“Tell me about it,” Cassel sighed.
Felina spotted Calloway grab a seat to Loudon’s right, who gave him a firm and respective nod. He caressed and cradled his PDA as if it were a brick of gold. At his right sat Brennan, eyes shut and head back, lips muttering without a voice. To Baez’s left, with one seat between them, sat Boyd and Nakamura, no words among them. Left of Nakamura was a teary-cheeked Lawrence Wincott, whose jaws appeared clenched tighter than Landham’s fists during his death.
The Samum jolted and Mitchell announced their umbilical disconnection thanks to Brennan’s manual override.
“And we’re off,” Mitchell’s voice said wearily via the intercom. “Next stop, Dingir and in due time, home sweet home.”
The notion of returning to Earth intact and healthy—psychosis and endlessly bad dreams aside—was immensely comforting. Felina already felt anvils lift from her shoulders, and a distant wind foreign to zero-gravity grace her neck.
As the Samum gained flight, Amila Djevojka belatedly put herself in a passenger’s seat, between Kosa Bomani at her left—nearest the cockpit starboard of the shuttle—and Connell at her right.
Contrary to any other disembarking from a perilous environment, there was no cheering or candid celebration. What ensued, as the shuttle returned to its celestial home-away-from-home, was a quilt of heavy silence. Felina tacitly interpreted it as a reverent moment for the dead and an acknowledgment of the debacle’s resolution.
Freedom, but with a price tag covered in blood, etched with the names of defenseless men and women, not without the lives lost helping to promote the survival of others.
Days earlier, Felina Sabartinelli could recollect all the specifications and details of the Manticore as a technical vessel, but now it was no more than a hearse en route to its just end.
Via the manifest in her mind, she recalled not only the names but the identities of those lost. Their faces, healthy and filled with verve, no matter how misplaced it turned out to be.
Meanwhile her eyes affixed to the Virtual Periscope as the Samum put increasing distance between it and USRD’s greatest vessel ever created. Felina watched with bittersweet contentment as the Manticore auto-piloted itself into a speck of the cosmos.
Through all the funding and dedication, it had become yet another slowly dying star amid the vast unknown.
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