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

Well shit, Miska thought. She was aware of tracers hitting the Cyclops’s armoured body, which protected their backs from their own troops. The phosphorescent-tipped rounds went spinning off into the air. Then the Cyclops opened up with its back-mounted Dory railgun. One of the tree-creatures was snatched backwards by the hypersonic 20mm rounds and turned into so much kindling in mid-air. That’s more like it. Though the Dory didn’t sound right as it fired. She heard a sound from behind her. Something fast-moving and hard hitting armoured plate. She’d heard the noise before when large calibre weapons hit armoured vehicles, but it didn’t sound right somehow. She was turning around as she heard the sound again. The Cyclops’s legs went from underneath it. Horrified, Miska saw the arrows sticking out of the war droid’s head and its chest. Roots grew from the arrow crushing the Cyclops’s head, burrowing into its chest cavity to destroy its power source, its CPU. That is not your dad, she told herself, while still hoping he’d had time to evacuate his electronic ghost back to the Hangman’s Daughter on a tight beam uplink. Your real dad is dead.

She turned back to the tree-creatures. Their slow movement through the heavy pollen bloom was an obvious power play. They were trying to intimidate the Bastards before they were in flame gun and squirter range. It wasn’t a completely ineffective tactic, Miska decided. Though she was far more worried about the thing shooting the arrows. She switched the AK-47 to the grenade launcher manually. She had no real idea if the switch had worked because her IVD had long ago stopped talking to the AK-47’s smartlink. C’mon, c’mon, she thought. It had been a long time since she’d fired anything without using a smartlink and grenade launchers weren’t the most accurate of weapons. She allowed for the big projectile’s drop, aiming the weapon at the tree-creature’s head but hoping for the larger chest cavity. She squeezed the trigger. There was the popping noise of the 30mm under-barrel grenade launcher firing. The grenade hit the approaching tree-creature in the chest, the armour-piercing tip pushing through the branch-like ribs before the explosive charge detonated. It left a pair of legs and a wooden spine swaying in the humid breeze before it toppled over.

‘HEAP grenades work,’ Miska said over open comms. She was still aware of ‘friendly’ rounds sparking off the now-dead Cyclops behind them. ‘Nyukuti, you’ll lay down suppressing fire, Corenbloom, Raff, you’ll reload your launchers with HEAP grenades.’ She didn’t wait for acknowledgement. Instead she just knelt down and worked the pump on the 30mm grenade launcher, ejecting the other three grenades in the weapon’s tubular magazine into her hand. She pushed them into the drop pouch that rode her left hip to sort out later. Then she quickly reloaded the launcher with her last four HEAP grenades, working the slide to put one in the chamber. She aimed at another one of the creatures. A grenade exploded behind the advancing line.

‘Take your time,’ Miska told the other three over direct comms. ‘Aim for their heads to hit their chests,’ she said and fired. Another of the creatures exploded.

‘Reloading,’ Nyukuti told them. He ejected the empty cassette from the SAW, grabbed another from one of the large pouches hanging off his belt and slid the cassette containing two-hundred rounds of vacuum-packed caseless ammunition home. Then he was down on one knee, ejecting the grenades from his under-barrel launcher and replacing them with HEAPs.

Take your time, she told herself, exhale, squeeze. The popping sound. The AK-47 slamming back into her shoulder as she fired. The grenade missed but exploded close enough to one of the tree-creatures to send it flying. She was aware of more explosions. Corenbloom and Raff missing. Panicked fire. No help from technology. The tree-creature that she’d knocked over got up. Something about the cast of its wooden face told Miska it was angry. They charged. They were really fast.

There were more explosions behind the sprinting creatures as Raff, Corenbloom and now Nyukuti missed again. Miska took her time and aimed before firing. Her wired reflexes slowed everything down to slow motion. The grenade in the air was heading straight for the charging creature closest to her. It was dead on target. It would hit the creature’s chest cavity and blow it apart. Then the creature moved. The grenade exploded harmlessly behind it as it closed. Miska aimed again and squeezed the trigger. The feed mechanism on the grenade launcher jammed. Miska moved her right hand from the AK-47’s grip to the flamer and squeezed that trigger. Flame squirted out of it, engulfing the wooden figure. It kept coming. Miska’s left hand worked the slide on the grenade launcher and ejected the final HEAP grenade. She knelt to pick it from the dirt. The burning tree figure reached for her. Miska pushed the grenade back into the launcher and worked the slide to chamber it. Burning root-like tendrils wrapped around her throat and lifted her into the air. Her unprotected chin burned. The tendrils were crushing her armoured neck protection. Then Nyukuti was there. He fired his grenade launcher at point-blank range into the creature’s chest cavity. Due to her wired reflexes, Miska had the luxury of thinking: Shit! Then the grenade blew.

There was a lot of strangely resilient wood and armour between Miska and the explosion. Her inertial armour helped deaden and distribute the force of blast to minimise the impact. She was still thrown backwards, head-over-heels, to bounce off the dead Cyclops before sliding back to the ground, landing head-first. She was barely conscious, in fact unconsciousness seemed quite a welcoming idea. She was vaguely aware that the force of the blast had blown Nyukuti into Corenbloom, taking them both to the ground in a tangle of limbs. She heard that inhuman screaming noise again. She saw the burning, one-armed head and torso crawling towards her.

‘Oh c’mon!’ she shouted as she forced herself to