Cradle of War (A Captain's Crucible Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

glanced at Robert’s hologram. “Commander, get those anomalies transferred to the Salvador and Marley .”
    “On it,” Robert said.

    J ONATHAN STOOD IN cargo bay seven. Robert had finished arranging the transport of the two anomalies a few hours ago, so that only one of the golden, cigar-shaped objects remained in the translucent container before him. He gazed intently at the remaining object, daring it to inject a vision into his thoughts, but none came.
    Connie joined him. She wore her dark hair in a bun that day. The hair, in conjunction with her aReal spectacles, gave her the look of an academy professor. She dressed in standard blue utilities like the rest of the crew.
    “Apparently you were right about these being eggs,” Jonathan told her.
    “Normally I would be happy to be proven right,” the chief scientist said. “But not under the current circumstances, unfortunately.”
    He shook his head. “Elder eggs. Who would have thought?”
    “We are in a different galaxy, after all,” Connie said. “Anything could happen out here.”
    “While that’s true,” Jonathan countered. “We are making one small assumption: that the Raakarr aren’t lying to us.”
    “You’re never going to trust them, are you?” Connie asked.
    Jonathan glanced at her. “Would you, in my position?” 
    She pressed her lips together. “Probably not.”
    He returned his attention to the alien embryo. “The commander thinks the humanoid that originally fled from us on the greenhouse planet traveled through the Slipstream and summoned the Elder.”
    “What do you think?” the chief scientist asked.
    He rocked his head from side to side. “It’s possible. Those suits of theirs are big unknowns to us. They give the humanoids the ability to journey between planets, blurring the line between smart missiles and fighters. But could those suits give them the power to pass through Slipstreams? I don’t really know. Maybe the humanoid is hiding on one of the inner worlds back there, in a secret base whose equipment he used to summon the Elder with. Either way, it doesn’t really matter does it? The Elder are here and we have to deal with them. By the way, speaking of the suits, any progress?”
    His gaze momentarily drifted toward the second container in the cargo bay, where the environmental suits collected from the planet were held alongside the dead humanoids.
    She pursed her lips slightly. “I’ve made some progress. I took samples of the fabrics. The composition is vastly different from our own technology, unsurprisingly. It’s mostly silicates embedded in a flexible carbon nanotube-like base.”
    “Anything we can adapt to our own suit technology?” Jonathan asked.
    “The material could certainly help us construct less bulky, more robust spacesuits. The problem is fabricating it.”
    Jonathan frowned. “The 3D printers can handle nanotubes, can’t they?”
    “They can,” Connie agreed. “But those tubes have to come in pre-produced packs. The fullerenes in the molecules form hollow cages of one hundred eighty carbon atoms. Stuffed directly inside those molecules are silicates. We don’t have anything that can mass produce molecules like that, not easily.”
    “So what you’re saying is,” Jonathan said. “You won’t be able to repair the holes we’ve shot into those suits.”
    “I’m not sure yet,” Connie said. “I might be able to use a substitute material. A bandaid, if you will. But keep in mind, even if I can repair them, there are likely security protocols in place. They’ll have to be bypassed before us ordinary humans can use the suits.”
    Jonathan nodded. “Do what you can.” He paused, remembering something. “What about the energy fields we theorized surrounded those suits, and protected against our laser weapons?”
    “We haven’t figured out where the fields were sourced from,” Connie said.
    “And the ability to fly?”
    “There aren’t any obvious jetpacks on the suits, as you