Free Exodus: Tales of The Empire: Book 2: Beasts of the Frontier. by Doug Dandridge Page B

left.  You, to
the right.  And keep an eye out for tracks.”
    The men told off
acknowledged, and started to move to their assigned paths, while the scout
started across the clearing, the leader right behind him.
    The scout
stepped on one of the vines, a narrow specimen attached to the one of the
larger members.  The vine recoiled away, and one of the thicker versions came
lashing in to strike the scout in the back, knocking him down.  The vine
followed, slamming down on him while another went after the leader, wrapping
him in a tight embrace.  At that moment the creature they were attached to let
go of its attachments in the trees and fell toward its prey, its multitude of
sharp toothed mouths opening.
    While it looked
like a plant, the murder vine was all animal.  With perfect camouflage and an
asymmetrical form, it blended into its surroundings, ambush hunting anything
and everything that walked the land areas of the Swamp.  Only the larger
carnotropes, the hoppers and the hooters had nothing to fear from the hidden
hunters.  Now several tons of beast fell onto its dinner.
    “Jubil,”
screamed the augmented scout as a half dozen mouths tore through his skin suit,
and a score of spike struck into body and limbs.
    The leader was
too busy trying to extricate himself from the vine that was trying to pull him
to the body of the creature.  He was wearing light combat armor, giving him
three times normal human strength, and the vine couldn’t penetrate his
covering, no matter how many spikes it tried to shoot into him.
    The scout also
had three times human strength, thanks to his augmentation, but he was fighting
the main body of the creature and multiple vine like tentacles.  While the
mouths were tearing into his flesh and spikes were penetrating into his vital
organs.  With one effort he tried to pull himself free, then went slack with
eyes rolling up into his head.
    “Kill the damned
thing,” yelled Jubil, pulling free and aiming his particle beam rifle at the
murder vine.  The beam struck the creature a meter to the right of the scout’s
body.  The body mass of the predator for ten centimeters in each direction of
the strike converted to vapor, and the creature went wild in agony.  Four other
rifles opened up, burning deep into the vitals of the creature.
    “Take the one to
that side,” Thomas told his daughter.
    She nodded, then
rolled a few meters away and looked over the log, her own rifle tracking. 
Congo was both a frontier world and a class I threat planet, and any and all
personal weapons were legal.  Both carried military class particle beams, able
to penetrate light armor in less than a second.  Sophie sighted in on a man who
was wearing light armor, which let her know that her dad was shooting at one
sans protection.  A squeeze of the trigger and the dark red beam burned a hole
through the chest plate of the man’s armor, then deep into the torso, sending
jets of red tinted steam through the opening.
    The man her
father was firing at didn’t even have time for a scream as the beam contacted
his head, blasting it into fragments.  The pair dropped back down behind the
log just before the three survivors started firing at them.  They crawled away
to the right, then rolled through some low, fernlike foliage and into a small
depression.  Particle beams tore holes through the thick fallen trunk, bursting
out the other side.  Without knowing where the targets were, they really didn’t
have a hope of hitting anything.
    “Cease fire,”
yelled the leader, kneeling to present the smallest target he could.  The
creature they had been fighting was dead, along with the scout.  And the two
other men who had been ambushed by the people they had been following. 
“Everyone stay down.”
    Sophie looked
over at her dad and smiled.  They had reduced this team by half, and reduced
the confidence of the survivors so that they would probably jump at their own
shadows.  Then the thought struck her