Day 282 - The War Corp. - Chapter 1.3 (1059 Words)

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THE WAR CORP.

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 1.3

This time there was no Klaxon and the Foresters were through the door and hallway to the mid point before the Team could see they were in play. The Team were reminded of the goal, protect the base, via their NINEs and so they instinctively took up a pre programmed defensive position to cover all the entry points to the center of their half of the field.

A third of the Team was on the high ground still and cut down many of the beasts as they pushed relentlessly on towards the base and intent on killing as many of the humans as they could. Foresters on their home world were territorial animals and they had learned to fear humans after the colonization took a toll on their ranks. The Forest Wars that erupted out of those encounters were bloody and extended as the colony settlers were not warriors, not soldiers but farmers and makers. The battles were bloody, fierce and to the death.

Eventually the soldiers were brought in to pacify the planet and cull the herds as the colony took shape, cutting down the forest homes to make room for the settlements. It was discovered too late that the random collections of these beats were not random at all but they ha d complex living arrangement in specific areas of the Forest. Specific because of access to natural shelter, water and other resources that living creatures required.

This of course made them prime targets for the colony as well, but by the time the beasts were studied and understood it was too late, they had been decimated in self-defense. The remaining stocks that lost their packs and their home grounds were put in Gene Storage where they had been for a century or more. The home world was now unrecognizable as the place they grown and felt at home. The cloned and farmed versions now used in CBT were an off shoot of a study program that looked at all native species that were in Gene Storage and tried to learn more about them.

Gene Storage was very similar to being a Pod Baby, it was not real Foresters that were being experimented on and used to assess Pod Babies, as that would have been both cruel and unethical. Only the highest-grade cloned material was used and copies were made and programmed with extra instructions to make CBT more challenging.  They had genetic scent markers they used to mark home territory; each herd or pack of these animals knew their home by scent, not by sight or location.

The Flag Centre which the A.C.E. team was protecting was doused in the scent marks of the Foresters, they were not attacking the humans, they were reclaiming their territory.  The onslaught of beasts was sustained and emotionally charged for the Team, it was a never-ending tide of animal rage and righteous anger that crashed against them over and over again.

At first the Team had easily repelled the waves of beasts that came filing through the blockades as the higher grounded Team Members, led by Brodie and Sharpe were culling the numbers from above. Then the Foresters took a new tack, they changed their assault vector to be harder to intercept and spread their ranks further apart, making it harder to kill them en masse.

They took to circling the Flag Base and trying to sneak in from the sides and the rear, even trying to come up and over the blocks where there was sufficient room and height for them to manage the approach.

Liam Zero Six had enough of the slaughter and he broke ranks from the Team and gunned his way forward through the now thinned ranks of Foresters on the ground in front of the Team. The new strategy of circling about the Team and coming in from multiple angles was effective in that it split their attention from a singled direction and made them stay on their toes.

Brodie and Sharpe watched their Team Mate break away from the Team and seemingly abandon the standing order to defend their base, and he moved unmolested towards the entry point of the Foresters, who were still streaming through the door but splitting and dispersing rather than coming forward to be cut down in multiples.

A few meters out from the gate Liam strode up the Blockade a high one that cut off the view from the rest of team and from there he started shooting bullet after bullet into the Foresters, jamming the doorway with their bodies and stemming the tide of beasts adding to the fray. They had to climb over the bodies of their fallen comrades to get over the doorway and into the battle area, and that not only slowed them down it also meant that they were easier to hit, getting higher and directly in Liam’s line of sight.

Brodie and Sharpe understood the tactic and they too dropped positions to come and support their teammate. His bold strategy worked much quicker than expected. Soon the Team was mopping up the stragglers on the field and the three Team Members on the higher ground in front of the doorway were cutting down the beasts before they could even enter the room let alone make a concerted attack.

The grind of killing, blocking and then carrying on eventually wore thin on the examiners and the sealed the door, a laser blade slicing heat through the corpses and allowing the door to close the field to the invaders.

As Liam, Sharpe and Brodie stood and watched the doors closing, the cauterized bodies of the Foresters ben shoved aside, they could hear the pained and frustrated screams and howls on the other side of the closing opportunity. They may have been copies but the visceral rage they felt at being denied the homeland that was not really theirs at all, that resonated with Brodie and Sharpe.

The NINE flashed green on the third and fourth mission goals of CBT and the 0 DNF rating came up one more time. Two more of the five CBT tests were complete and they had not lost a soul, if they had souls of course, since the end of the first obstacle.

This was a rare result, and unheard of for a Team of Pod Babies like this one.