War Criminals by Gavin Smith (ereader for textbooks .TXT) 📕

Machimoi flew into the ground. Roots exploded out of the dirt all around it. They ran towards the combat exoskeleton. The Cyclops was there first but her dad didn’t have the tools needed for the job. Miska arrived second. There was indeed an arrow sticking out of the Machimoi’s head, though the arrow looked as though it had been grown rather than made. Miska saw where the roots had cracked the combat exoskeleton’s armour. She squeezed the trigger on the flame gun and played it all over the Machimoi. Moments later Nyukuti and Raff were squirting the defoliant all over the roots. The roots whipped around in the flame, accompanied by the inhuman screaming, but they released the Machimoi. The pilot, blinded by the loss of the combat exoskeleton’s head, was thrashing around on the ground, his finger still curved around the trigger of his Dory railgun. The Cyclops knelt on the Machimoi to stop the flailing.

‘Easy, son,’ her dad told the Machimoi pilot, as he prised the railgun out of the combat exoskeleton’s hand. ‘You need to unbutton.’

Miska assumed her dad had a comms link with the Machimoi pilot as well. She was checking to the north, looking around the Cyclops towards the network of trenches and earthen ramparts. She heard the Machimoi unbutton.

‘Jesus Christ! Did you guys just flame me?’ the pilot demanded. He sounded panicked. He sounded young. Then he was screaming. Miska swung round. It took her a moment to work out what was going on. Roots had grown through the back of the Machimoi and into the pilot and were now dragging him down into the earth in a fountain of blood accompanied by the sound of rending flesh and snapping bones. The Cyclops stood up, one foot on the bucking Machimoi, and pointed the combat exoskeleton’s own railgun into the passenger compartment. He squeezed the trigger. At this range the hypersonic ripping noise was a physical force buffeting her. She went deaf as her implants and her helmet’s audio dampeners sought to protect her hearing. There was movement to her left as roots grew up around the Cyclops’s legs. The chain that fed the Machimoi’s railgun with ammo was severed from the, presumably, crushed ammunition hopper on its back. The Cyclops quickly fired off what remained into the ground at point-blank range. Dirt exploded into the air.

‘Move!’ Miska shouted over comms. She triggered the flame gun again, squirting fire all over the Machimoi’s bloody passenger compartment. The lines of flame were getting shorter and weaker. The Cyclops stood up but staggered as the roots around its leg tried to drag it back down. ‘Nyukuti, Raff, squirters! Cyclops’s legs!’

They must have heard because they were immediately squirting the defoliant all over the staggering war droid as it tried to tear itself free. Corenbloom added fire from his flame gun as well.

Something hit Miska in the chest hard. She staggered. Tried to remain upright but ended up sitting down on her ass, hard. She looked down at the hard armour breastplate that covered her chest. She could see the score on the plate where the bullet had hit her. Friendly fire. Suddenly the air was full of tracer fire from the north.

Assholes! She had told them to just use flame guns and the squirters in the camp.

‘Contact!’ It was Nyukuti who’d shouted. It was followed by the sound of short burst after short burst being fired from his slugthrower squad automatic weapon.

‘All call signs, watch your fields of fire!’ her dad shouted over comms and then the Cyclops hunkered down, forming a barrier between them and the incoming bullets with its own armoured body. Raff and Corenbloom were also firing their M19s south. Miska pushed herself to her feet and then she saw the ‘contact’.

She could sort of see why Raff had described them as women. They had a faintly female shape but they looked like living skeletons made of branch and bark walking slowly towards them. They wore natural crowns or crests of twigs, or had branch-like horns, or hair made of leaves. Their arms ended in root-like structures that writhed like snakes. There were five of the tree-creatures walking towards them. They were a childhood memory – twig figures Miska had made with her mother in those brief years she had been alive, given nightmarish form. They were out of range of the squirters and the flame guns.

‘Reloading,’ Miska told the other four over comms as she ejected the canister on her flame gun and kicked it away, replacing it with one of the spares. She brought the AK-47 up to her shoulder. Through the optical scope the tree-things didn’t look much better. They were taking their time closing with them. She took her time playing the scope over each of the five approaching creatures. Some had hollow sockets where eyes should be, others had fibrous or resinous growths that might have been eyes but there were too many of them and they were in the wrong places. She saw the impacts from Raff, Corenbloom and Nyukuti’s shots. The bullets blew splinters off the creatures, staggered them, but still they kept coming. She aimed at one of the figures. The crosshairs on the old-fashioned sight settled over the creature’s throat. Miska squeezed the slugthrower rifle’s trigger with the pad of her finger, firing a three-round burst. The wooden stock kicked back into her shoulder. The first round was a tracer, the phosphorescent tip making a line of light through the humid jungle night air. The round caught the tree-creature in the upper chest, knocking it back. The recoil made the rifle climb. The second round missed. The third round was a 9mm long, armour-piercing bullet of the type that had been developed during the war with Them. Designed to kill terrifying armoured alien bioborgs, the AP round hit the tree-creature in the face. The force of the bullet knocked the head back. Some splinters and sap went flying but that was about the extent