Day 292 - The War Corp. - Chapter 3 (1274 Words)

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THE WAR CORP.

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 3

The next week was the first that the team had ever seen the whole of. Up until now the individual recruits had not been allowed to see a sequence of days without being in the Pod for recovery and retraining. Pod time was unconscious and uncounted, like it never existed for the recruits.  You went into the Pod, the door closed and then it opened again immediately from their perspective.

Brain activity was zero in Pod time; it was a necessary function if they wanted retraining and recovery to happen at their accelerated, near instant levels of effect. They were out of training and in the League Matches now, the War was their business and they had none of the advantages that they had as recruits. Adjustment was a hard thing for some of the Team, and it was generally something that veterans had an easier time with, having been through it before.

The Team now though had actual down time in between engagements on the field and they filled these with training, simulations and medical consultations. The manager would set a routine for each of the recruits with the help of a series of fitness and readiness instructors. Drills and situational tests were set for them and then the results were reviewed internally within the team HQ.

Liam was in the worst shape after his fall from the tree into the detonated forest floor, where he broke several bones, in agony with every movement. When his team found him, saw his orange status and dragged him bodily to the drop ship for return they actually did more harm than good. Pins and cages surrounded him for the first three of the seven days between the end of one League Match and the beginning of another.

Brodie Seven Three was second most injured, having run directly at the enemy and drawing some fire for the squad with him to mop up the opposition, he had taken three bullets to his limbs and two in his torso, though no major injuries were recorded. Bullets, superficial wounds, through and through’s especially would be a twenty four hour rotation in a med bay, waiting for the machines to knit the skin and muscles back together.

Broken Bones were longer, a minimum three day set for a recruit once past the CBT. In the Pods the recovery time was faster, the brain not working while the body was essentially dead, on hold and waiting for life to be restored.

They were beyond the gifts of the Pod though; once engagement had started it was clear in the League rules that the Pod was only to be used in CBT. The only way to get back to the abyssal grip of nothingness was to wash out your team and be reassigned as a veteran to a new team. That was a frequent occurrence, if you survived once it was likely you would survive again, until you burned out or were worn down.

Recruits were not technically alive, not in any legal or ethical sense. Their bodies were living machines, but they relied on the training programs and the muscle memory injections to act with a pre-planned instinct. This was why the Manager and the Board adviser, who was usually an expert in some fashion, were so critical to a Team’s success.

Recruits did not think for themselves, despite the anthropomorphisation of them by the audience in their billions. Clubs would form and the string recruits would be named, given titles beyond the designations of the Clone Banks from which they were grown. Liam Zero Six was already being called Liam the Lethal, and a fan club had sprung up based on a single performance.

The care and attention that the Team was receiving was in direct relation to the ratings they achieved in the last League Match, and the next battle betting was adjusting the odds constantly. It was impossible to know and prepare for the next engagement in the League Tables unless the betting settled down and gave them a benchmark to be measured up against.

The week passed and the generic training and healing was done with, all seventeen recruits were at peak fitness and mental readiness after a victory under their belts, the audience was dying to see them run the course once more.

The Drop Ship clanged with a metal ringing sound that echoed dully through the docking area where the Team was strapped in. Unlike some previous trips, they were awake for this one, or at least they were able to be awake. Mostly the Recruits would sleep in the harnesses because there was nothing else to do and that was the expected behavior.

Liam had been awake the entire time, sleep was not his natural state of being, it brought an unsettling change in his personality and he only slept when he needed to. Recruits were designed and grown with a low sleep tolerance ingrained, and they were capable of going forty eight to seventy two hours with no rest, and then a three hour down time before being good for a further seventy two more. The trip to the next field of engagement was as mysterious as the first one.

Team Management was aware of what the objectives and the parameters would be but now that the Team was in the ‘air’ so to speak, there was no more communication or planning to be done.  Carter had given little to no instruction to Liam, hoping to impress on him the need to adhere to orders this time around. The off-book explorations and the sniper plan of the first battle had come from nowhere, and Carter could not trust a Leader within the team that acted so erratically.

The Board though was so very happy with the winnings and the growing popularity of the team. They were setting viewer figures alight, taking audiences that only veterans and Special Ops missions would get in much more mature teams and careers.

The ship stopped moving and Liam got an Objective on his NINE, and it just said the word Gauntlet.

The audience got the objective on their screen the same time as the Team Leader did, followed by a secondary objective of “losses >25%” in the secondary colour. The rest of the Team started getting out of their harnesses and discovered that this was to be a zero gravity mission, they were not heading planetside for the next engagement.

Again Liam did not share the objective with the team, he did not want them to know what to expect, just let their training kick in and see what happens. If they put themselves in harms way, if they were in pain or on the edge of zeroing out, then he had leeway on four lives and would still be inside his Team secondary objective quota.

Of course a gauntlet may well take that opportunity from him, to deliver the unfortunate to the grace of zeroing out permanently and the bliss that the state would bring them.

Instead he sailed through the space of the doorway and into the airlock, propelled by a small push off of his own harnessed chair. The Team bunched up behind him and assembled into squads, as they had in the previous encounter.

“At ease, no formations.” Liam sent a verbal command to the Team and they dissipated from an orderly set of squads to the loose grouping of sixteen individuals.

The Doorway to the Airlock opened with a hiss, and the Team saw past their Team Leader and into the dark, unlit corridor of their destination for the first time.