NationStates Jolt Archive

They had swept out of the ash wastes in their thousands: they, the mutated hordes, criminals, degenerates, and lowlifes all. Nearly a million of them toiled in the camps deep in the Wastes, labouring to recycle the millions of tons of various toxic wastes that were routinely dumped here from other parts of the Indiastan empire. The guard had been becomgin more and more lax as time went on, and fewer criminals arrived to replace those that died or tried to run off into the night, to some small dream of freedom. Walls or fences wern't a requirement of the Waste camps. The prospect of life in the Wastes was so slim that they themselves did a sufficent job of keep the scum in place.

But recently this no longer proved true. A band of rebels and mutants had set up a camp out there, and had scrounged up enough equipment and materiel that they managed to make a go of it. Well, long enough for them to build weapons enough to start raiding the camps. After that, they had real guns, decent shelter, and a somewhat limited food supply. But that couldn't last forever, so as their numbers swelled after each raid, so too came the need to raid more and more often. Eventually, they'd built a vertable fortress out in the wastes, complete with a water distiller and alge tanks. They'd started building guns and ammunition out of the scraps that were to be found, and within the year, they were an army. They even started attacking settlements and compounds outside the wastes... but not before taking the last of the camps. With the alarm raised, the Army was mobilized to counter the threat. Patrols made the rounds about the fringes while fighters escorted the garbage haulers as they dumped their cargo into the wastes.

Try as they might, they just couldn't find the centeral base. Air raids successfully destroyed the old camps and kept the monorail safe, but years passed, and as nothing was heard from out of the wastes, the commanders and politicians assumed they had starved them out. But when the mutated horde poured out of the Wastes in a fleet of ramshackle vehicals, following the monorail line to Hive Helsreach, the commanders were proven horribly, horribly wrong.

Michael was, like many other young boys of his age, a videogame fanatic. Right now, his favourite was Zombiehunter VI: The returned! (Again).

H ewould never have thoguht that something like this could be possible elsewhere... In the real world...

Nor did he think about it. Instead, he just tagged a couple polygon zombies with his shiny railgun...

They could first be seen as a vast dust and smoke cloud, their scrap-mobiles spitting out thick black fumes as much as fast as they could. As they approached the sprawling hive suburbs, defence units rushed to the out-wall. The gates were locked, but they wern't expecting them to hold. Especially not after they saw just what was leadign the makeshift fleet.

At the convoy's head was something that looked like it was a tank in a previous life, or at least some sort of six-wheeled military-esque vehical. Fitted to it's prow was something that looked like a cow-catcher - clearly a heavy duty ram. It was this thing that bore straight down on the gate that started to attract the most attention from the HDF on the out-wall. This was only a small defensive line, designed to hold off an enemy while the suburbs were evacuated into the larger, more heavily defended hive proper. They weere nevr expected to hold off a determined enemy, much less one driving a multi-ton ram at the gate at seventy kilometeres an hour.

Predictably, the gate didn't stand.

Teeming inside, firing their stolen machien guns and crudely rebuilt rifles in the air and at anything that moved, the mutants set to looting as much form the suburbs as possible. Homes, shops, government buildings, everything was targeted. In the aftermath, it seemed that food and water were priorities, along with tools, weapons, and technology. This was a frightening trend.

It was about then that the populace got their first good look at the scroffulous hordes. They appeared human, but not quite. Many had developed abnormally shaped limbs, extra fingers, tentacle-like extremities or a combination of them, while all of them were covered in blisters and boils, and their off-coloured skin seemed to slough off at the edges. They were creatures of nightmare, and they knew it.

The police were almost powerless to stop them; for every cop that tried to make a stand, he ate lead from the guns of three different mutants. Caught totally unprepared, the Hive Defence Force was unable to mount anyhing but passive resistance. It was lucky for them that after an hour or so of looting, the horde passed back into the Wastes as quickly as they came.

But the damange had been done. The Army once again began rigiorous patrols of the Waste fringes, while the Air Force stepped up attacks on anything that moved in the depths of the Waste. But this time, the war would be taken to them. The Colonial Government made a plea to the Army to create a task force, who's job it was to go deep into the wastes for extended periods of time, alone and unsupported, kill mutants and find their lair. They agreed, and after eight months, six squadrons of the elite Kasrkin landed on the Red Planet. Equipped with the latest weapons and all-encompassing powered armour, they set off into the Waste...

But those wern't the only forces sent to the United Indiastan Martian Colony. Six combat divions, with full armoured and artillery support were shipped out from Homeland mere weeks after the Kasrkin began their pogroms. Several air battalions, consisting of a mix of fighters, bombers, and airborne infantry were dispatched as well, and a number of Fleet vessels were transfered to Mars to patrol the skies high above the colony, and lend precision orbital support if needed. And, of course, if the situation got entirely out of hand, the full scale tactical nuclear bombing of the Wastes had been approved. But only, of course, if neccessairy.

{Tag; For Intelligence Purposes}

The crackdown was bloody. Routes into the Wastes were not too common, and those that they'd known about had been barracaded and mined as best as possible. Limited incusions by Regular army forces continued regularly, but as the Army's hostile environment gear wasn't ment for continuous exposure, they couldn't chase the mutant bandits very far. The Kasrkin fared far better; the kill teams travelled deep into the the toxic hell of the Wastes, only to come back the next day with a two-pound bag full of the ears of their victims. Often they'd come back bullet ridden, a dozen or so blade wounds or worse, but still it was rare that the entire team didn't make it back alive. Despite their successes, they still hadn't found the larger bases that housed the mutants, so all the artillery and air power that the Army'd brought in sat mostly idle. There was no question that the conflict wouldn't grow much larger, but little progress was being made. That, above all else, frusterated Command more then anything.