©Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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.
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