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

by Craig Martelle

  Zisk unwrapped himself from the Wolfoid. The Lizard Man had been raised to be one with the trees. He’d used his instincts to pull Stinky to him and sheltered him with his body while they rode the tree to the ground.

  Zisk demonstrated an agility that Stinky had never seen before as they landed between the smoking branches, easily absorbing the impact of the fall with his thick Amazonian legs. He straightened and turned Stinky loose.

  The bot beams had stopped, and the pair of survivors stalked away from the destruction as if nothing had happened.

  Black Leaper heard the building rumbling into the street. Only a few branches were on fire, but they cast enough light to show the lieutenant that the bots were moving away. Many lay crushed or scorched.

  Stinky didn’t think their fire had been that effective. He didn’t spend any more time contemplating it.

  He activated his comm device and spoke clearly into it. “Bot army inbound. All hands on deck. I say again, all hands on deck and prepare to fire.”

  Zisk ran a few steps and leaned against a fallen tree branch to brace his arm as he aimed. Stinky jumped into the middle of the destroyed bots and laid down, then fired into the back rank of the bots. He kept the trigger depressed and waved his lightning back and forth. It arced from one to the next.

  Thin beams appeared from the smoldering tree line as Zisk opened fire. The bots returned fire on the Lizard Man, but didn’t send any lasers Stinky’s way.

  The bots in the rear ranks slowed and the parade stretched out as those in front kept moving toward the shuttle.

  From the side of the fallen building, two more lightning spears opened up, then a blaster. The bots returned fire. Three of the mechanical creations departed the group and raced toward the incoming fire.

  Two bots dispatched from the rear and headed toward Stinky. He stopped firing and pulled a bot on top of himself as he waited.

  The two approached, stopped, then slowly headed in.

  Stinky wondered why they weren’t firing, then he saw something. The bot lying on him had been blasted by a bot laser. The initial attack triggered an auto-response and they’d fired into each other. He didn’t know why and he didn’t care. He wanted to see more of that, but the bots had already learned and were no longer firing in the vicinity of their fellows.

  Stinky shoved his spear into the bottom of the bot that hovered directly overhead. He activated it, only needing one short burst to explode the bot. The second approached quickly and Stinky struggled to re-aim the spear.

  The bot didn’t fire, but the Wolfoid did, blasting from underneath where there was no armor.

  Stinky crawled from the destruction he’d wrought and bounced to all fours. He ran toward the building where he’d last seen his mate and three bots.

  ***

  “Cain! Cain!” Ellie shook the major. His eyes fluttered open and his head rolled on his shoulders as he tried to pull himself upright.

  “Where am I?” he mumbled.

  “Under the shuttle,” she said, pushing on him. “You need to get up. A bot army is on its way. Stinky and Night Stalker are in the middle of a fireworks storm.”

  Cain groaned as he let Ellie pull him upright. “I feel like I’ve been hit by speeding hover car,” he grumbled.

  “Shake it off!” she yelled in his face. His eyes popped open at the same time as the first lightning spears fired in his field of view.

  Ellie jumped away from Cain and with her flashlight in her mouth, she worked on two bots that she had set up side by side. Wires trailed from one to the other and back again with an external lead dangling from the open hatch of the shuttle.

  Cain thought he heard her mumble Jolly’s name around the flashlight. Her blaster was on his lap. He wrapped his fingers around its grip and with his free hand, grabbed the landing strut. Cain strained to pull himself to his feet.

  The battle raged at the entrance to the field. Cain’s legs failed him when he tried to take a step. He leaned against the strut and took aim.

  Flashing through his mind were images from the myriad of movies that Holly had played for him when he returned to Vii to form the Cygnus Marines. The warrior in a last stand against a determined enemy, the girl at his side, ready to be saved and then swept off her feet.

  Lightning arced and sparked through the metal bodies of the bots, but they weren’t going down. Blaster beams flashed in short bursts and hit the bots, some having an effect, but many not.

  How many heroes made it to the end of the movie? Not many, Cain thought, looking at the bot army advancing toward him.

  I’ll die defending Ellie. I’ll die for her, he thought, and I’ll die with honor. And then she’ll die, too, and no one will remember that we ever existed.

  So be it.

  “DIE!” he yelled and started firing well-aimed shots. He hit his targets and moved on, spreading the attention across the broad front that the enemy showed.

  Ellie yelled in fierce joy as she activate the lasers on the bot pair she had sitting in front of her. She manually swept the beams left and right across the enemy, ripping the bots apart. There was no return fire. The air sizzled with the power funneled through the bot lasers.

  With a final bright flash, the beams stopped. Lightning arced from Wolfoid spears into the remaining two bots, holding them in place until they dropped to the ground and tumbled over.

  Cain blinked to get his night vision back, but he still saw stars and kaleidoscopic colors dancing across the inside of his eyelids. Ellie flipped on the flashlight and shined it on her own face. She was grinning.

  Sometimes heroes don’t wear Marine green.

  Cain leaned back and looked into the darkness. “Help me?” he asked.

  “What? More than I already have?” she replied. He couldn’t help but smile. Social graces weren’t his strong suit, but he knew that Ellie had just saved them.

  “I thank you, my lady,” he said, bowing slightly at the waist and dipping his head. “That really was magnificent, Ellie.”

  “I could not agree more!” Daksha’s familiar vocalization device voice added.

  “Now can you help me? We need to make sure those things are all dead and that we don’t have any fakers.”

  Cain activated his comm device. “All hands, converge on the bot debris field. Look for any movement, vibrating while on the ground, as if they are trying to rise up. And kill them.”

  He took a deep breath, inhaling through his nose and exhaling through his mouth. Then he took a second breath.

  When he opened his eyes, Ellie was next to him and draping her arm over his shoulder.

  “You look tired,” he told her softly.

  She snickered. “You look as tired as I feel,” she replied.

  They walked slowly through the grass of the open area. Flashlights appeared as the Marines converged on the remains of the enemy.

  “Squad leaders, report,” Cain ordered into his collar.

  “Spence here. Shady is down,” the young man reported.

  “Roger. Corporal Bull?” Cain asked, hurrying ahead. Ellie let him run free. She shined the flashlight in his path as she tried to keep up. Daksha fell far behind, but he kept swimming.

  “Bull, Flash, and Ogden are down,” Trilok reported sadly. Cain thought he heard a ‘cat purring in the background. He looked around and saw Brutus at his side.

  “Thank the heavens,” he whispered.

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ Brutus said gently into the turbulence of Cain’s mind.

  “Report your positions,” Cain said firmly.

  “Spence here, coming up the road with Tracker, Zisk, the lieutenant, and the platoon sergeant.”

  Cain didn’t want to value one life more than another, but he was ashamed at his thoughts, while at the same time relieved that his closest friend, Stinky, was alive.

  A lightning spear sent a bolt into a pile of debris. Blasted parts and pieces flew in an arc away from the shooter.

  Cain aimed his blaster from one bot to the next. He stopp
ed and held out his hand to Ellie. She turned the flashlight over. He braced it against his blaster and then aimed both around the field. He fired two shots close together when he thought he saw movement.

  “Major!” Stinky yelled.

  “On my way!” Cain replied and started working his way in that direction. Walking through a smoking junkyard with only a small light to guide him was unnerving.

  The fact that five of his people were dead rubbed salt into his emotional wounds.

  ‘Nothing you could have done. Graham didn’t know any of this because it all happened well after they last heard from this colony. We came down here and did the best we could. Accept that. And tough it up. We’re stuck here for a while longer, if I’m not mistaken,’ Brutus said.

  ‘Not too much longer, my friend. We’ll be gone before next nightfall, as long as there isn’t another attack,’ Cain replied in his thought voice.

  “Look what we have here,” Stinky said as Cain approached. Ellie’s weapons fire had sheered the weapons off the top of a bot. It was trapped under other bots that had been driven into the ground, auguring themselves in and pinning their weaponless friend.

  “Ellie!” Cain called, but she was right behind him. “Oh! What do you think you and Jolly could do with a live one, assuming we can immobilize it?”

  “Give me your blaster,” she told him. Cain didn’t hesitate as he handed it over, butt first.

  She took careful aim at a lower section of the bot and fired, drilling a tiny hole. The bot stopped fighting against being trapped.

  “We found where the mechanism was that controlled its flight. Now we’ll be able to talk with it without it trying to fly away!” she said excitedly.

  “Zisk, Tracker, carry this to the shuttle for Ensign Ellie, please,” Cain said. They pulled the other bots off and lifted the live one. They carried it to the side, away from the bot debris field.

  “Jolly, can you give us some lights please?” Cain requested over the comm device.

  The shuttle landing systems bathed the area with soft luminescence.

  “Stinky, it’s good to see you,” Cain told his friend, before motioning for him to turn his side toward the light. “That looks bad. Make sure you get it tended to, get some numbweed on there.”

  Spence appeared at the edge of his vision. Cain slapped Black Leaper on his hairy back and pushed him in the direction of the shuttle. Night Stalker made eye contact with her mate and nodded. She turned back to accompany Cain.

  “Corporal Spence. I’m sorry about your losses. What happened?”

  Spence favored his left leg, hesitant to put any weight on it. “I’ve lost my whole squad, Major!” the squad leader lamented, shaking his head while looking at the ground.

  “I put you out there. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine and mine alone. You were following orders, and you did what you had to do. You let us know they were coming and you took a lot of heat for it.”

  “The crossfire made them shoot each other. They killed a bunch of their own. Without that, I suspect we wouldn’t be here,” Night Stalker said over Cain’s shoulder. “Spence and his people did their duty, unquestioningly, unerringly. It’s what the Marines do. Duty first, sir.”

  “Duty first,” Cain and Spence parroted.

  “Maybe that’s why they wouldn’t return fire when Ellie shot them with their own lasers,” Cain suggested.

  “Is that what happened? We only saw the tail end of it. We were engaged for…a while,” Stalker said, hesitating as she spoke.

  “What kind of charge do you have left in your spear?” Cain wondered.

  “None,” she answered, waving her spear as if it was an empty beer bottle and she was trying to get a server bot’s attention.

  “Spence?”

  “Another few shots, that’s all,” the small man answered.

  “Tobiah, you take care of him. Leaper and I will get Shady and bring him home. Take over first squad and get everybody back to the shuttle. Consolidate everyone into one unit and get a couple weapons on the chargers. And for Pete’s sake, Spence, get someone to look at that leg.”

  Spence saluted and almost fell over. Righting himself, he leaned heavily on the big ‘cat’s back as they worked their way around the smoking remnants of the bot army. Spence started yelling and pointing. Abhaya handed him Bull’s spear to use to support himself.

  He reluctantly took it as Forest, Abhaya, and Trilock picked up Bull and slowly shuffled in the direction of the shuttle.

  With Ellie’s former flashlight pointing the way, Cain and Stalker walked down the road toward the city.

  “Will they come again?” she asked after a few steps.

  “I sure as hell hope not,” Cain answered quickly. He wasn’t afraid to be honest. Their position was weak and they were too tired to find more defensible ground. Even when they had the energy, he hadn’t seen better ground, and he also couldn’t risk the bots destroying the shuttle.

  His gut told him something different. He felt relieved and thought the bots had made one last ditch effort to kill the invaders.

  “I think they brought everything they had, the force that was left in place a hundred years ago. They’ve been dormant and were finally called to action. They popped up one at a time, until they realized we weren’t like the last residents of Heimdall, and we had no intention of quietly marching to our deaths. They learned with each new attack. I guess they figured a mass attack in the dark would take care of it, but they hadn’t had to fight like that before, so that’s why they were so easily disoriented when you guys hit them out front.”

  “Makes sense,” Stalker agreed without elaborating. She pointed with her spear toward the downed trees.

  “Leaper, Zisk, and Tracker were over there and we were on top of what used to be that building.” She pointed to the rubble on the left. “We escaped from the roof and ran out the back. We were able to flank the bots. We hit them, but Shady was in the open. He took more than one bot laser when they zeroed in on him.”

  They found him, and there wasn’t much left. Cain was nauseated, but he steeled himself. Shades Racer had been one of his Marines who had fearlessly engaged the enemy.

  Shady had given his life in the service of the Cygnus Marines. Cain could ask no more of him. The major had asked all of them if they would lay down their lives for their fellows, for the mission, for the people of Cygnus VII. They’d all agreed.

  That had made Cain proud. He still felt pride, but pain, too. They had paid the price of honor with their blood until they could serve no more.

  Or no better.

  “We can’t carry him like that,” Stalker said, barely above a whisper. Cain nodded and used his flashlight to look through the remnants of the fallen building. After testing the strength of trapped material sticking out from a caved in wall, he used his pocket knife to cut a portion of it away.

  An old window curtain. Cain looked at the flower pattern. At some point in time, one of his distant human relations had looked at that and thought it was nice. Cain looked at it as functional for his purposes, now that the building was destroyed.

  Cain returned to Stalker, who was still looking at her friend from their mutual hometown of Livestel on Vii. The Wolfoids had all known each other when they signed up. Most of them had been blooded together in the annual rite of maturity.

  They’d joined to make a difference.

  “He was a warrior, a Marine,” Cain shared out loud, knowing Stalker’s thoughts.

  She turned to the major and sniffed the air, sensing the pheromones he exuded. She tasted his sadness. “Shady did exactly what he wanted to do. He went from an undisciplined pup to being an outstanding Marine. He has earned honor for himself and his family. No Wolfoid could ask for more. No Wolfoid could ask for more equal treatment, either,” she said, her vocalization device reflecting her sincerity.

  “We leave no one behind,” Cain added as he spread the curtain on the ground and they carefully put Shady into it. The Wolfoid’s charred and to
rn harness carried no awards, no medals. Cain hesitated, then removed the harness and draped it over one of his shoulders.

  It seemed far heavier than it should have been.

  Stalker folded the material over the dead Wolfoid and grasped the two ends on her side. Cain breathed deeply, then lifted his end. He grunted with the effort. Everything was heavy on Heimdall. If they stayed here, he expected they’d get used to it, evolve to the point where the gravity was natural.

  He had no intention of staying. He had vowed to leave the planet and take all his people with him, or die trying.

  “Thanks, Night Stalker. Thanks for being here with him at the end and for now and for being a great platoon sergeant, making my job easier and for being good for my friend, Stinky,” Cain said, stringing his thoughts out as he bared his soul to her.

  “You’re always there for us. And why do you call him Stinky?” she asked, trying to lighten the mood as they walked sideways down the roadway.

  “Ensign Lindy, you met her. She was the discipline instructor for our class. Leaper and I kind of fell in the obstacle course swamp. You know what wet Wolfoids smell like.” Cain stopped himself, but it was too late.

  “Not really. What do we smell like?” she said turning her head toward him. They continued shuffling.

  “It wasn’t me! That’s what Lindy called him, not me, but it kind of stuck because that’s all I call him.” Cain looked ahead as they approached the lit area. He risked a look behind, but darkness had descended once again over the roadway from the city. He could see nothing.