Merkiaari Wars: 02 - What Price Honour Read Online Free PDF

there was to see. Trees, trees, and more trees. Her mikes were set on high gain, but all she heard was a gentle rustling as her Marines moved carefully through the undergrowth. Eric was utterly silent. She knew what he was, and she was still impressed. Her Marines were good. The little noise they made would not be heard, even her mikes barely picked it up, but Eric seemed to float through the jungle. He was like a shadow moving across the ground—utterly silent.
    Eric crouched and waved everyone into cover.
    Gina went to one knee amid the foliage and scanned her surroundings. Ignoring the dampness that seeped into her uniform from the mulch she knelt upon, she dialled up X4 on her optics and looked beyond Eric’s position. Nothing. Her sensors reported the usual background heat sources, but nothing the size of a man. Animals often showed up on scans, but her sensors reported nothing Human ahead of them. Eric was a viper. If he thought there was something, then there was.
    Dialling back to X1, she checked her back trail and found her people ready for action. Satisfied they were all under good cover, she turned back to speak with Eric, but he had moved. She swore under her breath until she located him stalking something up ahead. She didn’t dare distract him. According to her sensors, he was stalking a target that her software insisted was a bear. Not that this God-forsaken planet had bears, and if it did they wouldn’t be in the tropical zone, but that was what her software insisted it was. A bear, not a man. As she had come to expect in the Border Zone, the software had interpreted the sensor data into Earth terms. Its programmers could hardly be expected to know that she wasn’t on Earth could they?
    She snorted in disgust.
    The core worlds provided the Alliance with downloads detailing the native wildlife to avoid this kind of thing, but border worlds rarely had the money for the in depth studies required to compile them. The military had to make do, but that meant the sensor data was often interpreted incorrectly. Luckily, humans were quite distinctive. The software rarely interpreted a Human profile as anything else. It seemed to have failed this time however.
    Gina watched her sensors as Eric went to ground again. His target was not moving, which said to her it was unlikely to be an animal. Suddenly, Eric moved in a burst of speed that only a viper could produce. He pounced like some kind of big cat. He was a predator in that moment, and she shivered in excitement as he took his prey down.
    “Eagle One, Eagle Two,” Eric said under his breath.
    “Eagle Two, Eagle One. Go.”
    “One hostile neutralised. You can bring them up.”
    “Copy one hostile neutralised. Is he a single?”
    “Seems to be. I have no other targets in range.”
    “Is this standard procedure for the rebels?” she asked intently.
    “No,” Eric said sounding grim. “She had comm equipment, but she didn’t have time to fire off a warning. I have no idea what she was doing out here. Unless they know we’re coming.”
    Gina nodded. That’s what she had been thinking. “We’re moving up. Eagle One clear.”
    “Two clear.”
    Gina stood and waved the others forward before moving out. When she reached Eric, she hunkered down beside him, while the others took position in a circle around them looking outward in all directions. Eric was speedily searching the corpse, but he hadn’t yet found anything of note. The rebel was a woman of approximately twenty-five years of age. Eric had killed her with a knife across the throat. Silent and efficient.
    Gina approved.
    “Anything?”
    “Nothing much,” Eric said. “She hasn’t been out here long.”
    She looked the question at him.
    “She brought her lunch with her, it’s still hot.”
    Gina nodded and moved to the perimeter to keep watch. Why had the rebel been set to watch this approach? Why alone? Surely, it made more sense to watch in pairs.
    “No way he’s a civ, Gunny,” Westfield