Page 7 of Defiance
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,syadari.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 mypriya.”
“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!”
03
“Welcome back, brother!”
Vin’s voice boomed, cutting through the crackling whir of the trans-atmo vessel as it jettisoned its heat. Novak breathed a lungful of fresh air for the first time in a sol and would have withered to the tarmac in relief if not for the elderly yiwreni woman he was assisting down the gangplank. Their kind usually experienced vertigo on new planets.
“Good to be back,” he called truthfully.
Being on theTidusfor a sol had been torture. Half the crew was shilpakaari women–including Commander Xata–and their pheromones leeched his senses. He was swallowing so much of his own venom that he felt tipsy and tingly, on the verge of making catastrophic decisions while holed up in a floating tin can with dozens of curious women that subsisted on bravado, sparring, and cosmetic oils. Xata’s team was no better than a crew of pirates, fighting and fucking their way to victory.
But the female-tainted recycled air of theTiduswasn’t nearly as potent as the anticipation of setting foot on Renatan soil again. Novak breathed in deep, greedily gulping down the strong sting of plasma. Because once it dissipated…
Vin ran up and clapped his shoulder with a wide venandi grin, his massive chest vibrating like an engine beneath his black shirt. Novak bumped his brother’s head and they both snapped their teeth at each other. They’d taken to secret handshakes and greetings in their youth, both orphans in a HIXBS lab thatchewed up their childhoods and spit them out to face the world. The habit lingered into adulthood, making Novak smirk.
Ezraji Zarabi, looking and smelling like he hadn’t slept in two days, wasn’t far behind the others. His scent was astringent with a hint of human sweat. His tabard was on backwards, and his tendrils writhed over his shoulders in a jittery tangle. He swallowed hard, jaw clenched, and nodded his head to Novak before immediately approaching the yiwreni doctor.
