Fast Current and her hunting squad had traveled to the other side of this planet to see for themselves that majestic and gigantic creature, which was almost as big as Bothol. Other than a few such restricted animals, which weren’t so common any way, any Bodar could freely hunt in the oceans. This suited most Bodars fine because the Bodars were as much at home in the water as they were on land. In many ways Bodars were more comfortable under water than on dry land. The only thing missing from a marine hunt was the delicious cunning of a human prey.
All human settlements, however small had been cataloged by the central computer of the Ravenous. These settlements were strictly off limits for unauthorized hunts. Hunt Masters would allocate a hunt quota to hunting teams for authorized hunts, where a particular settlement of humans would be designated for the hunt. Only the number of humans as authorized in the quota would be allowed to be hunted and if desired taken as a trophy.
The remaining humans in the settlement had to be left untouched for future hunts and to give them an opportunity to breed and restore their numbers. An unauthorized attack on any human settlement for a hunt would invite a harsh punishment from the Hunt Master. The only unauthorized hunt of a human that was permissible was in self-defense or to prevent an ambush or an imminent attack on a Bodar hunting party.
As Fast Current checked and double checked the situational awareness computer, she could not find a listed human settlement anywhere near this place. Human names and human units of measure were superimposed on the map that Fast Current was checking, and it listed the area around this beach as Badlands for hundreds of units that the humans called Kilometers. This area apparently wasn’t suitable for human habitation, and hence there were no settlements nearby. Yet Fast Current could hear the voices of human young.
From her experiences of hunting and raiding human settlements, Fast Current knew that humans did not take their young to places that were unsuitable for habitation and potentially hostile – unless there were adult humans also present to take care of those young! That would mean that there must be unaccounted and undocumented humans present nearby. If she was lucky, there might even be an uncharted human settlement nearby! A settlement that wasn’t present on the Hunt Master’s computer in the first place, couldn’t be missed! Neither would anyone know of humans hunted, who didn’t exist in the Hunt Master’s database to begin with!
If she and her sister killed any humans here, it couldn’t be deemed as an unauthorized hunt, because these humans didn’t officially exist. Even if someone found out, it could easily be passed off as an ambush perpetrated by the humans. She and her sister could easily claim to be surprised and ambushed by humans, whom they weren’t expecting since this settlement wasn’t listed in their situational awareness computer!
Fast Current made a complicated set of pincer signals towards her sister. Bodars reverted to their ancient system of signaling when hunting, especially under water. It came naturally to them and was programmed into their genes as a marine hunter from a faraway planet, a long time ago during the course of their evolution. Fast Current’s sister Rising Tide indicated that she had heard those sounds as well and had come to the same conclusion as Fast Current. They excitedly signaled to each other at this unexpected windfall of an opportunity to indulge in an unbridled hunt of humans. The only bummer would be that they would not be able to brag about this freely back at the base. The two Bodar sisters walked up the slope of the reef towards the beach in the direction of the squealing sounds of laughter. They did not break out of the surface, but just raised their eye stalk above the water.
There were eleven human children on the beach, running around, splashing water at each other and generally making a lot of noise. Fast Current knew from her briefings that the human young indulged in these kind of activities, which they called playing. It was in some ways analogous to young Bodars in a nursery pool practicing mock ambush and attacks on rocks in preparation for a life as a hunter. Many species that were hunters, indulged in such play as a practice in the early stage of their lives across the universe. What was of more interest to Fast Current and Rising Tide though, were the two human adults sitting on the beach at some distance. They knew that these two adults were the minders of the children playing. Human children needed constant supervision, unlike Bodar hatchlings.
The two Bodar sisters knew that there had to be more human adults present somewhere nearby. Eleven children would not be present in the middle of nowhere with just two human adults. There must be some human settlement nearby, probably a band of humans hiding from the Bodars. That is why the settlement does not show up on the computers. What an unexpected windfall! A whole human settlement free to be hunted, and the spoils to be shared between just the two of them! Rising Tide’s claw segment touched Fast Current, and her claw was thrumming with excitement and anticipation.
The two Bodar sisters quickly hatched up a plan. If the two of them wanted to kill all the thirteen humans on the beach, they could have done it within moments, before any one of those humans could even take a step off the beach. That would however not be a very satisfying hunt. Most of the humans on the beach were children, pathetically feeble who would go down with a single strike. The two adults wouldn’t be much fun either. The adults clearly were not geared for combat. Like the children, the adults had shed most of the covering fabric from their body. These humans had a strange penchant for covering their bodies with fabric. The humans were only the second species that the Bodars had encountered, who liked to cover their body for nonfunctional reasons.
The other species that the Bodars had encountered, who covered their body with brightly colored plastic clothes did it to display their social status. From what Fast Current had learnt about humans, the fabric clothes that the humans wore, also performed that function to a certain extent. However, the primary reason to wear fabric clothes, it seems, was to hide their sex organs.
The Bodars had found this strange, because most sexually reproducing organisms that they had encountered across space had thrived on exactly the opposite. Mating success in sexually reproducing organisms, and evolutionary pressure usually pushed sexually reproducing creatures to prominently display their sexual organs and sexual prowess. The better the display, the better the chance of finding a mate, and hence the better the chance of passing on their genes.
It seems that the evolution of these humans had taken some perverse twist somewhere in the past, which had resulted in cultural preference for exactly the opposite behavior to normal sexual animals. In any case being unclothed also made it easy to determine that a human was not armed and prepared for combat. Humans lacked an exoskeleton. Their bodies were soft and squishy, which could be damaged with trivial ease. The humans overcame this limitation by wearing external artificial armor in combat. Without this armor, there was no fun hunting humans because they would die with the first blow struck. Even an armored but unarmed human was no fun hunting, because there was no element of danger in the hunt. The humans had no effective natural weapon like the Bodar pincers.
The two Bodar sisters decided the course of action. They would surface out of the water slowly, placing themselves in plain sight and giving the humans, whose panicked reaction was predictable, enough time and opportunity to run towards the settlement to raise the alarm. This would also have the beneficial effect of those panicked humans leading them straight to their settlement, without the sisters having to use their odor sniffing equipment to locate it. The sisters would follow the fleeing children and their adult chaperons at just the right distance to give the humans enough time to arm and armor themselves before attacking. Then the real fun would begin!
As Fast Current and Rising Tide slowly started walking up the slope of the beach, the reaction of panic was as predicted. The children ran towards the adults, and all of them abandoned whatever they had carried to the beach including their clothes and started running off the beach towards a formation of tall rocks close to the beach. What the two sisters hadn’t predicted, b
ut in hindsight should have, was that these weren’t animals they were hunting, but a species with technology. The humans had enough technology to almost take them to their neighboring star, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when one of the adults in the fleeing group was detected transmitting radio signals.
Fast current hadn’t detected any technological piece of equipment on the persons of the two adults when she had surveyed them. The two adults had essentially been naked except for a strip of clothing hiding their sexual organs. The two adults hadn’t reached for any equipment lying on the beach. They had simply run, abandoning everything they had brought to the beach, including their clothing. Yet one of the two adults were transmitting radio signals!
Fast Current belatedly realized that at least one of the two adults had a transmitter probably surgically implanted in their body. Most human adults had a very rudimentary and primitive computer embedded under their skin, akin to what Fast Current had embedded under her own shell. The level of technology embedded under human skin was rudimentary compared to her own equipment, but consistent with the stage of technological sophistication at which the humans currently were. It was rare for a human though, to embed a transmitter in their body, probably because it consumed a lot more power. Unfortunately for Fast Current and Rising Tide, one of the two adult human minders had such a transmitter implanted.
Fast Current had a quick decision to make. Should she shoot down the two adults? Her sensors couldn’t make out which of the two adults was transmitting, and it was possible that both human adults had transmitters. Ergo, she would have to shoot both. What would that achieve? The damage had already been done. Whatever advance warning she had hoped to prevent, had already been delivered to the human settlement. The only thing killing the two human adults would achieve would be to panic the eleven children into running helter-skelter. At that moment the two human adults were doing a remarkable job of herding the children, leading them and Fast Current towards the settlement. Fast Current decided not to shoot and probably committed the first tactical mistake of the day.
It was basic hunting skill not to follow the exact footsteps of the prey. Especially if the prey were as cunning as these humans. That was the easiest way for a hunter to be led into an ambush or a booby trap. Not even a hatchling Bodar committed such basic mistakes, and neither did Fast Current and Rising Tide. The panicked humans were running through wide open Badlands territory, with little or no cover provided by the landscape. There was no need to follow the exact route taken by them. The two Bodar sisters followed the humans, taking a completely different path, while keeping a visual track of them at all times.
When Fast Current and her sister saw the humans disappear into a crack in the rocks, they knew that they had located at least one of the entrances to the human settlement, which was perhaps more of a hideout. These humans must have made a habitat out of natural or artificial caves dug in those rocks. Fast Current was well aware of such human tactics. Bodars themselves used such tactics when required. There could be multiple entrance and exits for such a cave system, and the sisters would have to be on a lookout for such exits from where the humans could spring an ambush.
It would be safer to flush out the humans from those caves, than to try and follow them inside even if the caves were large enough for the larger bulk of the Bodars to enter them. Those caves were almost certain to contain a large number of ambush points as defense mechanisms. The first order of business would be to send tiny seeker robots into those caves after the humans, to survey the layout of the caves and then decide the optimal mechanism to flush out the humans hiding inside.
Rising Tide was about to release a few of the seeker robots, when the Bodar sisters noticed a human exiting the same crack in the rocks, where the fleeing humans had disappeared. The computers could easily have translated what the human was screaming, but Fast Current didn’t need a computer to figure out that the human was screaming and shouting incoherently, repeating something repeatedly. Humans were known to use deceptive verbal communication during combat either to try and save their lives or to gain some advantage. Bodars were taught to ignore all human verbal communication while on a hunt. Fast Current did not even bother to translate what the human was saying. It was a mistake.
The human was frenetically running towards Fast Current and Rising Tide, as she kept up her screaming. It was a she! Both the Bodar sisters had hunted enough humans to distinguish between the two sexes of humans. In the case of this particular human running towards them, it was particularly easy to make out. This human was far shorter in height than the average, and had an extremely high-pitched voice. When in non-combat gear, the two sexes often wore distinct clothes. This human was dressed in black flowing robes that covered her entire body, including the head. This type of clothing was worn in this part of the planet only by human females. She wore no body armor., and was armed only with a long steel blade that humans called a sword.
Scanners showed that there were no explosives on her either. The sensors and the scanners would have been able to sniff out the explosive molecules from any kind of explosive if she had been carrying one at a distance. She did seem to carry a rather large storage of electromagnetic charge under her flowing robes. The computer marked it as a power source, possibly for a prosthetic boost of power like some of the powered armor that the Bodars had seen when facing organized fighting forces during the initial days of the invasion.
That fact only increased the anticipation of the two Bodar sisters for the first kill of the day! The sword that the human was carrying was of little threat to a Bodar’s hard exoskeleton. The only way to cause damage would be to wield it so skillfully as to be able to somehow lodge it between two overlapping plates of the Bodar shell. That was unlikely, even for the most skillful human combatant, and this human looked far from it. The only other way to cause any arm would be to use powered boost of human strength. If this pathetic human coming to attack at least had some power boost, it might just give the two Bodar sisters some extra moments of fun killing her.
On hind sight, Fast Current realized that she should have suspected something more than met their eye stalks, when they saw that lone crazed human female rushing towards them. This human was clearly not a combatant, and neither was she equipped for combat. Humans did not rush out singly in a suicidal charge, unless they were cornered. Suicidal charge! Then again, if the human had been laden with explosives, the computer would have warned them from afar!
Humans were known to use the tactics of sacrificial suicide by a few to give others a chance of success. It involved a few humans laden with explosives rushing into a mass of Bodars, and blowing themselves up on proximity. Bodars had learnt that painful lesson quickly enough during the initial days of the invasion and had reprogrammed their computers and recalibrated their personal sensors to give an early warning of any approaching human laden with explosives. This human was not laden with explosives, so why would the computer raise an alarm?
The inventiveness of these humans knew no bounds, which is what made them such fun to hunt. The humans had realized that such suicide rush was no longer effective and rarely tried it these days. This human female was on a suicide mission, but the objective was slightly different. Fast Current would have gotten a clue had she bothered to translate what the woman was saying. As she rushed towards the two Bodars she kept chanting – “Allāhu Akbar”!
The two bulky boxes that were strapped around Leila’s body were the highest-grade capacitors that humans had ever produced. They were the pinnacle of humans’ material technology, capturing electrical charge at densities unimaginable even a hundred year prior. Yet those capacitors were never used to store energy for power hungry applications like electric cars or powered armor. There was a simple reason for that. Those capacitors were extremely unstable. Leila thought clicked the trigger a second before Rising Current’s pincers could reach out and neatly cut her raised arms out of her body. In that second her entire life flashed in front of her.
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Leila remembered her childhood growing up in the olive orchards near Hatay. The first day she met Abdul as a teenager. Their marriage and her first night as a bride. The birth of her first child and the two that followed. She remembered the joys, trials and tribulations of raising her three kids. She remembered holding her first granddaughter in her hands for the first time, and all the grand children that were to follow. Then the train of memories turned dark, as the demons arrived and Allah’s Qayamat (Judgment Day) seemed to have descended on this world. Rivers of blood ran through her small fishing village. Her two sons were never found, but she could not erase the picture of Abdul’s dismembered body found close to the house. She only hazily remembered running away towards the hills with her daughter-in-law and her two grandchildren.
The demons preferred the coast, so people ran for the hills and then further hinterland towards Anatolia. The arduous trek that she, and the rest of the refugees undertook flashed in front of Leila’s eyes. Drifting through the Badlands in search of food, water and shelter, moving from one refuge cave to another till they ended up next to the cursed sea again. Now these demons had discovered their hideout, the last refuge of her ragged group, the last hope for her grandchildren, the last of her blood left alive. Leila would stop these demons from touching her grandchildren, or die trying. She got her wish.
The two capacitors strapped on Leila’s body connected with each other, discharging the tremendous amount of current stored in a matter of milliseconds. The heat melted the conducting wires, but the vast majority of the energy had nowhere to go. So, the energy discharged in the same way as it does in nature when a large amount of charge builds up in the clouds… it formed lightning! Among many forms of energy that a lightning produces, one of the major forms is EMP – Electro Magnetic Pulse. In the case of the device detonated, this EMP output was magnified deliberately by the choice of conducting wires used, which in the process of melting and evaporating channeled a significant portion of the energy as EMP. The rest of the energy in the form of electricity found the shortest route to the ground – through Leila’s body. Leila didn’t suffer. She died instantly.
Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5) Page 4