Caldwell Carrion

Tampiece places a hand over his eyes as he scans the forest below. There is a snuffle sound coming from somewhere to his right. Slowly he inches forward keeping eyes peeled. He drops to his stomach and lies perfectly still. There is an unnatural silence. On his belly he inches painfully ahead across the sharp thick stalks of broken roots. Tears appear in his skin .He stops and, scooping up red earth, sprinkles it on the open scratches. A clicking of metal upon metal. He stays perfectly still. There us a muffled cough that can have only come from a human throat.

Five minutes of travel on hands and knees brings him to a small outcropping of moss covered rock. At the base an opening five feet long and a foot high. As his eyes adjust to the dimly lit gap he slowly perceives the face of a man .At his side the shape of the many shots arqubusier. He continues his reconaiscance. At the end of the day he has spotted an additional half dozen of the forward listening posts of the forces of the ORIGINAL EXECUTIVE .

Budeaus has called for a meeting of commanders. Tampiece, Seraphion, and Jutes are among the fifty or so upturned faces staring in his direction. A fire glows duly behind a screen of inner tree bark. There is a barking cough and a blackness as a flying reptile hunting its prey .its blocks out the great star for a miniscule period.

Budeaus awaits patiently for the hub hub to subside. He has become adept at handling lands-men. At sea he would immediately call for order, any man not complying instantly subject to the lash. On land he has learned that it is different. Not only are there a greater number; the discipline is not the same. He has to herd his charges in the required direction. It is a funny world, one which due to the contrariness of the ethereal plane, has claimed him and his fleet. Not only is the vegetation different from any he has previously encountered, so are the people . Some are steeped in a strange religion where they believe that they have been transported through time. Others, having no belief system what so ever, believe only what they see with their own two eyes and hear with their two ears. Slowly the buzzing subsides. The sub commanders come forward Tampice conferred briefly with the Jutes,he in turn conferred with Tampiece and then they all conferred with the assembled force of the ALTERNATE EXECUTIVE troops.

The colonel looked over the barrel of the LMG into the settling mist. He hated this assignment. He is an administrator, born with no psychological implantation. Damned if he could understand the logic of placing him here with this bunch of zombies. He is natural .No cloned experimentation on his body. His genes will combine with other freely mixed genes and ,in the future, create a race able to over come any biological catastrophe. Not like these clones who would, at the first hint of any thing unusual, wither and then die off. No it just wasn’t right.

Suddenly, out of the mist, a running figure. He dives for the gun. He is to late. A knife across the throat ,wielded by a clone, nearly ends it all for the natural until an instinct takes over, not an instinct that has been psychologically implanted ,one that has been implanted through the hard rigors of basic training. The Colonel twists and turns bringing the clone on to his back and then over his shoulder.