Cascadia Badlands, east of B-16
[16/05/2056]
Zone Captain Peele thundered across the hills, the servos of his armour amplifying every motion into effortless strides. The loose dirt of the hillside sprayed up around him with each footfall. Spread out behind him, five more trails of billowing dust marked the approach of his squad.
They were all armoured in fifth generation power armour. The hulking bubbles of reinforced-plaspex with armour plating turned them into walking tanks, able to survive in even the most inhospitable environments. The arms and legs were almost comical, sticking out of the blocky mass like an afterthought.
The loose dirt of the plains gave way to patchy yellow grass as they entered the valley. This was one of the few regions of arable land outside of the Zone Wall at Vancouver. Clusters of transparent plastic bubbles sprouted like blisters, protecting the precious crops within. This island of greenery was a welcoming and idyllic sight - or would have been, if not for the black thunderheads looming over the horizon.
Overlooking the greenhouses was a rather less modern structure; a weathered wooden farmhouse that might have been built a hundred or more years ago. Peele highlighted the structure on their communal heads up display, but gave his squad a hand signal for extra caution. Ion Storms could wreak havoc with comms, and he wasn't taking any chances.
Acknowledgment tones chirped over the squad radio band, so Peele took off at a rolling lope towards the seemingly abandoned farmhouse. As he approached, he saw peeling paint, and shutters hanging off their hinges on the upper storey. More disturbingly, a jagged line of crystalline growths was visible along the partially collapsed wall. They pulsed rhythmically with a sickly green glow.
"Two and three," Peele called over the radio. "Clear out the homestead. Four, five and six, I want you to spread out and look for additional signs of infection around the farm site."
Peele unstrapped the bulky sonic blaster slung over his armoured shoulder, and made a quick check of the power conduits connecting it to the miniaturised fusion reactor on his back. He took aim at a spindly, finger-like outcropping of green crystal protruding from the wall of the abandoned homestead. A twitch of his trigger finger, and the air began to visibly shimmer with intense sound waves. The crystals shook, too, slivers falling off the main spire, and in a few seconds the whole spear was reduced to a pile of sparkling dust on the ground.
Peele re-slung the blaster, and pulled out what could only be described as a high-tech vacuum cleaner. The two devices were attached to the bulky black fusion reactor on the back of his suit of power armour. He gripped the handles of his cleaner and suctioned up the splinters of Tiberium dust that blew around the homestead, stopping it from spreading further and seeding new fields of the tenacious substance.
As one of the Reclamation Squads of the 19th Recon Division, their objective was to move in behind the force's advancing line and clear any Tiberium infestation once more immediate threats had been neutralised. The rest of the division would then be deployed to reinforce the area.
Despite the emphatic claims of the GDI Public Relations Department, living in a Blue Zone wasn't a surefire guarantee of safety, as the majority of the GDI populace had been led to believe. Outside of the walled cities the farmlands and green hills were home to raiding parties of mutants, fanatical Nod holdouts, and the ever present Tiberium that spread like a cancer throughout even these last bastions of humanity.
This was where it was plain to see that Tiberium was taking the Earth – not in the deserts, the Red Zones or the crystal-ridden wastelands. Even in their own backyard, GDI was fighting tooth and nail to keep their planet safe.
Peele shook himself out of his morbid thoughts. The big picture stuff wasn't his concern; all he could do was deal with the situation in front of him. He called out to his squad over the radio.
"Sitrep," the Captain requested.
"Two in. I've covered the lower level of the homestead. Minimal infestation inside. No one home either."
"Three in. I'm on the upper storey now. Minimal personal effects; could be abandoned, or just a loner."
"Four. Covering the fields. Seems like they've been growing some sort of Tib-mutated crops. Could be Nod zone-runners."
Peele digested this information, and ordered Four to collect samples of the mutated crop for analysis. "Right, five, hit me."
Static filled the radio band.
With a pit of anxiety growing in his stomach, Peele called out again.
Yet more static.
"Six, investigate five's last known position, let me know when you get eyes on her."
There was static from Six, too.
Peele breathed deeply as the adrenaline flooded his system, and began giving orders.
"Three, assist Two downstairs, then pull back to my position. Be warned, Five and Six non-responsive; possible hostiles on site."
"Affirmative," replied Two. Peele waited for Three's response, but it didn't come.
"Three, acknowledge."
There was only more static.
This simple operation was rapidly spiralling out of his control.
"Two, three is down, pull out, repeat, pull out! Four, group up on my transponder."
All across the band, there was static. Peele unshouldered his sonic blaster and ran full pelt towards the door of the homestead, armoured shoulder lowered, and smashed it into splinters, still calling out for Three to withdraw.
As he crashed into the hallway, the Captain caught a glimpse of Three's dismembered power armour strewn across the room. Sticky red blood mingled with the servo fluid that leaked from the broken joints. Two was standing in the doorway to a cellar, discharging waves of high-intensity sound at something in the gloom at the foot of the stair. Plaster rained from the peeling walls.
Peele started forward, straining against the inertia of the metal and servos that entombed him. He was halfway down the hallway when a pulse of lightning flashed. Some unseen force hurled Two across the room, turning him into a deadly projectile. The half-ton suit of armour collided with Peele's, throwing both of them against the wall. The rotten timbers had no chance against the weight of the suits and both of them hurtled into the next room in a crash of splintering wood.
Something wet trickled down Peele's forehead, and he gasped at the splintering pain that filled his chest when he took a breath. The room was a dim blur, but something was moving there. Over the bulk of Two's smoking armour, a dark shape rose into view. A shape with slender, distorted limbs, and broad shoulders bristling with spines.
He tried to lift his hand, but it weighed a thousand tons. "Squad down," he rasped into the radio, as lightning surged again, illuminating his shattered body in its harsh radiance.
Extract from "Tiberium Mutation – an Evolving Process"
By Professor Stephan Renald
The acceleration in Tiberium growth is what's killing the newest mutations. The Forgotten generations of mutants and their direct descendants are from a time when the Tiberium mutation process was, dare I say it, friendlier to living organisms. The Divination experiments carried out by the Brotherhood of Nod's biologists only succeeded because at that stage in its evolution, Tiberium was adapting native organisms to help it propagate (see Dr Boudreau's breakdown of the 'Blossom Tree', pages 50-67 of the 2032 GDI Ecological Summit report). Once it had established a firm foothold, it had no need to continue creating these mutated organisms, and began a more aggressive phase of direct assimilation of matter after what it perceived as an attack on its developmental process. Yes, I speak as if Tiberium is a thinking, living entity. I'll return to this point later.
The mutants of this current generation are few and far between, simply because their bodies can't adapt to the changing conditions in the Red Zones quickly enough. The descendants of the Forgotten have Tiberium in their veins from birth and so thrive in the increasingly toxic environments in the Red Zones. First generation mutations, however, are not yet well enough adapted to the deeper zones to survive there, but are too heavily mutated to survive in an environment that we find habitable…
…Tiberium's 'purpose' was a contentious point of discussion in the early 30s, which has now mostly been eschewed in scientific discourse due to the current assimilative process's seemingly uniform absorption of matter (in fact, the leaching process is now producing substances with much greater concentrations of minerals than the last stage of evolution) leading some to believe that Tiberium was 'designed' simply as a tool to extract elements in an easy-to-process form). The Visitors' preoccupation with harvesting the crystals and their use of the base-substances as building materials seems to support this hypothesis. However, the fact that Tiberium has shown marked reactive and adaptive abilities when faced with obstacles, suggestive it is alive in some sense, just as a biosphere of high enough intricacy can react to defend itself through cause and effect in a similar way to a living organism. This level of complexity is simply extraneous in a simple tool of resource extraction.
It seems, now more than ever, that the previous hypotheses regarding 'terraforming agent' or 'harvesting tool', whilst describing its effects, are too oversimplified to properly explain Tiberium's purpose. I believe it would be obtuse to the point of arrogance to assume that it does not have one, and that we are closer to discovering that purpose than ever before.