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

know. I have Sil Chopra leading a team full time, but our best guess at this point is that they’re using a miniaturized version of the reactionless drives found on the Elder ship.”
    “Contracting space in front of them, and expanding it behind?” Jonathan said.
    “Yes,” Connie answered. “I finally had a chance to review the recordings from the battle on the planet. I watched it on every available frequency, electromagnetic, gravimetric, you name it. And I discovered that when the humanoids took flight, their suits emitted weak gravity waves similar to what we’re reading from the Elder ship itself.”
    “I can’t tell you how important it would be for humanity if we could reverse engineer that tech,” Jonathan said.
    “I know,” Connie told him. She smiled weakly. “No pressure, right?”
    “None.” He turned his attention to the naked bodies arrayed around the suits. They were obviously still frozen: their skin was porcelain white, reminding him of a certain mountain climber he had been forced to abandon on a summit long ago. He had forgiven himself for leaving her, but he would never forget her. Famina was her name.
    He focused on those lifeless faces, which appeared vaguely human: each visage had two eyes, a nose, a mouth. The thick noses, receding foreheads and prominent brow ridges betrayed their divergent origins, however. Even so, according to Connie and her team, the DNA base pairs of the dead individuals were a ninety-nine percent match to modern humans.
    One of the humanoids lay in a separate holding tank nearby, isolated from the others. Its skin was not porcelain, but rather olive colored. Its belly bulged visibly, more-so than the others, and above that its chest had been cut open, and the ribs forced apart. Its half-removed lungs rested on those ribs, laid out on either side of the heart; the sight made Jonathan think of the ancient ritualized killings the vikings supposedly inflicted upon defeated warriors, known as the blood eagle; except in that method the lungs were removed from the back.
    Like the other tanks, a glass partition separated it into two sections, with robotic arms mounted in the partition to allow for manipulation of the body without actually entering the main chamber. Metallic, telescoping limbs led from the dissected body to those arms.
    “And what have you learned about our mostly human friends?” he asked Connie.

five
     
    J onathan turned toward her, eager to hear the answer.
    “They have nearly the same number of organs as we do,” Connie answered. “But their spleen is slightly larger. They have no appendix or tonsils, but they do have an extra set of wisdom teeth, which makes the lack of appendix odd.”
    “How so?” Jonathan said.
    “Well, an extra set of wisdom teeth would imply that they chew a lot of cellulose tissue—plants. Meanwhile an appendix, while mostly useless in our species, is utilized by other herbivores to hydrolyze cellulose and other indigestible plant material. So you’d think that because of those teeth, they’d have at least the equivalent of our appendix. The only reason I can think of to explain its absence is that the extra set of wisdom teeth are all the help they need to predigest plant matter.”
    “All right. So what else?”
    “Well,” Connie continued. “Brain scans have determined that they also have large temporal lobes, similar in size to those found in psi-capable humans.”
    “Interesting,” Jonathan said.
    “We’ve also found cyanobacteria in their skin, embedded in the dermis layer,” Connie told him. “The bacteria seem to be in some sort of symbiotic relationship... in exchange for shelter and warmth, the bacteria return some of the energy they produce from photosynthesis, dumping the necessary amino acids into the subcutis via capillary action.”
    “Photosynthesis?” Jonathan felt his face scrunch up. “Then shouldn’t their skin be green?”
    “That was my first thought, too,” Connie said.