Merkiaari Wars: 01 - Hard Duty Read Online Free PDF Page B

well, if he didn’t know that Burgton’s every waking and sleeping moment was dedicated to the good of the Alliance and the Human race, he would have shot him in the head when next they met. But he did know him, and he would continue to obey him as would the rest of the regiment no matter what was asked of them, because they did know, all of them, that Burgton was always right. Scary right. So when he said there would be another Merki incursion within five years, they knew it would happen and that the Alliance needed to be prepared for it, even if it didn’t know it was being prepared. Missions like this one, and others Eric knew nothing about, were all part of it.
    Eric skimmed the data Ken had put together picking out interesting facts and figures. The planet was firmly in the grip of global warming he noted, but it was a natural occurrence. The geological survey commissioned before colonisation placed Thurston in its cretaceous period. Every square meter of land was covered by steaming jungle. There were mountains visible from orbit and the cones of extinct volcanoes rose out of the vegetation like the bones of some great beast, but everything else was either water covered or teeming with native life. There were no ice caps and as a result sea levels were high. No deserts either. Thurston had eight continents. If he included the small island chains in his calculation, land equated to more than fifty percent of the surface area, and Thurston was not a small planet. It was twelve percent larger than Earth for example, and populated by Thurston’s unique brand of wildlife.
    “More dinosaurs,” Eric grumbled. “Really? What the hell is it about the lizards that they evolved on every bloody planet we like?”
    He was no scientist gleefully labelling the wildlife, but the few pictures Ken had included looked like dinosaurs to him. Big buggers some of them, and although a lot were vegetarian living off the vast jungle canopy, some were carnivorous. Eric studied one of the meat eaters and compared it to other critters he had seen over the past two hundred years. It looked like a mutant crocodile—huge jaw full of ripping teeth, no molars that he could see. Long narrow body with a ridge of horned spikes along the spine for protection, and stood twice a man’s height on four feet each having four clawed toes. The front legs each had a long curved spur, probably a vestigial toe, but what did he know?
    Computer: compare current image with known Earth dinosaurs. Query: what is closest match?
    >_ Working
    >_ Desmatosuchus: Dinosaur, living on Earth through the Triassic period. Approximately 245million years B.C. Carnivorous lizard analogue. Ref; link crocodile. Ref; Texas. Ref; Mass extinction.
    Eric had no idea what Texas had to do with it, but he had to agree it did look like a crocodile; a super-sized croc that spent its time eating dinosaurs under the jungle canopy, and not soaking itself in a swamp. Or maybe it did, and just came out for a snack. A hundred ton snack.
    Eric snorted at the whimsical turn his thoughts had taken. The point was, old Desmond the super croc was only one danger among thousands hidden all over the planet. The jungles were dangerous places, which meant most of the population went everywhere armed. That was common in the Border Zone where protection was a personal responsibility. Often border worlds had little or no police force, and when they did their jurisdiction rarely reached beyond the city limits. Thurston did have police and emergency services in the cities, but had no way to extend that protection to its people if they left civilisation and entered the wilds. The wilds could be described as everywhere not under plascrete... everywhere outside the cities or mining compounds in other words.
    Ashfield, Thurston’s capital and centre of government, was as modern as any city to be found in the core worlds. It was just smaller, maybe a tenth the size of an average city. Despite that, the port had