Cygnus Arrives: Humanity Returns Home (Cygnus Space Opera Book 3) by Craig Martelle

Author:Craig Martelle [Martelle, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2017-05-08T06:00:00+00:00

Recovery

The sun was well up and warming the sleepers. Stinky and Stalker were the first ones to rise because they’d gotten hot lying in the sun, their heavy coats holding the heat in.

They pushed to their feet and walked on all fours to find a spot in the woods where they could relieve themselves. Their passage woke others and the rustling associated with Marines welcoming the day roused the rest.

The complaining set the Cygnus Marines apart from the rest of the crew. Cain’s people treated bitching as an art form, as if it were a rite of passage.

Cain listened for a couple minutes. Even Spence, who’d lost most of his squad, was condemning the planet’s origins for creating an obscene amount of gravity. He stood, using a Wolfoid spear as a crutch and babying his leg. Cain figured it was broken, but Spence had stayed in the fight.

Cain stood, stiff, but getting used to the gravity. He felt well rested, which surprised him. He checked the timestamp on his neural implant and discovered that he’d been asleep for nine hours. Ellie was still out.

He wondered when she had joined him.

He stretched and hurried to Spence’s side, draping one of the smaller man’s arms over his shoulder. Cain didn’t know what to say, whether to empathize, sympathize, or take the conversation in a completely different direction.

“Your leg hurt?” Spence nodded. “The med bots will fix you up. You know what they can’t fix?”

Spence looked at him, his eyes glistening as he thought of his dead teammates. That wasn’t what Cain intended so he hurried to deliver the punchline. “I’m out of toilet paper.”

Spence snorted as he tried to stifle a laugh.

Zisk joined the pair and took Spence’s arm from the major, nodding abruptly as Lizard Men had learned to do. The way they communicated among themselves was a mystery to the humans. Cain simply accepted that they didn’t show their emotions to the outside world.

Cain turned to face the two men. “Peace, my brothers,” he said softly. “We’ll celebrate the lives of the fallen and work to be better now that we know this threat is out there. The Cygnus Marines will live on. Think about it. If we hadn’t been here, had only sent a team of scientists, what do you think would have happened?”

Spence looked to Zisk, letting the junior Marine answer. “They would have died,” he said, his vocalization device reflecting a matter-of-fact tone.

“That’s right. We would have learned nothing. As it is, we know a great deal about this enemy and we have a city that is ready to be reoccupied. If another colony ship comes this way, assuming they have their own military to clean out this snake pit, they could move right in,” Cain stated forcefully. “We started the process, showed the universe what’s possible. Now we hand it over to someone else and move on, find the next obstacle to overcome. No one else could have done what we did here.”

Cain didn’t know that for sure.

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