Instinct: A Dark Sci-Fi Romance Read online

  Instinct

  By

  Loki Renard

  Copyright © 2019 by Stormy Night Publications and Loki Renard

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Stormy Night Publications and Design, LLC.

  www.StormyNightPublications.com

  Renard, Loki

  Instinct

  Cover Design by Korey Mae Johnson

  Images by Dreamstime/Alexandr Yurtchenko and iStock/MATJAZ SLANIC

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

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  Prologue

  Zion

  She wriggles and writhes beneath me, her eyes lit with rebellion, her lips set in a snarling sneer. Her wet sex is ready for mating, but she does not seem to understand what she is in need of. Her innocence and inexperience make her foolish in so many ways.

  I have never met a female like this, one who so boldly defies the touch of a male. Women have resisted me before, refused to lift their hips when ordered, failed to present their pussies for my cock. I punished them with a swift whipping. A female who will not be willingly bred must be disciplined until her cunt drips with need.

  This one did much more than merely resist me. This one attacked me. This one took my consciousness—only for a few moments, but the damage was done. She must be taught her place. She must learn to yield with grace. And she must learn not to shriek her head off when being rightfully punished.

  I have claimed every adult female in the village as is my duty. Now I will claim this one. No female enters my territory without feeling my cock inside her. No woman leaves without being filled to the brim with my seed. It is tradition and it is duty and it is honor.

  She wriggles in my grasp, not submitting to my touch, not learning the lesson I intend to teach. Her words are jabbered and shrill, commanding, as if she has the right to give me orders. She should be soft in my hands. She should know to lower her eyes and her voice. She should bow her head, spread her knees. She should offer herself to me in submission.

  Instead, she bucks and stamps and shouts and earns herself slap after slap, not seeming to understand that the ongoing discipline indicates that her behavior is still incorrect. Most creatures know how to yield to a male’s touch. This one seems innocent to the ways of her own body.

  She is short. She only comes up to my chest. She is covered in a wrapping that shows me the shape of her body. Full breasts, wide hips. She will do well in birth and she will be mine.

  Chapter One

  Tselia Icaria

  Earth Year 10,442 CE

  “You’re not going to interfere with this planet. No matter what. Tselia. Repeat after me.”

  It sounds like the Patron is right here next to me, though in truth he is speaking in low, slow tones over the holotalk system. He is in Andromeda Delta, a little over three lightyears away. I have taken a hard left past Zubenelgenubi, and am skimming my way toward a little planet on the outskirts of Ophiuchus.

  “Tselia?” He prompts me when I don’t immediately reply.

  “I am not going to interfere, no matter what, I promise.” I roll my eyes. He can’t see me like I can see him, and that is a very good thing. If he detected any attitude at all, I’d be recalled so fast my head would spin.

  His warnings are unnecessary. I know what the protocols are. But you leap into one tiny little armed conflict and the exploration league puts you on probation for the rest of your natural born life.

  My people have been mapping and cataloging the conscious contents of the solar system for well over a thousand years now, and we’ve barely made a dent in it. Turns out, there’s all sorts of weirdness in creation, but it all follows more or less the same rules: eat stuff, fuck stuff—except for plants. I’ve never trusted plants, and I’m not about to start now.

  “You will find this a challenging assignment,” he continues.

  That’s not likely to be true. It does have some potential to be interesting, but we both know I am being punished for what happened the last time I made contact with a sentient species. I’d put money on it that they’re not going to allow me near another civilization for the rest of my career. I’m basically being posted to watch grass grow.

  It’s going to be a lonely assignment, but I’m ready for that. All explorers are temperament tested. We have to be able to withstand solitude, the true curse of the stars.

  “I don’t need to remind you that this is your last chance,” the Patron says. “If you breach protocol, you will be terminated and returned to Primary Colony Gamma. I recommend you stay inside your craft unless in case of extreme emergency.”

  I do not want that. Primary Colony Gamma is basically a rock with most of the colony in stasis pods. Depending on what the council decides for me, I’d either end up inside one, or cleaning them out when one malfunctions and the unfortunate occupant passes on as a result. The unthawing process has to be as carefully handled as the freeze. If a pod malfunctions, you don’t get a revived person. You get human soup all over the deck.

  “You’ll be in orbit around Hades Exile soon,” the Patron continues, repeating the briefing he gave me three months ago when I set off after the disciplinary hearing. “We expect the length of your observation period to be three years as determined by the solar cycle of this particular planet. I don’t need to remind you that breaching the atmosphere will be grounds for immediate recall. If you do encounter life, report it immediately.”

  “Immediately? You want an urgent report if I find a frog or something?”

  I hear him sigh. “There is a small chance of human life on this planet. If there is, you will be reassigned. We don’t want a repeat of the last set of events, do we?”

  I bite my lower lip. Yeah. There it is. If there is anything interesting to see, they don’t want me to see it. They want to bore me out of existence, that’s what they want.

  “Alright, sounds good. See you in three years then.”

  His stern tone softens a hint. “Be good, Tselia.”

  With that, the connection is severed. I am alone. Properly alone.

  “Bye, Dad.” I wait until he can’t hear me to say my goodbyes. He prefers I think of him as the Patron, just like everyone else. Can’t have him showing me favoritism, even though he already has a dozen times. Anyone else would be a pod person by now. I’ve been given chance after chance. I hope I don’t mess this one up.

  The last couple hours of my journey tick by uneventfully. My ship seems to hang in dark space, and it’s as if I don’t even move as a big gold and blue ball slowly rolls toward me, a massive marble that swallows the sky until my ship is caught in the outer tendrils of the gravity field.

  I’m in awe. Slipping up to a new planet is al
ways an incredible moment. No two are the same. Most of them are hostile to life, but every now and then you find a place like this, somewhere the rules for existence have been followed. Not too hot. Not too cold. Carbon dominant. Beautiful.

  They call this planet Hades Exile. It’s not a fitting name for a paradise planet. There are plenty of places where the surface boils at millions of degrees kelvin, where the air is pure sulfur, where nothing has ever been able to bloom into existence.

  Places like this are rare, and evoke a yearning deep in my soul. This is the world as it once was, I imagine. This is how our genesis planet, Earth must have looked when it was still pure.

  I give myself a few moments just to take it all in. Emotion is welling in me, excitement, joy, hope. The brief of this planet is an interesting one. A very long time ago, humans landed here. It was an accident and they were not expected to have survived, but if there’s still a trace of them, I will find it.

  But I must be careful. My last assignment was a raging disaster. I was assigned to observe a small colony of semi-sentient four-legged beasts known as the Furri. Nobody prepared me for how incredibly cute they were. Of course, I went down to the surface of the planet and I happened across what seemed to me to be an orphaned baby. It was small enough to fit in my hands and when I picked it up it made the most adorable sounds and nuzzled into me. I knew I couldn’t keep it but when I put it down, it followed me back to my shuttle. Protocol said I needed to put it back out, but night was falling and the weather was bad and the little guy was having so much fun chewing on the wiring, I let him stay.

  There was no way I could know what would happen next.

  Unbeknownst to me, the pup I was playing with up on the ship was the firstborn son of an alpha. The beasts were separated into two main tribes. When the pup was discovered to be missing, the other tribe was blamed. War sparked within an hour. A bloody and brutal conflict that I could not stop even when I returned the pup. The killing had begun and the losses were too great for either side to forgive again.

  War raged across the world for forty days and forty nights, nearly wiping out both sects of the species. In the end, only ten percent of the original population remained. I had inadvertently caused mass suffering, and forever changed the history of the planet.

  I was recalled to the Patron and the council and severely censured. It was a misery for me and a complete humiliation for him. My guilt ate at me to the extent I asked to be put into stasis. I didn’t deserve to be among the exploration crews, but my father refused.

  I have been exiled, sent as far away as possible, once more left to resist the intrigue of a wild new world on my own. I will be much more careful this time. I will not allow my presence to bring suffering down on whatever life might exist below.

  I hope I can get some useful information, impress the Patron and his council with not just my observations and discoveries, but interpretations. Raw data means nothing. It has to tell a story. Some of the best explorers didn’t really see anything. They just tore meaning from chaos, reassured those who keep our species in stasis that it was worthwhile to keep doing so. When most of your population is on ice, things can start feeling a bit meaningless.

  I am one of the very few who get to see, to search, to bring home knowledge. It’s a privilege, and in spite of what the Patron thinks, I haven’t forgotten that.

  I move to the observation deck and sit down in the comfiest chair in the ship. It has to be. I’m going to spend many, many hours here just watching the world below unfold.

  Once comfortable, I set about calibrating the instruments. They’re incredibly sensitive, and even from a relatively high orbit, they can pick out lifeforms on a broad taxonomic level. I might not be able to tell from here if there are humans, which there very likely aren’t. But I will probably be able to tell if there are mammals in the same order.

  A planet, any planet with life, is a gene swarm. When the instruments first lock on, they find a buzzing confusion of data that takes hours and hours to sort into discrete lifeforms.

  That’s why I turn the cameras on and that’s why I like to look. A human eye and mind can perform that task in a fraction of the time. We generally know when we’re looking at something that is or has been alive.

  My stomach growls, so I grab some noodles from the ration generator, and settle back down. This is a punishment, to be sure, but an exciting one. I am sure the Patron is interested in what I am able to gather here. If I send back some decent reports, I might even be allowed back to Base Eden, the place where I grew up, sometime in the next century.

  I hit buttons, put the camera feeds up on the big screen in front of me. Out the window, I see the mass of it, the edge tapering into darkness.

  The cameras reveal a beautiful planet. Its land mass is largely one big continent, with several smaller islands at the verge. The sea level is fairly low, no more than ten thousand feet in any given part. Unlikely to be home to leviathan creatures then. But the lands, they are a different matter. There are multiple large inland lakes where I focus my search. Life loves water.

  For the first few hours, all I do is stare, chewing the occasional noodle. I think this might be the most stunning place I’ve ever seen. There are massive plains and towering mountains, forests through which great rivers flow. The polar regions are minimal, and the humidity seems to be high throughout most of the territory.

  Suddenly, being stuck on this ship is more punishment than ever, and I realize just how devious the Patron has been. If I was staring into the void of space, or looking down at a burning planet, I would be perfectly content in my nice oxygen-rich little star home. But now I am seeing this world laid out before me, and I can imagine what it would be to swim in those lakes, or stand atop those mountains, feel the rain that is falling across parts of the world, or bask in the sunshine of the great star beyond.

  I miss being planet-side. I miss being part of a system of life. As an explorer, I am nothing more than a speck of existence floating about space so infinite sometimes I wonder if I exist anymore, or if I’m just a wandering thought lost to the void.

  I need ground beneath my feet. I need to be part of something. The connections between humans are so distant and tenuous now it almost feels as though we are already dead.

  “Snap out of it,” I lecture myself as my thoughts drift toward the maudlin. It’s far too easy to slip into self-pity out here. “Look for the humans,” I tell myself. “They’re here. We survive. It’s what we do.”

  I have hope, even though hope seems futile. Most planets evolve some form of life. Intellect is not guaranteed, but brutal animal instinct is.

  The humans who came out here were originals, direct from Earth. Records show that a small colony may have been established here, largely by accident. They decided to explore instead of going directly to the next waypoint. When they tried to return to course, their heading was off by a few degrees and it took them into deeper space than any other ship could reach and also expect to survive.

  It’s been ten thousand years since anyone made contact with this offshoot of the species. In all likelihood, they are all dead. That’s why the Patron sent me here. To see what happens when orders are disobeyed, and protocols not followed.

  He wants me to see the desolation of a species consumed by the wild. He wants me to understand how fragile life is, and how disobedience leads to inevitable suffering. I know these things already. The humans who headed out this way were ill-fated explorers, and they almost certainly died so far from home they would never be found, but I see this mission a different way. I’ve come for them. Even if it’s just for the smallest hints of remains, some long lost wreckage, even if they had to wait ten thousand years, I have come. We do not abandon our own. Not forever.

  Beeep Beeep Beeep

  Either I’ve forgotten that I put a second set of noodles on and the ship is reminding me that they’re ready, or the scanners have found something. Noodles are more likely, so I slip out of the chair and check the ge
nerator first. No noodles. Back to the scanners, which have started spitting out data so aggressively I can hardly keep up with it as it scrolls across the screen.

  “Holy shit.”

  I’m seeing signs of life. And not just any life. Humanoid life.

  The scanners are showing a settlement at the base of a mountain range. It’s hard to pick out details at this range, so there are no pictures right now, but according to the data feed, hominid patterns of behavior have been detected. Primitive, but present.

  “Wow,” I breathe to myself, watching as the data pours across the screens. I am going to need more than numbers and reports. I want to see these people with my own eyes. They have been here for ten thousand years existing entirely on their own. What are they like? Do they retain any of the old culture? I am excited at the prospect of seeing people who live as humans did at the turn of the thirtieth century.

  This is so exciting I almost call a report into the Patron’s office, but something stops me. If there are people down there, I will be recalled and sent off to some other backwater. I will be denied what is mine: the rescue of the remnants of humanity.

  I know what he would say: they are not to be interfered with. Life on other planets is not something for us to toy with. But I don’t see why. The Patron is always so concerned with contamination, saying that our mere presence can destroy what would otherwise exist. And maybe that’s true. But maybe it doesn’t matter. If the scanners are right, those are people down there. So how can I mess with them? I am a people too, after all.

  The Patron might disagree. He has been saying for a long time that we are not human. We are superhuman. We are an offshoot of the original Earth species who decided not to keep falling prey to the cycle of birth and death. We long ago cured our ailments. Colds. Warts. Cancers. Coronary disease. Each one was systematically eradicated until only our traitorous bodies with their cellular aging held us back—and then we solved that too. Some say the Patron is over a thousand years old. He has earned his immortality by guiding us to a place of pure power. To him, the rest of creation is nothing but a zoo to be curated. But I am only eighteen years old. I am a late birth, the product of illicit copulation. I am lucky the Patron didn’t have me removed from existence as an embarrassment.