Turin, radji Cradle ecologist.
Date [standardised human time]: February 19th, 2117
(19 years, 6 months before the invasion of the radji Cradle).
Some days, Turin had found, you just cannot catch a lizard. It would have been somewhat understandable if these were wild lizards, who were faster and wilier than she was, and she were a young girl inexperienced at the game of reptile wrangling. But these lizards—or rather, this one lizard—was not wild. He was in fact hand-reared by her, the supposed expert, who’s young, lizard chasing days were meant to be long behind her.
Yet here she was, scrambling through the forest undergrowth with splinters in her nailbeds and leaves caught in her fur.
“Boubou you rascal, get back here!” she panted as she snatched for him. The animal paid her no mind, his dark brown tail vanishing into the leaf litter. The scant dappled light filtering through the Brackwood’s high canopy splashed across the dropped leaves, Turin sending her arm in after him. The reptile burst out of his cover, his little legs splaying out as he darted across the hard packed dirt. Turin leapt to her feet, trying to recall why she had released the damnable animal.
Shadow monitors were a rare sight nowadays. They were so named as their squat, ragged outline supposedly resembled the overall silhouette of a radji child. According to popular myth, this was to lure in unsuspecting infants. Between this story and their predatory nature, they became regular sport for bodger-men, bounty-hunters, and the governmental exterminators. A shame, given that the reptiles were important little pest controllers themselves. Where possible, Turin and her partner Braq paid locals off to ship them, as well as the abundant stray and quasi-pet vexise, into their care.
The long-held plan was to use monitors like Boubou to try and control the population of stiplets that had been plaguing the lower foothills. The opportunity to explore live predator-prey population dynamics was cutting edge stuff, at least to them. It was a shame that neither the reptiles nor the introduced vexise were currently numerous enough to be put to work. Braq had been dedicated to establishing a breeding population, and whilst their numbers were up to eighty-seven individuals, they had run into an unexpected problem. None of the first generations of hatchlings were hunting anything. Boubou was one such hatchling and seemed to favour anything from fruit he could not swallow, to cutlery, to pieces of straw. It was maddening. Turin would have thought him stupid were it not for the fact that every other monitor was the same way. She had thought that perhaps it was the enclosures, and that feeding them in their habitat might prove more fruitful. At least that was the notion, until he had bolted.
Of course, none of that would matter for this one monitor once she got her paws on it; this animal was definitely endangered.
Turin chased the little reptile downhill, brushing aside thorny shrubs lest she loose him in the thicket. Scattering leaves betrayed her quarry’s path, the monitor hastily making for lower ground. His flight drew him out into the open, the treeline quickly giving way to a stony channel. It was always deceptive how fast so small a thing could move. A stumbling dive for his scaley tail was thwarted by a sudden change of course, Turin’s claws scratching against rounded pebbles. Cursing the reptile, she was suddenly greeted by the sound of a light ambient roar. Ahead, small boulders, their surfaces coarse and crystalline crowded the rapidly approaching embankment. Beyond it was the river.
Shit.
Panting heavily, Turin sprinted up the incline in time to see the monitor scurry up the nearest boulder. She leapt up after it, narrowly avoiding plummeting headfirst into the river beyond. She righted herself, the crash of the white and foaming water a mere step away. Boubou had nowhere to go. Person and animal shared a prolonged glare at one another, each almost daring the other to move.
“Don’t you-!“ The lizard turned for the water. Turin’s paw darted out, unbalancing her. She fell heavily against the rock, her jaw and cheek crashing painfully against stone. Her other paw went out, the claws grinding against granite as they attempted to find purchase, just managing to stop her from tumbling into the current. She lay on her front with one arm over the rocks edge. Groaning, she pulled the wriggling monitor in her grip out from over the water.
“Ow…” she moaned, grit sticking to her face as she sat herself up. She wiped her mouth with the back of her free paw, her knuckles smearing blue with blood. Lucky I didn’t knock any teeth out, she thought, running her tongue along her molars. She held the still struggling Boubou up to her eye. “Idiot,” she huffed. The reptile just blinked at her. Keeping a firm grip on him this time, she staggered back the way she came. The carry cage was where she had left it, kicked over and discarded in the soft brown earth. She righted it, and hastily thrust him inside.
“Hopefully all that running around gives you an appetite,” Turin grunted, double checking the latch. She stood, stretching out her back, and glancing up at the sky. Kay-ut’s pyre had passed its zenith she noticed. Rubbing her bruising face, Turin picked up the case and started for home.
A high wind was gently licking its way through the trees, carrying a light chill from the distant coast to the west. Turin shuddered beneath her overalls, wishing for thicker fur. Though the day was bright and clear, all that light barely touched the forest floor. Turin hastened her pace, taking satisfaction in the muted crunch of discarded bark and sodden roots across the trail. To many radji, this place was untamed and hostile. Most had withdrawn from rural life, retreating to great monolithic metropolises to earn livings more comfortable and lavish. Whilst those who worked in agriculture were rewarded handsomely for their crops, those who lived remotely were considered akin to hermits, as backward people who could not make it in the big city. But Turin could not care less about big cities as she tried to blow some warmth into her numbing paws.
After all, this was what they had come here for.
Turin and her partner Braq were ecologists, some of the only field ecologists still employed by the radji government and were tasked with the maintenance of the Brackwood Estate. “Estate,” was a funny way of saying, “wilderness,” to Turin, but it was also a very straightforward way of saying, “piss off.” The pair had earned some esteem in their work on ecosystem management, working in the upper branches of the agricultural sector. It was difficult work, mostly concerned with managing quotas, commitments, and the dreaded face-to-face meetings. Yet they struggled through it, if for nothing else than paying the bills and enjoying each other’s company. But just as their careers were looking promising, they began experimenting with augmenting standard farming procedures with small numbers of predators. When they had published their findings on trophic interactions between organisms in the same ecosystem, they were met with backlash, and accused of sympathising with radical ideologies. The resulting trip from law enforcement had not been particularly charitable. A few months afterward their funding was cut, and they were reassigned to “more important work.”
The funny thing was, it was more important work. When the pair had moved into the dilapidated set of walls generously called a house, there was just shy of twenty thousand hectares of forests, streams, mountains, and coastline to manage, the largest single area of unspoiled nature left on the Cradle. Turin remembered how Braq had been beside himself when he saw the pictures on the holo-feed.
“Tullipets?!” he had squealed like a boy. “Those haven’t been seen anywhere on the southern hemisphere for decades! Oh, and three species of carnivore?! How can they tolerate being in the same space as each other? Does the government even know?! There’s even a freshwater lake on the coast?! I suppose that must make it some kind of lagoon…”
It had been a wonderful few years, cataloguing as much of the flora and fauna as they could, it seemed to carry on without end. The thought that they had not even moved a pawful from the hill was bittersweet one. Now they had lost three thousand of those hectares to agricultural land and had narrowly fought off petitions to buy up even more. What secrets great and small have been lost? Turin shook her head of the thought, closing her eyes to take in a lungful of cool forest air.
As she made her way, the high canopy of rip-bark trees slowly parted and there, in a sloping valley of yellow frond-like grasses and rickety old wood and wire fences, stood their home.
The lodge had been built in the traditional subterranean style sometime in the age of Turin’s grandparents and was in desperate need of a thorough digging out. It had clearly been renovated from a small shack into a more functional hideaway, an escape from the everyday drag of the city. A series of intersecting passages and sunken chambers had been carved by hide and claw into the rock, reinforced with carefully carved wood from locally sourced rip-bark trees, and plastered with clays from the nearby stream. Two sets of double layered wood created the front and back doors, front and back being relative terms when your home was mostly underground of course. It had running water, generators, and a rather spacious bathing room at its heart. The builders had also decided to include a trio of glass windows that sat on the northern, western, and southern sides of the structure, a rather costly arrangement in their day.
Beyond the forest’s vast shadow, the sun was lathering the ice-capped mountains in its warm gaze, and the rip-bark, berran, and merryling trees were soaking it all up. Sitting beneath it all, Turin mused, the lodge looked like an idyllic little plot with its carved wood jutting from beneath a mound of mud and bluegrass, as a small clay and stone chimney puffed out smoke in the cool afternoon air. But the clay was splitting, and the wood was splintered. The windows rattled, and the chimney had the habit of blowing smoke into the home when the wind roared down the mountain slopes. But this sagging testament to carpentry was now not just their home, but also the nerve centre of the largest effort to maintain the native ecology of the radji Cradle. Maternity
Boasting a whole two employees, a single high-range all-terrain buggy, an intermittent DataNet connection, three actual nets, a few small enclosures and incubators, a web of cameras of different makes and quality, and more books and maps in one square unit than most working radji saw in their entire adult lives. Oh, and one unit of a two-way radio, the other member of which had been lost down the rapids three years prior.
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The sun was at her back as Turin kicked the muck from her feet and trundled inside. The living room was as she had left it. Various books were escaping the nearby shelf to join digital tablets, graphing paper, and some sealed plastic containers occupying a large wooden table. Many lay open to specific passages or diagrams, a few littering the carpet. Pushing aside the clutter, Turin found a spot to set down the reptile, Boubou hissing lightly as his confine rattled. She flicked open the blinds and looked about the room. The nearby couch, low and worn from years of backsides, had also not escaped the chaos; a map of the region stained with crescents of tea lay across it, the drinking table holding unwashed mugs that had never made it to the sink. Not that there would have been much room in the basin, a cursory glance at the adjoining kitchen told her. Last night’s meal still encrusted the pots and pans, the kettle was empty, and the withering stem of evermind by the windowsill was holding onto the last strands of life.
Sighing at the sight, Turin turned back to the table. Opening two containers she retrieved a piece of shoko fruit and a crunchy piece of dried predator kibble. Her snout wrinkled at the sliver in her paw. The feed was not actual flesh, but it still had the revolting odour and texture of meat. She held them both up to the reptile watching through the bars.
“Right,” she murmured, “shall we try this again?” Careful to not let him escape anew, she dropped the two morsels into the cage. The reptile just looked at them. Turin groaned, wincing as she rubbed her bruised face.
The roar of the buggy in the distance announced Braq’s return, a glance out the window showing a plume of dust approaching. Reaching into the cage, Turin retrieved Boubou attempting to swallow the whole piece of fruit three times the size of his head. Well… at least he’s got an appetite… That was unfortunately all he could manage, and she had to detach him before he hurt himself. Sighing at the non-predator in her paws, Turin walked him outside past the individually occupied pens of his compatriots, before stopping outside Boubou’s.
“I confess you’ve bested me today little guy,” she said as she held him up to her eyes. “Promise me you’ll do better tomorrow?” Boubou deigned to tongue an eye at her. Turin dropped him into his pen and, wiping her paws against her overalls, headed back inside.
Absently she gathered the discarded mugs from the table, depositing them beside the sink. She paced around the living room, glancing out the window at her husband as he disembarked the buggy, fetched something from the backseat and headed for the door. Braq was a handsome radji, in a rugged, thorny kind of way. His paws were never clean, and he was older than he had been, but his scrappy brown fur and worn quills were stretched over a wide muscular frame. He even hurts to look at.
Turin turned her back as he shouldered through the door.
Braq stopped short as he entered the living room and clucked through his teeth.
“Someone’s been busy,” he remarked, a light chuckle rumbling from him. Turin did not turn around. She nodded absently and set about prodding some life into the fireplace. The clay and hardwood mantlepiece was decorated—more so littered—with an assortment of curios. Rocks and minerals, a few fossils on pedestals, some rare flora held in resin stasis, the usual detritus accumulated by curious minds. The photographs framed there were of their younger years, relics of a different kind.
Her partner persisted, setting a freshly bought bucket of animal kibble onto the floor, and carefully placing a blue fabric sack onto the table. He reached down and plucked up one of several books laid around the tables.
“Hmm… Gryad’s ‘Notes on predator behaviour.’ Thrilling. I take it you’re trying to coax our little friends into being a bit more…” The fire was producing little more than embers.
“Predatory. Active. Useful. Take your pick.” Turin sighed, turning to look at him. “At this rate they’ll all have starved before we can put them to use.” Her partner did a double take.
“Kay-ut, what happened to you?” he asked. Turin looked down at herself. Dirt had encrusted the fabric around her knees and the fur of her forearms. No doubt her mane and pelt would all be askew.
“Little shit scarpered,” she grumbled. Braq leaned close, reaching out to tenderly turn her jaw.
“And you ran into a tree?” he murmured. Her cheek stung where his thumb rubbed against it. She brushed his paw away.
“Something like that,” she grunted, taking the book from her partner’s claws. Turin started clearing the table. “Didn’t help neither,” she muttered, gesturing about with a book. “Sometimes I think they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”
“If what we were doing was simple someone would have done it already.”
“Yeah well,” she said, “something’s gotta change soon.” Braq was wearing that same exhausted expression, the kind he only wore when he was trying to hide how tired he really was.
“Well, at least they’re breeding,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Turin bristled. Braq grimaced and gestured to a bag of animal feed on the table.
“The vexise,” he said. Oh. They both stood in awkward silence for a few moments. “I’m sorry.” His voice was soft. “I didn’t mean it like that.” Turin nodded and bent over to start picking up the books spread across the carpet. Braq squatted down to help her. “Have you tried Barudama’s ‘Methods and monitoring of predators in containment’?” he asked.
“Barudama got results I grant you…”
“…but what he did shouldn’t have passed the ethics board, fair enough,” Braq finished, his features drawn in thought. “Well, what about Flint’s ‘The History of Non-Sapient Predators’?”
“It’s right here,” she said, digging through the pile. “They had some success with reintroduction, but they all seemed to just… get on with it? There’s no record of anything like–“
RIP! Picking the book up by the corner, she’d torn a page.
“Oh… shit!” she exclaimed. Exasperated, Turin examined the damage before slamming shut Flint’s work and bashing it against her forehead. Gingerly, Braq reached over and took the book from her, pulling her up into a warm embrace. For a few short moments she forgot it all, the “Estate”, the bodger-men, the ecosystem they had fought so hard for. The family they could not build.
“Hey,” he murmured to her. “Let me have a look at that lip.” Braq shifted the map from the couch, rolling it up with one paw. Turin begrudgingly sat as he disappeared into the hallway that led into the deeper bowels of their dwelling. He returned with a bowl of hot water and some disinfectant. The warmth helped little to lessen the sting, but it was nice regardless.
“Hrn…” Braq grunted, dabbing at her face gently.
“What?”
“At least you didn’t land on your pretty side,” he said. She snorted at him, rolling her eyes. He smiled at her, but she saw the furtive glance, the shake at the corner of his mouth. Braq pulled the towel back, folding it idly.
“Sorry,” he said softly. “About before… I didn’t mean anything by it. I just… say things sometimes…”
“I know,” she whispered, resting her paw on his knee. “It’s part of your charm.”
“Oh, I have charm do I?” He put on that silly pretentious face, the one that made her laugh.
“On occasion.” She smiled at him, but her expression dropped. “Look… we’ll find a way to get the monitors working, I know we will. Just… don’t let me get you down.” Braq folded away the first aid supplies.
“You never get me down, beloved,” he murmured. “Never.” Leaning forward, he kissed her. A moment later he pulled back, grimacing at the taste of the disinfectant.
“How was that?” Turin sniggered. He smacked his lips.
“Not the best,” he admitted, making her chuckle. He laughed too, looking at her for a long moment. “I’ve got a surprise for you,” Braq said.
As he pulled a pair of chairs up to either side of the table, Turin took a closer look at the strange blue sack. It was made of a simple but soft fabric, and clearly contained a large, round object. Turin looked at her partner quizzically, who simply gestured at the bag.
“Gently,” was all he said.
Turin carefully pulled the bag towards herself and reached inside. The object within was not quite perfectly round, instead being ovoid, elliptical. Nor was it perfectly smooth to her touch but covered in small bumps across its surface. It was also, strangely, slightly warm. What is this? Pulling the object from the bag, Turin found that she was holding the largest, bluest egg she had ever seen. It was a little smaller than her fist, fitting snugly in her hands. Gods, it’s beautiful.
“Woah,” she whispered. Braq nodded, a happy little expression on his face. Damn him.
“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?” he said. It was indeed. Careful not to turn it, she explored its surface gently beneath her fingers. It isn’t just a matte blue, but glossy! And it blends to dark green towards its edges…
“Where did you get it?” she asked. “No wait! If I were to guess that a certain kleptomaniac was involved?” Braq snorted, trying and failing to look innocent.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said with a smile, quickly dropping the bit. “Okay, yes it was Dirk. He had no idea what it belonged to; said he’d found it in a mound on one of the colony worlds.”
Dirk was an old friend of Braq’s, an iridian who earned a living off selling a wide range of merchandise to anyone and everyone. He was only in-system every so often but had provided the lodge with some much-needed predator feed and had helped put together their camera array. He had even sold them with a small hydrogenator to run the electricity. It also was not the first time the iridian’s kleptomania had rubbed off on Braq, and he had brought home some new and doubtless expensive trinket.
Her beloved was, of course, almost bouncing in his seat.
“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go get it cooking!”
Shaking her head Turin stood from the table, and they began to the incubation chamber. One benefit of living underground was that the cold was only felt in the dead of winter. This made for comfortable nights, and plenty of space to dig out adjacent rooms, even if the low ventilation made it somewhat musty.
“Why would you buy this when we have no idea what it is?” Turin asked. “It’s most definitely not native to the Cradle, so how could we care for it? What would we do with it?” Braq merely rolled his wonderful shoulders into a shrug as they walked. The soft amber light from the lamps on his left buzzed gently to life and cast his features in intermittent pools of orange-yellow light.
“I thought you’d like it,” he mumbled. Oh, don’t ruin a good thing.
“Look, beloved, I know you meant well by this but we both know it isn’t just that. You know I’m not big on gift giving. Let’s not pretend this was about me.”
“Am I so easy to read?” he asked.
“I’d be a poor partner if I didn’t know my husband.”
Braq looked at her with no small amount of warmth as they turned left into the chamber. The flickering amber joined them a moment later and lit the small room. Along one wall were the three incubators, all different makes and sizes. Only one was presently occupied by a trio of small, mottled pink kuru eggs. The space also served as storage. Five and a half pairs of shoes filled a rack in one corner, alongside a broken dingy; it had gone the same way as the radio unit.
“I don’t know why,” Braq decided as he powered up an empty incubator. The lights dimmed for a moment as the power board adapted to the new load. “It was just left there, until Dirk found it… all alone. I guess it called to me.” Turin was a little taken aback. She considered the little blue oval in her paws. Stepping toward him, she pulled his face down to her and nuzzled him gently. I must be getting old and sentimental, she thought, to love such a silly man.
“In that case then, softy…” Turin teased, handing him the egg. “You can sit on it.”
Braq smiled coyly down at her and delicately placed his charge into the incubator.
“Well, I guess the colony worlds are all in the habitual zone, so I’ll set it for galactic standard and see what happens.”
“Ecologist of the year…” Turin quipped as she took Braq by the paws and pulled him towards their chambers.
“Ha ha,” he laughed sarcastically. “Just you wait. I’m about to knock you on your pelt!”
The orange lights dimmed as they passed, leaving the egg to darkness.
---
“Something old,
Something new.
Something borrowed,
Something blue.”
– Traditional English wedding proverb.