Savage By Nature Read online

  Savage By Nature

  Jacob Russell Dring

  Copyright © 2015 by Jacob Russell Dring

  Cover art © 2015 by Janice Duke

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, restored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Therefore unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  1

  Manticore, what a strange name to give such an innocuous spacecraft. Sure, it was imposing in size and capabilities—intergalactic travel and terraforming at the top of the list, preceding its laboratory aptitudes. Felina Sabartinelli knew of the USRD Manticore’s technical specifications as much as she did its staffing. She had read the manifest like a textbook for two weeks prior to boarding the Samum shuttle and even after, her eyes scanned its details. Titles branded her brain, their associated names like a collective ball-and-chain to her memory.

  Unlike some of her present colleagues—the only fitting term despite having never met prior to this excursion—Felina was more confident with names than numbers.

  Even so, the Manticore’s personnel capacity was immense. The vessel’s physical size alone was awe-inspiring, giving Kahoolawe a run for its money. This was the common joke, at least, but realistically it was simply a fibrous-steel leviathan of the cosmos.

  The United Systems Research Division had funded the Manticore’s production as its largest and most expensive non-military creation in 2225. After a thorough year of testing and promotion, the USRD deployed the Manticore on its first voyage in July of 2226. Despite its swarming media coverage, the publicity surrounding the vessel was limited to every human on Earth, including even most USRD employees. Only those with high clearance became privy to its true mission, which was beyond basic exploration and the studying of cosmic material.

  Felina and the other nine USRD documenters aboard the Samum had been given a titillating invitation through recommendations from their individual superiors. All documenters under the global corporation that was United Systems, a multinational coalition with their hearts and minds set on the stars. All men and women of various ethnicities, origins, experiences, mindsets, and passions.

  Despite this, the latter was a contradictory variable.

  They all had a passion in gathering details, analyzing situations of human nature, science, reality, and the possibilities beyond. Their skulls were observatories and their thoughts like a million orreries trapped within, all the while bound by the obedience to law and limited by a decree of employment.

  This was their job, their income, their career.

  This was their life.

  Most of them were in their mid to late thirties, some early forties, and a few upper twenties.

  The specifics of the Manticore in addition to its crew and personnel was one web of details that Felina had on lockdown—or so she’d forced herself to believe. The Samum vessel’s details and crewmembers were not as significant to know as the Manticore’s, nor even necessary for her professional presence.

  Afterall, she and the nine other documenters had been invited then hired as per their acceptance to be shuttled out here, eventually boarding the Manticore and performing their duties during their stay. It was hardly an invitation as much as it was a tentacle around their leg, dragging them through space to be thrown aboard. Sure, they could’ve refused the invitation—but not a single one had even thought about declination.

  It was, literally, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  And to spend even a moment of it in the company of stars, solar systems not their own, and aboard the largest non-military spacecraft in existence…it was a no-brainer.

  They came willingly, avidly.

  From their respective locations on Earth they were flown to a United Systems launch site in Sydney, Australia. There they boarded the USRD Rüppell, a Class 1 Shuttle, and were launched from Earth to a low-orbit space station, the USRD Columbus. They spent two days in the Columbus to gather their bearings and tighten preparations for the voyage to another space station that would be their middleman between Earth and Manticore. They disembarked on a Class 2 Shuttle called the USRD Hermes and spent six conscious days in flight to their destination.

  Felina got acquainted with everyone, but her focus was still on the Manticore’s details while mental preparations battled theories of what awaited them aboard the vessel.

  So much was cloaked in ambiguity, it was difficult to concentrate on anything else. She detected this same sense of perplexing curiosity and enigmatic intrigue among a few other documenters, but still fewer than expected. The majority of them were awash with so much excitement that it clouded their professional perspectives and they were reduced to juvenile personalities.

  I’m stuck in space with a bunch of likeminded children, she couldn’t help but think at times.

  Friendship was a term left on Earth. There was only colleague acquaintances here. At times she wished she was clairvoyant so that she could read their thoughts and dissect their own theories about this expedition, those that didn’t have Saturn’s Rings circling their heads like a bunch of toddler mobiles. Mockery aside, she admired a handful of their light-eyed ambitions.

  Felina tried to stay detached, however, on a reasonable scale. She didn’t seek palaver to pass time, instead relying on her own thoughts and gathering sleep when she could. Her dreams were metallic and lustrous, of suns and moons not belonging to Earth’s system, of shuttles and vessels with the U-S-R-D plastered on their hulls like colossal cattle brands. She dreamt of infinite forms and papers to be filled, mailed, or filed away. She dreamt of a time before The Washington Post became a hologram service, before their cars were driven on propulsion systems. She dreamt of when she was a child, before a decade of life had passed through her veins and arteries, then of her maturity as the world around her evolved dramatically.

  Changes that had been on the verge leapt off and grew metallic fire-bred wings that carried mankind through the stars.

  When she woke, she was Felina Sabartinelli again.

  A 31-year-old USRD documenter, as she had been since she was 28, after being hired as a United Systems analyst in their military division when she turned 25. What a quarter-century birthday that had been.

  Celebrations were still held in her heart every time she woke from sleep, and now she woke to see the stars out her window, realer and brighter than any could be dreamt of.

  Felina gathered her focus, her thoughts, and her passions into one bag of interstellar marbles. She rolled them like dice but neither prayed nor betted on their outcome.

  Unlike most of the other people here with her, nor did she try to calculate the dice’s consequences or end results. There was little to document about fate and coincidence, a contradiction of belief Felina left to reality.

  What happened, happened.

  Currently Felina was happening upon a sense of boredom and mental fatigue. It had been four conscious days since their departure from Dingir, the space station located at the edge of the Solar System, en route to Manticore, which was coming from travel across the NGC 1300 galaxy—sixty-one million light-years from Earth.

  The Samum, a Class 2 shuttle they boarded from Dingir, had an ETA that was more reliant on the Manticore than themselves. According to their arrangements, the Manticore was supposed to accelerate their return to the Andromeda galaxy sooner than expected with the establishment of this new expedition.

  We’re gonna give this hunk of metal we found floating through space a name relevant to some Greek deity, Felina had
thought sarcastically, but this voyage of sending ten of our own documenters to the Manticore, well, we aren’t gonna call it anything.

  This fact aside, the expedition was supposedly a monumental event for USRD. The public was made aware of it, easing their theories about radical conspiracies regarding the Manticore.

  Felina just hoped that their return as scheduled in ten days—spent aboard the Manticore, that is—would warrant no truth to these dramatic ideas.

  Humans have quite a way about them when it comes to the unknown. They will twist and warp what little information they have to concoct absurdities for the sake of a gathering in awe, fear, or even panic.

  Anything to heighten an individual’s prominence.

  Seldom in the interest of a collective elucidation.

  This was the dream sought and, believed to be, conquered, by the United Systems.

  Felina hoped to be enlightened, or at least pleasantly clarified, once aboard the Manticore. She and the others, surely, sought the same thing—at least a portion of it.

  A particle of satisfaction versus a plague of regret.

  “We’ve made contact with Manticore, sight in five,” the copilot announced over the intercom. The Samum was a small spacecraft, Class 2 shuttle but still only half the size of a Class 1, like the Rüppell that launched them from Earth. What made it a higher Class were its ratings of interstellar travel and the addition of maneuverability, despite a lack of necessary evasion way out here. Due to its size and discus-shape, the ten passengers were seated securely along the inside hull in a U-pattern, its top space composing the cockpit. At the center of the Samum’s passenger bay, which was essentially the entirety of the shuttle excluding the ‘basement’ of its technical workings—engine, propulsion drives, fuel, wiring, oxygen reserves, the like—was its systematic turntable. A Lazy Susan not for food, but a communication array complete with hologram displays for crew and passenger statuses as well as a Virtual Periscope relaying the pilots’ view outside.

  With the copilot’s announcement in mind, Felina eagerly awaited seeing the USRD Manticore materialize on the displays. She sat starboard on the Samum, in the center of that side, so her view of the Virtual Periscope was straight on. This display was tripled so that passengers both portside and starboard could see it, as well as astern. At present it was merely the same as it had been for the past several hours—empty space. The monotonously beautiful, star-studded, black wide-open—no planets, no moons, no celestial activity.

  Just inert space.

  The opposite of inert occurred in each passenger’s chest. Their hearts thumped rapidly, like a drumroll cued for a big entrance. They anticipated the Manticore, seeing it and believing their eyes, wanting to be inside its every niche like Pygmalion and his sculpture.

  Felina absentmindedly, and thus transiently, wondered how the chief designer of the Manticore felt now that it was born immaculately and smoothly traversing the outer rim of mankind’s own galaxy.

  And then the thought was gone, because all she could conjure in her head were thoughts of awe.

  The USRD Manticore appeared on the display.

  Even via the Virtual Periscope one could perceive its colossal size. Felina’s mind raced to taste the details of its dimensions. It was a Class 4 Research Vessel, the first of its ilk when Class 3 was considered top-of-the-line as of early 2225. As such, its size and capacity were nearly fifty percent greater than its largest predecessor’s. At 13,000 feet long and 2,400 tall—nearly two and a half miles’ worth of bulkhead—its personnel capacity was rated at 105 with lodging.

  A cruise ship in space, Felina had once thought. But for exploration and research, not dancing and drinking.

  Despite this capacity, the manifest had only listed ninety-one occupants, all of them deemed essential personnel.

  Once Samum boarded, it would be 107.

  Felina recalled images of the Manticore’s personnel lodging, and how it satisfied her perception of comfort. Their rooms were neither banal nor opulent, but a reasonable in-between. Given, this excluded either of the extremes—navigators and high-ranking officials on the high end, and basic services on the low. For all she knew, or could guess, the Manticore technicians and custodians lodged in menial rooms.

  She only hoped that their visitor lodging was on par with their average personnel quarters.

  At any rate, sleeping in the company of endless space and passive stars had never been an issue for Felina. Although catching comfortable shuteye was easier aboard a space station like the Dingir than a shuttle, even a Class 2, she could still manage.

  And aboard the Manticore—it was basically a space station in constant motion, more or less.

  Shape-wise, the Class 4 Research Vessel was an architect’s dream of simplicity. It had a sleek broadsword shape, what some have called an inverted canoe influence, with subtle communications arrays and minimal protrusions. A lone weapons mount was located beneath the bow, roughly six-hundred feet from the bridge, utilized for breaking clusters of debris in emergency situations.

  Illumination wise, way out here, the vessel was an obvious object floating through space and yet without much overtness in its motion. It moved practically without moving at all, so far as the human eye could tell. Light emanating from its exterior bulkheads were few and far between, unlike most United Systems military and commercial vessels. For what little did shine, however, shined bright like white-hot burning stars. This gave the Manticore a soft blue-steel color, a duller similarity of its thrusters’ propulsion flames.

  All in all, seeing it in the flesh—essentially, albeit via the Samum’s Virtual Periscope—was more captivating than watching its launch on TV five years ago or seeing images of it in the media.

  “She’s locked us in,” the copilot announced. Felina’s focus was too dead-set on the Manticore and the anticipation of boarding it that she had temporarily forgotten his name, or the pilot’s for that matter. In an instant she had damn near forgotten her own identity. “Docking-guidance turbulence in five seconds. Samum to Manticore umbilical in two minutes.”

  A heartbeat after the copilot’s voice ended over the intercom, said turbulence kicked in. Felina pictured the pilots saying “hands off” to each other with their headsets collared, placing their palms on the ceiling and probably grinning. She didn’t recall them being particularly buoyant aviators when she and the others boarded the Samum from Dingir, but when it came to the relief of piloting their shuttle in order to occupy such an ubiquitous vessel, excitement was a given.

  And at the very least, a sense of marvel.

  Meanwhile, the Manticore’s bridge crew probably shared conflicting feelings, or so Felina imagined. Most of the larger and more famous—for lack of a better word—vessels under the United Systems coalition tended to dwarf the significance of their smaller brethren. The occupying personnel, that is.

  This elitism was borderline understandable, even to the humble Felina. But considering how they were all USRD, she ultimately figured it wouldn’t be as haughty as she initially thought. On the other hand, if the Samum was carrying civilian tourists, this high-and-mighty or at least roll-my-eyes demeanor among Manticore personnel would be more than logical.

  Not being the case now, Felina hoped for a warm welcome. Afterall, the better the Manticore received and treated them, the more likely the documenters would be lenient on their reports.

  This could potentially mean more funding, better conditions—if even applicable—and higher pay for the Manticore inhabitants. For the documenters themselves, those whose reports were reviewed highly and respectably by their collective superiors would see an immediately brighter future in their careers.

  Felina was adamant to be among those few.

  The turbulence engulfing the Samum at present wasn’t a terrible experience. Although the shuttle was a termite in comparison to the behemoth that was the Manticore, the docking-guidance was surprisingly smooth and well sustained. Eventually it evened out and the Samum connected with what
would be its new home, the invulnerable flesh to its tick.

  The shuttle rocked once more before becoming still.

  “Umbilical secure,” the copilot announced. It came back to Felina in ripples rather than waves. His name was Terry Ballard—Caucasian, lean, thin-mustached, upper twenties. He had a shallow voice in person, like a pigeon’s plumage, but over the Samum intercom it gained a baritone enhancement.

  “This is the Captain speaking,” the pilot announced. Kurt Mitchell, deep and hoarse-voiced, dark wavy shoulder-length hair, full but well-kept beard. There was a chipper tinge in his tone. “Your chariot no longer awaits. The Manticore welcomes us all. Please keep your ID card visible, and prepare for boarding. Good luck to you all. See you soon.”

  The three-man crew of the Samum were fortunate enough to have at least been invited aboard the Manticore as well, and not just for a day’s stay like most shuttles. They would have been delighted for two or three days, but ten—and paid—made them happier souls than ever on this job.

  According to typical operating procedures aboard spacecraft these days, the crew of a boarding shuttle must stay behind to secure everything after their passengers have disembarked. This could take anywhere between fifteen minutes to an hour, depending on the shuttle’s size and maintenance.

  What Felina felt strangest about this venture was the lack of luggage. Only an ID card hanging from their necks was brought with them from Earth, and a limited number of basic changeable clothes provided at the Sydney launch site were ultimately abandoned aboard Dingir. Future provisions, from attire to toiletries, would be appropriately attributed to each documenter once settled aboard the Manticore.

  Thus they carried nothing but themselves, and the emotions therein attached.

  Each documenter wore the same outfit, as last supplied on the Dingir. It was a basic USRD visitor’s uniform, matching navy top and bottom, long sleeved polo with slacks.

  Felina fell in line after everybody had stood from their seats, gradually reorienting as the Samum’s passenger bay door opened with a pneumatic hiss to expose the Manticore’s umbilical bridge.