Page 3 of Defiance (The Intersolar Union #7)

Renata, Yaspur, Mandaahl System.

The steaming heat of the jungle was always milder on the banks of the Saphed River.

It was the hardest part about acclimating to life outside of Ireland. Wouldn’t have mattered if I was in Miami, Florida or an alien jungle moon, which happened to be exactly where I’d been parked for the last… year? Hard to tell, and the humidity didn’t care either. It turned my sandy strawberry hair into a tangle worse than old fishing nets, and that tiny bastard sun called forth forty-three years of age spots and freckles like I’d fallen into a sack of cinnamon.

And it still rained every bloody day. The absolute cheek of it.

It was sunny now, though, so I reclined against the strappy back of the lounge chair I’d ordered off the holomarket last month with a satisfied sigh like a tom cat sunning on a rubbish bin. Made for the muddy banks and marshes of Dharatee, the chair was “sink-proof, rust-proof, and won’t singe your stripes after a long day in the sun!”

I’d been skeptical, but the adverts didn’t lie. I could leave it out in the sun, slide off my waders, and sit down on my bare butt without sizzling my bacon or sinking into the black clay. I rapt my knuckles against the lower armrest—it had four—and wondered again how it stayed cool and floating. But like duct tape, it was one of those masterful strokes of applied science (applied magic?) that you just accepted as superior to any alternative.

Anyway, I was an aquaculturist, not an alien engineer, so the answers would definitely soar over my head.

My holotab’s timer buzzed against my thumb, cutting my relaxing interlude short. I sighed and stood up with a rubbery creak. I’d left my waders on so that I wouldn’t get clay on the inside and have to hose them out later, but I’d turned into a sweaty mess as a result. I couldn’t get back out in the water fast enough.

I opened a new voice log and made sure the holographic blue spectrogram hovering above my forearm was capturing sound. The software would automatically cut out any embarrassing grunts, coughs, or sniffs, and shorten the time between speech while transcribing, so I could just let it run.

“It’s half past fourteenth turn now,”

I confirmed, looking at the side of my index finger, where the time glowed as my boots sank into the sediment and I trudged forward with sloppy, vacuous glop sounds.

“Weather’s eight degrees warmer than the high yesterday. Safe to say it’s a heat wave.”

I continued to rattle off the temps and stats for the afternoon just like I'd done in the morning while collecting sediment and water samples. I’d placed sensors half a kilometer up the river, half a kilometer down, and interspersed in between. Oxygen levels, pH, temperature, conductivity, sediment concentration. I confirmed water clarity and erosion by sight and noted little swimmers that darted around my knees as I waded deeper.

The waders scrunched in around my legs like I was sous vide, and I breathed a sigh of relief at the chilly press of water all around me. I wasn’t above taking an ice bath if it got any hotter.

“That hits the spot,”

I groaned, splashing water over my neck and hairline.

Then I did what I always did. I stopped, turned towards the cliffs, and absorbed the stunning view.

Renata was situated high above the Saphed River, which had carved its serpentine footprint into the soft clay for centuries before the shilpakaari agreed to host us human refugees and plonked three shiny home towers into their remote backyard. The deep ravine through which it ran had probably once been a hill that extended our playfield, where I could hear kids screaming as they played football and frisbee.

Apparently, the cliffs that time and water had whittled away also made the perfect spot for a hangar that serviced glorified delivery hover-trucks.

The colony’s hangar hung arse-first over the edge of the highest cliff, where the red and purple jungle foliage had been cleared away by dozens of meters on all sides. As far as eyesores went, it was a nostalgic sort, with corrugated domed ceilings and big flat doors on sliders. The platform that overhung the river was blasted with black exhaust from hundreds of skilled landings.

And right underneath that platform was a beautiful waterfall.

Exhaust dissolution? Problematic. I'd developed an eye-twitch, but sat on my hands like a good human.

Then I found out that the beautiful waterfall was a cleverly disguised colony runoff and threw my hands up into the air with a righteous cry.

The entire reason I’d decided to do this little experiment—other than the obvious need for some project to validate my existence—was because my entire career had been dedicated to sustainable aquaculture. I couldn’t sit in my air-conditioned flat eating bon-bons while a thousand-plus humans pissed into the local habitat.

Which is basically what Chief Engineer Hunar Fareshi told me to do. The runoff was pristine, and when the time came to service the system, he’d teach me how. But right then, he was still in the throes of making sure the colony was safe and stable.

When I came back a week later, he sighed with defeat and handed me test kits to poke around with. It was hard to tell with their striped pupils, but I think he rolled his eyes and grumbled, Are you all this stubborn?

The other shilpakaar with sapphire blue skin that worked next to him had smirked and winked at me. Let’s hope so.

“Come here, my beauties,”

I grunted, pulling my boots out of the riverbed as I pushed through the water towards one of my bright green bobbers. I dunked my bare arms into the cool stream and heaved a large cage halfway out of the water.

“Three kayadrud,”

I said out loud for my voice log.

“Two are adolescents for sure. No stripes yet. One is mature. No scarring or fin damage. And their yellow bellies are bright.”

I hitched the cage up on my thigh, gently letting the kayadryd swim off.

“More algae growth,”

I murmured, scraping my blunt nails against a slippery stone I couldn’t see yet. I pulled it out of the water to find a neat cluster of bright pink mussels attached to it, sunny-side up.

“Well, you’re new, aren’t you?”

I stopped my voice log long enough to get a few snaps of the little things. They were about the size of my fingernails with marigold byssal threads that they shared like a velcro rug or a good slathering of rubber paste. Very different from mussels and barnacles on Earth.

I lost track of time as I recorded all three cages. I still saw something new every few days, which gave me a schoolgirl thrill. After two decades of working with fish farms, this was an adventure.

The only gratitude I’d extend to my abductors was a fire extinguisher to the balls, but I counted my new life on Yaspur as a blessing. I’d left behind a messy divorce, family estrangement, and a cold flat near the Clare Island ferry that might have still been packed up in cardboard boxes for all I knew.

I’d lived there for nearly two years and never unpacked.

I was ringing out a washcloth to cool the back of my neck when a comm buzzed on my thumb. Ezraji Zarabi’s profile image hovered over the back of my hand. I answered, squinting beneath the shade of my palm as the yoke-yellow sun roasted me alive.

“What’s the craic?”

I asked, only slightly out of breath. My middle-aged ears were glad I didn’t have to strain to hear over the river. The toxinologist’s voice rang in my head instead, thanks to the connection between my bionics.

“Charlie?”

Ezra sounded out of breath and scatterbrained.

“That’s meself.”

I rolled my eyes, but it was with love.

From the outside, it might seem strange for an ichthyologist to be a jack of all trades, but on a colony moon occupied by a semi-aquatic alien species with tentacles on their heads, gills for noses, and skin that lights up like a horny cuttlefish? One might say my fishy degree had many applications, least of which was picking up shifts at the clinic while Dr. Ahlberg was on bedrest with her twin pregnancy.

I hadn’t known Ezra and Amelia for long, but they had quickly become some of my favorite people.

“I need you.”

I scoffed, impervious to his rugged voice.

“Better not tell your missus that. She’ll be after having my head on a pike.”

Begrudgingly, I could admit Ezra was handsome for a glorified cephalopod—you’d have to be blind to think otherwise—but I knew too much about cephalopods to be attracted to one in the slightest. Did I want to touch every shilpakaari delegate’s head tendrils and, weirdly, tickle their gill noses? Yes, but for science. I desperately wanted to know if they had gill arches and rakers hidden in their nasal cavities, but didn’t know any of the shilpakaari well enough to ask if I could shove my finger up their nose.

“Charlie,”

he said again, this time his voice breaking.

“Amelia’s going into labor.”

My back went ramrod straight, my heart leaping into a sprint. I tried to clutch a phone to my ear out of old habit, then hugged myself instead.

“Is she okay?”

“She’s laying down and told me not to rush. Her water broke and she’s not in any pain… yet. Is that normal? She said it’s normal to feel pain. She said it like she was telling me the weather.”

I grimaced.

“Uh, yeah. Human childbirth is pure shite.”

“I don’t know what to do, syadarī. I thought I would know, but… I-I don’t.”

At the sound of the honorific for an older sister, I began the awkward dash to shore in water-logged slow-motion. My arms swung like a mime doing a boxing bit, but Ezra’s panic was much more important than my pride.

“I’m on my way. Clinic or flat?”

“Clinic. Pom Pom is here. I’m in the middle of her usual descaling.”

Ezra’s voice steadied, returning to its normal cadence at the mention of something he had control over.

“I need you to sit with her for the rest of the procedure while I…”

He trailed off. “Ezra?”

He cleared his throat, sounding bewildered and in shock.

“While I help my priya.”

“Isn’t there supposed to be a midwife coming?”

“They’re in route. A few turns away from orbit now.”

“Christ almighty, that’s cutting it close.”

I spilled out onto the bank and fell gracelessly into the mud. My knees creaked as I got to my feet and shrugged off my waders. I slopped the heap of rubber onto my chair and collapsed it shut.

“The spats will be here before she arrives, won’t they?”

Ezra asked in a daze. I could tell he was pacing, his professional ethics and primal instincts playing tug-of-war with his mental reins. He wanted to go, but he couldn’t leave Pom Pom. She was a child and knocked out cold.

Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath. My hands were shaking from the adrenaline. Ezraji’s frayed nerves were wearing on mine too. I exhaled in a whoosh and reminded myself that lots of my friends had children. One was a grandmother already. My sisters both had children too. I hadn’t been through the process, per se, but I’d been steeped in it as a little girl in a Catholic family.

“Mel will be grand,”

I told him, hoisting my chair under one strong arm and hiking up the hill back to the colony like I was climbing two steps at a time.

“The first anyone goes through this, it takes longer. If she’s resting and not in pain, it’s a long while off yet. Don’t be a stereotype, Ezra.”

“What stereotype?”

“A panicking father-to-be. I’m sure that if she was… in the thick of it, she’d be… calling you,”

I hedged. I was losing the battle with my lungs to keep breathing and talking at the same time.

“Feck’s sake. Be there… in five!”