Chapter Thirty - When the Trees Start Speaking Plant

“We’re not eco-terrorists. That word leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Terrorism is the unlawful use of force to coerce action.

You too, can help our crusade for a cleaner, greener world, by buying our exclusive Mother Earth NFTs!”

--Eco-friends website, 2025

***

“Spare the fucking trees,” I muttered as I hovered over the forest. The convoy was just about to slip into it, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

Thick, older woods, with only the road splitting it apart. We had maybe a kilometre and a bit of woodland to pass through, some of it pretty thin in places, but a few chunks were pretty thick. It looked like the fields before and after the treeline didn’t line up. Maybe this area was some missed spot on a bureaucrat's map of the region, left alone so that it could grow peacefully.

Didn’t matter.

I didn’t need to clear out the forest of aliens. That was too much of an ask. All I had to do was stop the little fuckers from hitting the convoy.

And Grasshopper added to the fucking challenge by asking that I not hurt the nice trees. For fuck’s sake.

Resonators might do it. Place enough of them down along the main path and it would melt the aliens. I could ask Myalis to tune them so they didn’t melt the greenery too. Resonators weren’t fast-acting though, they took a good dozen seconds to start liquifying an antithesis, and it had to be relatively close to the grenade for it to work.

Good area denial, shit at alpha-damage.

It was going to be like using one of those sound-guns on a crowd to disperse it.

“Oh, that’s an idea,” I said.

Something came to mind?

“Myalis, is there a kind of... tear-gas bomb?”

Yes. Up to and including some which have been outlawed by international treaty!

“Anything like that which works on the Antithesis. I don’t need them dead, I need them to fuck off away from the convoy.”

I think I see your reasoning. Yes, there are some gaseous chemicals that can irritate and ward off antithesis. Unfortunately their impact is greatly diminished when used in open areas. Laying some down along the convoy’s route is possible, but the amount of gas necessary to secure the path would be prohibitive. There is currently a strong wind blowing opposite the direction the convoy is travelling in. I have another solution that works on a similar idea.

“I’m all ears,” I said.

I would propose using a Biodegradable Enforcement and Extermination Swarm grenade.

“A... B.E.E.S.?” I said, working out the obvious acronym. “What is that, a jar-full of bees?”

Small mechanical flying drones, entirely made of biodegradable materials, and able to bore and cut their way into the softer flesh of organic adversaries. A singular unit is mostly harmless, their time to kill is too great, but a swarm of several hundred or thousand can slow down, injure, and eventually kill a great number of antithesis within a designated area. Their operation time and range is limited though.

“Coupled with resonators though,” I muttered. “Yeah, fuck it, let’s try it. I’ll zip down the road. You drop resonators every couple of metres. We’ll have the entire road be lethal to the xenos so they won’t linger there. Then we drop your BEES all over.”

You will only need to deploy them at the head of the convoy, they can travel alongside the convoy and relocate themselves along its length. Dropping a canister every fifty metres as the convoy moves should be sufficient.

“That sounds perfect,” I said. I started to fly lower, the road zipping by beneath me. I noticed Grasshopper waving to me as I shot past. The bike self-corrected and pulled up a notch, which was probably good because otherwise I was going to really test my armour’s capability when it came to roadrash resistance.

“Start dropping them,” I said.

Resonators appeared by my side and fell. Same as the bombing run a few minutes ago, but without the big booms or the satisfying woosh of fire. Instead... not much, really. Myalis wasn’t setting the bombs off already, not when there weren’t any aliens around for them to work on. It made more sense to wait until the antithesis were in a compromising position.

The road curved a few hundred metres in, then it turned around in the opposite direction for a little while. The forest thinned out and I pulled up as I exited the woods and flew out across open fields of... some sort of farmable stuff. Corn maybe?

I flew in a wide circle, turning to head back to the convoy. “Grasshopper, I’m heading back to the convoy. I think we’ll be defending the convoy from close up from now on.”

“I’m ready to be the danger in danger-close,” Grasshopper reported.

I had no idea what that meant. “Yeah, cool,” I said.

Motion below had me slowing down and searching the forest until I could spot what had caught my eye. Model fives, with a few model threes zipping past them in the underbrush. The smaller models were hard to spot, their skin was mottled and dark enough that they were just plain hard to see.

The model fives had their own camouflage of sorts going on, but they were big enough, and clumsy enough, that it didn’t help them all that much.

I gave my bike a bit of throttle and shot out ahead. “We’re going to have some bigger company,” I said to Grasshopper.

When I finally arrived at the convoy, I found Grasshopper standing atop the same mobile base, her gun folded up next to her. She had a pair of handguns out instead, long, curvy ones, with covered grips and what looked like a blade going from beneath the barrel all the way down to the underside of the grip.

I hopped off my bike and landed in a crouch not too far from her. “Hey,” I said.

“Hello,” Grasshopper replied. “I was thinking.”

“Were you?”

She nodded. “I think the convoy will slow down a little.”

“That seems counter-intuitive,” I said.

“Sometimes, things are like that,” Grasshopper said. “Did you ever do arts and crafts?”

“What?”

“Making pretty things from paper and cardboard, and even wood and fun things like sprinkles and glue.”

I shook my head. “No, sorry. I never really went to, uh, a proper school. Kinda missed out on all of that. I’m guessing you’re going to make a point that’s tangentially related to arts and crafts now?”

“It’s too bad you never went to school,” Grasshopper said. “I think you would have been a very good student. You seem very smart. Anyway, when doing arts and crafts, if you try to go too fast, you’ll make lots of little mistakes that going slowly will help you avoid. Art takes time. It’s an important lesson.”

“And what’s that got to do with slowing the convoy down?” I asked as I glanced out ahead, we were entering the forest already. I could see the aliens in the woods. “If we slow down any more, we’re going to have a hard time with the xenos.”

“Only a little. If we’re slower, they will have an easier time reaching the area where they perceive the greatest threat to be. That will, of course, be right in front where we’re walking.”

Grasshopper’s mask folds back so that I can see her entire face. She’s... a rather plain looking thirty-something woman, with clever brown eyes and a few freckles on her cheeks.

She grinned. “Come on, let’s kill them up close and personal. It’s good cardio.”

I shook my head as Grasshopper’s mask closed back up and she ran off the front of the mobile base, leaping into the air and disappearing over the edge. “Insane,” I muttered. The convoy started to slow down and I noticed the antithesis on the sidelines starting to rush in.

“Myalis, that BEES thing. Now would probably be a good time to deploy those.”

Understood.

I was expecting a little grenade, but instead Myalis had a large canister appear next to me. It was about the size of one of those three-gallon water bottles like those used above water coolers, but all stainless and with a big plastic-like cylinder filled with glowing motes.

Unleashing the B.E.E.S.

The top popped off and a swarm of buzzing machines flitted out of the top. They left yellow streams through the air as they passed and spread out below.

“Neat,” I said as they rushed down the front of the convoy. They were already lining up towards the nearest antithesis. I pulled my Bullcat off my back and pumped it for good measure as I started walking to the front of the mobile base.

I couldn’t just leave Grasshopper alone down there.

***