MERCS: Crimson Worlds Successors Read Online Free PDF

drive a truck.  But not a life of war, a life like mine.  Anything else.
     
     
    *        *        *        *        *
     
     
    Augustus Garret stared out the viewscreen.  Pershing was a mighty vessel, a testament to the herculean efforts men could put into war.  And she had served well, in the struggle against the First Imperium, and later against Gavin Stark’s Shadow Legions.  His eyes were fixed, his mind lost in old memories, as he bid a final farewell to the vessel that had been his last flagship.
    He knew three of her sister ships were out there too, but they were too far away for him to see with the naked eye.  It was a fluke that Pershing was the closest to the station, but Garret was grateful for a last look at her.
    “Saying goodbye, Augustus?”  The voice was familiar, and Garret turned abruptly.
    “Yes, I suppose.  In my own way.”  Garret nodded to Roderick Vance.  “I want to thank you for your help with this, Roderick.  “There’s nowhere else we could do this, at least no place secure enough.”
    Vance looked out the viewscreen toward the hulking battleship.  “They were a great design.  Even after we built Sword of Mars and John Carter, I always thought ton for ton the Yorktowns were the toughest warships ever built.”
    Roderick Vance was the head of the Martian Confederation’s spy services, and a member of its ruling council.  He’d been an ally to Garret and the rest of the Alliance military for some time, though less so with the Earth-based Superpower itself.  In the years of warfare leading up to the final battle, the Alliance’s navy and Marine Corps had grown into quasi-independent organizations, as answerable to the colonies as to the Earth government.
    None of that mattered now.  The Alliance was gone, along with all the other Earth-based Superpowers, consumed in the disastrous nuclear finale of their last war.  Earth was a ruined planet, poisoned, radioactive, its cities utterly obliterated.  Vance’s people had estimated that 90% of the population had died over a 36 hour period of intense atomic warfare, a figure that had left Garret speechless the first time he’d heard it.
    It was almost impossible to account for the further losses from sickness, starvation, and fighting that had occurred in the three years since, but the best estimate was one to two percent of the pre-war population was still alive—fifty to one hundred million people scattered around the globe, eeking out some type of marginal existence.  But no one thought that would be the final figure.  The population was almost certainly still declining, and only the wildest guesses could be made about the long term effects of radiation exposure on longevity and fertility.  An entire population was difficult to eradicate, but Earth was still teetering on the edge.
    “I just wish we could keep more of your fleet in space.  Everybody is fought out right now, but we both know there will be new disputes.”  Vance’s voice was sincere.  He’d been an unemotional man when Garret had first met him, almost robotic in his demeanor, but the sacrifices of the last few years had changed him, and the former Alliance admiral could feel the empathy—and the pain—in his friend.
    “Well, you can’t afford that now, any more than we can.  Mankind took it to the edge, and now we need to scale back.  I don’t think two-kilometer long battleships are necessary for prosperity and economic growth, and without any Superpowers to fight, they are an extravagance we simply can’t afford.”  Garret felt torn.  He was disgusted that humanity had fought one war after another, building ever greater engines of destruction to hurl at each other.  That side of him welcomed the drastic reductions in armaments compelled by the destruction of Earth’s industry.  The colonies couldn’t come close to supporting on their own the vast military organizations the terrestrial powers had