Chapter Thirty – When the Trees Start Speaking Plant

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.

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–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.

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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.”