MOS : 19D Scout

Basic Skills

Part I  - Wilderness Survival

//

Time : 0605 Hours

Location : Classified

The wing-tips of the elegant and stately Lambda class Imperial shuttle skimmed over the treetop canopy of the dense tropical rainforest. The rev of its engines was distinctly out of tune amongst the alien calls of the highly diversified creatures down below. The streamlined craft cut through the thick morning gray mist, its presence a bewildering sight to the awakened avifauna just taking flight. The colourful birds cawed at the unwelcomed intrusion, their discordant calls making a cacophony in the dim light of dawn.

Gunnery Sergeant Hashi Shiyun shifted noiselessly in his seat beside the pilot of the shuttle. He studied the sprawling green mass intensely through the visor of his Scout Trooper helmet, taking in the sights and sounds of the jungle that lay below. From his high perch all looked serene and quiet. The never ending landscape of tall sky-reaching trees was indeed, quite picturesque. Yet he knew that down below, the sheer savageness of the jungle belied this image. The rainforest was an abode of fearsome and volatile creatures, raping and ravaging each other in their bitter struggle for survival.

Yet that was his very destination. The young soldier had recently enrolled for training as one of the elite of the Stormtrooper Corps ; a Scout Trooper. Reconnaisance has a vital role in modern warfare. And one of the most important facets of the training was imparting the skills of surviving in an unforgiving natural enviroment for extended periods of time. A Scout Trooper on a long range recon patrol has no hope of a resupply lifeline, as such a luxury may jeopardize the mission. The objective always came first. He would have to learn how to live off the land, or perish.

Another important aspect of his practical, hands-on training was navigation. Orienteering in a relatively unknown enviroment, using the bare minimum of technology, while overcoming difficult terrain was a daunting task. Especially in the jungle where there are almost no distinguishable landmarks to speak of, unless one could seperate one tree from another. Add vicious flesh-tearing predators to the equation and the result would test the human limits of any person to the extreme, leaving them hanging on precariously for their survival. The key to navigating through such adversaries was a sense of purpose. Or so he believed.

"How long till we reach the drop-off zone?" queried Hashi.

The pilot stirred in his seat and replied tonelessly, "ETA five minutes."

He exhaled slowly, relaxing the tension in his taut muscles. He scanned through his datapad, desperately skimming through the course module provided by the Academy. Yet what use was theoratical knowledge now? The instructors had given only the scantest of briefings. Here and now he had to face the challenge that beckoned for him sinisterly. The jungle would play havoc on his mind and body.

Play. Maybe that was the only requisite he needed ; a willingness to play. Maybe that was all there is to the game of survival. He was determined to come out the winner. It was as much of a battle against the jungle as it was against himself. Failure would certainly mean death, something which he was not quite ready for.

//

The gray haze parted as Hashi slowly marched down the lowered ramp. He immediately experience two odd feelings that discomforted him to a certain extent. The first was the sheer energy of life the rainforest exuded. From the moment his feet touched the moist ground he could feel the overwhelming presence of life, of the trees, the ferns and other assorted botany that enveloped him. And that of the red snakes, insecta, and the discerning stares of black primates looking down upon him from high above in the treetops.

The second disquieting feeling he sensed was that of hostility. He had no delusions that his physical presence was welcomed or wanted in nature's vast metropolis. His hand clenched and unclenched into tight fists several times in a show of defiance. It deliberately strayed close to the holster on his thigh, where he ran his fingers along the grip of his Q2s5 hold-out blaster pistol. The cold metallic touch of his weapon reassured him, toning down his insecurities.

"Got all your gear out, soldier?" came the voice of the pilot from somewhere in the darkened bay of the shuttle.

Sithspit. He forgot he was entitled to another firearm. "Where the hell is my carbine?"

The pilot stepped out onto the ramp for a moment to huck him a Stormtrooper II Carbine. It offered a better tool to defend himself with. Defend from what unknown entities he did not know, for now. The Stormtrooper II was nothing more than a sawed off version of a standard E-11. In return for an increase in firepower the accuracy of the weapon was greatly sacrificed. 

Hashi did a thorough check of his utility belt and extra pouches. He barely had any rations on him, his stomach would have to be kept in a tight knot throughout the duration of his march. Besides what limited food and water he was issued, the utility belt also stored spare ammunition, a swingline which was potentially useful, survival gear flares, a couple of concussion grenades and a thermal detonator at the back of his belt. He had no idea how explosives would help him in anyway, but he supposed that the instructors wanted to replicate down to the minute detail on how conditions would be like in the field.

Another long moment was spent meticulously rummaging through his backpack. The backpack supplied power to his helmet's macrobinocular viewplate and his comlink and his armour's internal temperature regulation devices, essentially functioning as a power unit. It also stored other random stuff like his datapad, an enviromental unit and other spare gear.

He nodded to the pilot, "I'm good to go."

"Good luck. This place can be a real green hades, I heard. It immolates sixty percent of trainees like you."

Hashi took the last comment with seeming indifference. "I'll make it through if I have to burn the whole damn jungle down."

The counter came scoffingly. "Typical alpha male bravado you Stormtroopers are notorious for. We will see about that."

With that, the pilot disappeared back into his craft and started up the engines, stranding Hashi in the tiny clearing that was the landing zone. He made a final check of his equipment, though any missed gear could not be recovered, now that the shuttle had gone. A sigh of relief marked that he had everything he needed on him. Not that what he had was sufficient, but it was better than nothing. After all he was supposed to be self-sufficient and not reliant on supplies. That was the whole point of his training. Survival in the wilderness. An ironic smile creased his lips.

His training objective was ostensibly straightforward. Complete a hundred klick march to a certain outlying training outpost roughly northwest to his position. He was to complete the journey in under four days, meaning he had to cover an average of roughly twenty to twenty-five kilometres each day. Yet beneath those orders, which on paper looked simple enough, were the complications of surviving such a gruelling march with rations that could only last him for a day at most. Complications which often meant death for over half of the course's aspiring candidates. Such was Imperial training ; taking the word brutality to a whole new level.

A foot tested the moist muddy ground. The wet squish of the soil provided hint of a heavy rainfall that had fallen upon the area just hours before his arrival. Hashi glanced up at the jungle canopy above him. The giant leaves and thick curling branches of century-old trees blocked most of his view of the sky above. Yet he could sense it was overcast. What little sunlight that penetrated the myriad of leaves was diminishing. Out here rain was perpetual, and it would fall again very soon. It was in such conditions that Gunnery Sergeant Hashi Shiyun, aspiring Scout Trooper, started off his onerous trek in the jungle.

//

The torrential rain pelted upon his armour, relentless in its attack. Rain was an intergral part of the jungle. It was an essential element for the modus vivendi of everything in its bowl. The liquid seeped down from the trees above. The plantlife absorbed it in ever generous amounts, the overhydration explaining the bloated size of several species. Crouched between a large bulbous fern that exceeded three metres in height and had leaves the spanned thrice of that, and a fallen dead trunk whose bore had the diameter of a small rancor, the white armoured figure looked distinctly disproportionate amongst the natural giants.

The silent figure of Hashi Shiyun, woefully out of place in his glaringly white armour, had made his best efforts to conceal himself in the thankfully, colored array of vegetation. The fauna was primary made up of green plants, yet there were tinges of orange, purple, red and other shades accounted to the wide array of flowers present. Yet white still stood out. Hashi had the common practical sense to carefully coat his armour in layers of black and brown mud. That was before the rain came and washed most of it all away in an unwelcomed polishing. He was back to square one.

He murmured another curse silently under his breath, directing it at the blasted jungle and the blasted rain. His knees were aching from all the crouching. His Stormtrooper II carbine was cradled in his arms. Through his macrobinocular viewplate, which offered a 180 degree arc of vision, he peered into the distance. It was obscured by the gray pelting pelts of water to such a degree that he could barely see five feet in front of him. His current situation was getting absurb. It was only his second day and he was already tired, cold and hungry. Hungrier than he ever felt in all his life. Frustration simmered in him. He was close to boiling point. If he was successful, he would be able to direct his anger at the cost of a living and breathing being. Soon.

There it was. The quiet but unmistakable crunch of heavy clawed feet. The sequence of heavy-footed landings revealed that they belonged to a quadrupad. A long moment later the viewplate of his helmet began transmitting hint of high amounts of thermal energy forward of his position. The infrared readings began to scroll on his viewplate. He did not need them to sense the massive creature's presence though. They were some skewered by the rain anyway. A tap of a button at the side of his helmet magnified the view in the distance. He could see the massive reptillian creature now. It had apparated between two tall offshoots of what may be passed off as young trees.

It was big and ugly. It was food. Not that Hashi was an aficionado for exotic cuisine, but hours of scouring the jungle floor and carefully cutting through the undergrowth had led him to the sobering conclusion that it was the only conceivable dish on the menu. Unless he wanted the apes in the treetops for dinner, which he found too inhuman for his tastes. He was disgusted to find that he had to resort to eating lizard to sustain himself. His rations of energy gel had been expanded sixteen hours ago, however, leaving him with no other choice.

The lizard in question was a Varanus, according to the stats his datapad provided. A lumbering saurian giant with a length of ten feet from the tip of its iron head to its whip-like tail. Eleven if one considered its foot long yellow forked tounge. The skin was reminiscent of woven steel armour, wrinkled, blackened and heavily scarred. A medieval king within his medieval territory. Its menacing head twisted with an air of almost regal power from side to side. It was a big bad boy, out on a hunt. And the prey was none other but Hashi. How the creature developed his craving for human flesh, he was not keen to find out.

And so the contradiction presented itself that the both of them were eager for a taste of the other's hide. Hashi had made the decision to dedicate a half-hour's worth of his precious time to tracking and stalking the beast in a dangerous and game of hide and seek. Which was the one hiding and the one seeking was not clearly defined in this potentially fatal game. It was good practice for Hashi regardless. The skills incurred in tracking a sneaky wild beast was no doubt of use in the field. But now it was time to end this engagement. One must die for the other to live.

Another sharp flick of that thin yellow forked tounge. Hashi was positive the creature could taste his presence. The massive leviathan crawled steadily forward through the rain, uncanningly resembling an AT-AT in terms of the sheer psychological fear it sank into its prey. The sinewy and muscular limbs terminated in refined claws capable of shredding the hardiest of prey with ease. The menacing hiss it emitted was not unlike that of an evil gust of wind.

Hashi tensed, his muscles twitching with apprehension and uncertainty. If the skulking predator had already pinpointed his position, as it ostensibly did, what good was it for him waiting like a trapped bantha? He brought the muzzle of his carbine up to his chest and slowly rose of the ground, the joints in his knees creaking audibly. Rising to his full height, he took a defiant step into the path of the Vanarus. There was a tense stand-off as the two gauged each other, assessing the threat the other posed. The momental lull was brief.

In an intense flurry the two burst into action, neither catching the other off his guard. The instincts of both the Vanarus and the Stormtrooper took over in a heartbeat, consuming their minds in a warp. Claw met blaster as the Vanarus lunged forward with an incredible speed that belied his slow lumbering image. Hashi dropped into a combat roll to the left of the charging Vanarus, firing blaster bolts that tore into the monster's thick black hide. They did nothing but superficial damage thus far, and elicited an ancient shrieking roar from the beast.

Hashi struggled to his feet and released another volley at the Vanarus as it made another vicious snarling charge. The bolts appeared to be nothing more than pinpricks against the thick armour of scales that encased the mammoth lizard, yet it slowed down the momentum of the creature somewhat. Hashi still took the full force as the creature slammed into him like a primitive battering ram, sprawling him. Moaning groggily his view went black for a moment, his faceplate masking the intense pain he felt.

The Vanarus panted visibly. Bleeding a thick dark mucus, it staggered over to its fallen prey, intent on delivering its coup de grace. Its jaws slowly opened, revealing a row of sharp incisors. Sensing that he was about to be eaten alive by the blasted creature, Hashi's eyes snapped back open. "The hell you ain't!!"

An agile and powerful kick to the side of the slobbering Varanus's head stunned it for a moment. In that brief opening Hashi had leapt up back on his feet acrobatically for the second time. His carbine was still grasped tightly in a cold fist.  Not wasting a second he jammed the muzzle against the temple of the dazed leviathan. "So long, you sick bastard."

It was over in a second. Not even the woven scales of armour could offer protection at point-black range. Up above, the shrieking caws of the birds had gone silent as if in awe and reverence at the fall of the great beast. The dark-furred primates stared down with blank stares, their black eyes set deep in their sockets. The smell of death began to diffuse into the immediate vincinity. The rain beat down upon them still, washing away the blood, red of his own, black of the Varanus. Yet the rain itself seemed to be abating.

A flick of his hand and a vibroblade cut across the midsection of the beaten Varanus. Hashi thought it was best to set about preparing lunch, no matter how abhorrent it appeared. To his horror the creature stirred once again, and he stepped back warily.

It vomitted.

Then it slumped back to the soil, truly dead. The stench of the loathsome yellow-green substance was unbearable. Hashi screamed a silent cry of despair within his heart. Food and nutrition had to be postponed once again. There was no way in hades the soldier, no matter how rugged or desperate, was going to make a meal out of that after that recent spate of vomitting. He sighed resignedly, the sigh of a man who had realized that life will never live up to naive preconceived notions of what was proper and fair. A large vicious gash, courtesy of the Varanus's claws, scarred the breastplate of his armour.

//

Darkness of a greater intensity could not be found save in the depths of deep space. Yet even deep space had illumination in the form of distant burning stars. Here, close to midnight, such illumination was provided by the bioluminiscent creatures such as the Monyet, a small mammal no bigger than a human-sized fist. Its glowing yellow eyes, disproportionately large, was on the search for its favourite prey, insectoids. The Kumbang, a grub-like worm, also provided light as it glowed bright red and slithered along the thin stalk of a plant, unafraid of predators due to its high toxicity.

Hashi Shiyun could spare no time for petty rests. What sleep he snatched was spent in the gray morning, where it was much less dangerous. Out here, in the black night, where a whole array of nocturnal predators far more terrifying than that of the day lurked, it was best for him to be on his feet and moving. Silent as a ghost he was. His helmet fed instantaneous information about the terrain that lay below him, allowing him to navigate the labyrinth of darkness. He was no more than an infiltrator of the jungle.

Yet as alien the jungle was to him, the young man seemed to be going at a steady purposeful pace. It was the middle of his third night, and he was near the end of his labourious, if not painfully-educational, hike. And the end of the first part of the course module. He paused to check his bearings with his datapad. He took the time to reflect upon his stay in the green hades. He rapidly came to conclusion that his relationship with the capricious jungle was that of intense hatred. Yet he could not deny that it was not simply a battle against the elements. It was as much as a fight against himself. The fight for discipline.

He stowed the datapad back into his backpack. A kilometre left to go in his current direction. He easily covered the distance in under ten minutes even given that he had to navigate around fallen logs and similar obstacles. He stepped over pit vipers and brushed aside lethal scorpions that had grasped onto his armour plates unwittingly. In a tirade of rage he tore apart the undergrowth that provided the last barrier between the jungle and the Imperial outpost he had desperately tried to reach for the past three standard days.

A single elevated platform greeted his hungry eyes. Atop that platform was a lone Sentinel transport shuttle, his ticket back to base and decent civilization. Imperial civilization. Away from the wretched jungle he had learnt to hate so much over a matter of 72 hours. Though the jungle was already creeping up upon it, the outpost was sorely out of place with its vile surroundings.

A single Stormtrooper, immaculate in his gleaming flawless white armour, greeted him. "I am Sergeant First Class Zafrie. Come aboard to receive your after-action review and I'll give you a ride back to base after that."

He paused and looked over Hashi. "You look pretty bloodied."

The other soldier, clad in his torn and bruised Scout trooper armour, shrugged it off nonchalantly.

"Things went pretty rough. It was a tough course to go through."

"What you had just rough-weathered through was just the preliminaries." Zafrie grinned maniacally behind his helmet.

"There are many more aspects of Scout training you have yet to cover. This portion of your training is the most physically taxing. The rest will be much more technical and intricate work, truly testing your capabalities and deeming whether you deserve the honour of this elite specialty."

Hashi swirled that in his mind thoughtfully. "Technical? After what I've been through, I'm actually glad to know that I have some classroom lessons in store for me."

"Rest assured there will still be plenty of outfields for you, trooper." Zafrie shook his head.

"For now, I think you deserve a well-earned rest."

An acknowledging nod. "I most certainly do. Thank you."

"You would be glad to hear to that I have a case of Savareen Brandy aboad, trooper," added Zafrie evenly as Hashi boarded the ramp with heavy steps.

In many ways the struggle with the Varanus summarised the grim lessons he had forcefully learnt over the past three days and three nights. Surviving the wilderness not only imposed a great deal of weight on his physical strength and mental discipline. It broiled down to something much simpler. The primordial and overwhelming instinct to survive. It had carried him through the rain and the sleepless nights, the hunger and the cold. Perhaps that was the most vital asset.

//
 
-----------------------
Gunny Hashi Shiyun