch up my trousers?”

Xata grinned crookedly and held out her hand, a thin disc pinched between her fingers. It was translucent like wax paper, with a gelatinous bump in the center. I leaned in close enough to see a hair-thin copper wire sandwiched within its layers.

When she opened a knife in her other hand, I snapped back a step.

“Jaysus!”

“It’s a contraceptive bionic. Good for five orbits,”

she said, all business as she kicked a seam in the wall. Two stools and a narrow nook table extended outwards like a Murphy bed. She unrolled a bootleg medkit with antiseptic, a mediplasma, and a lighter that she passed under her knife like I was getting a goddamn prison tattoo.

“It’s not full-proof with an advenan, but at least it’s something. Can’t log it in the medbay, so we’re doing this like privateers. Hope you have good pain tolerance.”

I sighed. This again? What were advenans anyway, breeding studs? You’d think their jip was invincible.

“I don’t need it. One and done, business over.”

Her striped gaze glanced over my forearm.

“Fucking Novak will get you pregnant.”

“Not without the goods, it won’t.”

I drummed my fingers over my middle. Xata squinted with confusion, then lifted her chin once she understood.

“You can take it out?”

She lowered her knife.

“Weird, but convenient. Alright then.”

“Aye… Thanks for the offer though,”

I said sincerely, extending an olive branch.

“I wasn’t offering for your sake,”

she clipped as she stowed the table and stools, ready to leave. I gnawed on my cheek, unable to let it go, crossing my arms and fisting my hands against my sides.

“Why don’t you like humans?”

Xata sighed, clenching her tendrils.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does if I’m supposed to trust you with my life,”

I probed.

“You’ve been fantasizing about watching me spin off into space since I stepped aboard.”

The commander evaluated me with a cold set to her jaw. She ran her tongue over her dental ridges—like teeth but not individual chicklets—and dropped her shoulders back on the wall.

“Do you know what a coil is, Charlie?”

She didn’t wait for me to answer.

“Coiling isn’t possible outside our own species, but enter humans and gasp a world of opportunities dangles in front of shil men’s faces like a fish on a hook.”

I fought back the sort of scoff made for telenovela primetime and thought about it. If some sort of female species came down to Earth, simpering with perky tits and slave collars, I’d be livid. The example was too extreme, but maybe the feeling was the same.

So instead of rolling my eyes and telling her she had to share, I nodded in understanding. I would be territorial too if our roles were switched.

“I get it. Take some human men, then. Fair trade.”

Xata leaned forward, making sure I was looking right into her fuming glare.

“That’s exactly the attitude that’s going to kill thousands.

So flippant, like all mammals.

You flit from one fling to the next without a second glance, don’t you? But if that hook-up you snuck out on before dawn is a shil man, he could be addicted, devastated, and starving when he wakes up.

No way for you to leave a vial of pheromones behind.

No consideration for how you flipped his world upside down with a single touch like Dr Ahlberg did to Ezraji Zarabi.

And you think it’s jealousy that makes me hate you? Please.

Shil men can take a dip in whoever they want.

But coiling… Our species manages it, but barely.

If shil men are tossed aside by their priya without any way to wean off their taste, it’s devastating.

It can kill them. Now Ambassador Zufi sees your colony as a political liberation.”

She scoffed, her mane shivering with distaste.

“Humans with their lifetime mating habits and their high potency… All I hear is a siren song.”

My entire face erupted in a blaze of cherry red. I sat down on my bunk with a gaunt frown. If I’d stepped out of my own world view for two seconds, I could have seen her perspective on my own. Instead, I was being a predictable twat about it, assuming just because we all walked on two legs and talked out of holes in our faces, that we had a comparable life experience. I was a fecking biologist, wasn’t I?

“That’s bloody shite,”

I sighed.

“Of course it’s different. You’re cephalopods. Craic ones that’ve evolved past senescence, apparently.”

Xata’s ferocity eased at the mention of senescence. It was the process of deterioration after mating, most notably in cuttlefish and octopi. Not my area of specialty, but I should have made the connection. As a professional, I was embarrassed. As a person, I was ashamed that I’d been so arrogant. A woman like Siat Xata was definitely not jealous of a handful of humans with funny strings coming out of their heads and lumps on their chests.

I gasped, completely engrossed in my own scientific spiral.

“You haven’t actually evolved past it at all, have you? The metabolic boost during a coil still triggers senescence. They’re designed to waste away. What a bloody tragedy. Like sentimentalism without the tuberculosis.”

My epiphany filled the brittle silence as I stared at the wall in dumbfounded indignation. Deep ravines formed in my expression as I thought of Hunar’s grey pallor and the three children he talked about every once in a while. Was he dying?

“We manage it.”

Xata’s shoulders were stiff but her throat bobbed when she swallowed. For the first time, she looked tired instead of angry.

“Women like me produce a larger pheromonal load than average and work as coilists to offset the health impact.”

“How do you do that?”

The commander sighed, her shoulders slumping. She sat down next to me on the bed and leaned her elbows on her knees. Her tendrils tumbled over her shoulders, hanging between her legs.

“It’s not complicated. We take multiple men into our coil and wean them off at a responsible pace. Maybe their priya died. Maybe she left him for someone else and cut him off. Maybe he’s being abused and used for slave labor.”

She shrugged.

“There are lots of reasons and lots of methods. Sometimes it’s sex work. Sometimes it’s clinical. But it’s always spiritual, even if we aren’t called priestesses anymore. A way to call them back to shore when they’re caught in a storm.”

I felt my medallion beneath my shirt.

“You’re right. Humans will make the problem worse before they understand,”

I admitted.

“That doctor turned Zarabi with a single touch,”

she said with wonder.

“And Bree Stewart put Aavar Medansh into a coil when he’s a fucking eunuch.”

She brushed her hand over her tendrils, sliding them from her face.

“Even I can’t do that.”

I nodded slowly, thinking about the impending devastation. Xata was right. A brush of someone’s sweaty arm in a market. Picking up a used towel. Sharing a cup… It wasn’t just sex. Humans were so potent that the fallout from cultural misunderstandings would be debilitating.

I lived with shilpakaari men and thought I understood the dynamic of life with them. Never sharing drinks, nodding instead of hugging, touching sleeves or boots, not leaning in too close… These were all habits listed in notices from the clinic to educate humans on how to make the delegates more comfortable with us. I hadn’t realized it was so much more than just good manners.

My eyes drifted to the door towards Agent Gaul’s quarters. What did that mean for everyone else? The venandi? The advenans? All the secrecy around Agent Gaul’s scent burn made me wonder how much bigger than just sex our arrangement really was.

I wasn’t offering for your sake…

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,”

I said, rubbing the space between my thumb and forefinger with my other hand. My mind was restless, not fond of problems I couldn’t solve.

Xata’s arm vibrated. We both looked at it and she stood up, silencing the notification.

“Don’t be. We don’t choose our nature. We don’t choose our assignments either. I’ve got your back on Piaoguo.”

“You mean you’ve got Agent Gaul’s back,”

I clarified.

She smirked.

“That’s right. Be good to him, Charlie, or when this is over, maybe I really will see how long you can hold your breath out there.”

Xata backed out into the hallway with a bounce in her step and waved with her fingers as the door slid shut.