Adventures of a Greenie (Vol 1)
All rights reserved Vanessa Ravencroft
Chapter 3: Outside
The house he called home was a dome shaped Ultronit sphere; made out of the same material they made battle ship armor out of. The house had two levels and once had been a forward research outpost on Green Hell and served as his families’ home ever since he was born. Roy switched on the outside visual sensor and waited for the Institute Floater that would take his parents away. The visual sensor was on a sturdy telescopic mast and inside a strong protective housing and could be steered and directed to look into any direction. On his view screen he saw the dense jungle around the house. There, a Pandora Swan attacking a flock of Gladiator Eagles. The silvery Pandora Swan attacked the much larger eagles with his razor sharp lower wings and cut one of the Eagles in mid-flight to pieces, while it evaded the barrage of arrow feathers the Eagles shot at it. The swan punctured a second with its long needle sharp beak. It was a spectacular display of raw nature. It did not matter what his parents thought, he was a Greenie!
He was very proud of this fact and he knew everything there was to know about his home planet. Green Hell was the second planet in the Maxwell System. A luscious green garden world that looked inviting like any other garden world when seen from space.
Long time ago, it had first been discovered by the old Saresii and they called it Mrtgtha in their language and it meant Murder-all. The Saresii never bothered to come back, thousands of years later the Sarans rediscovered the world and lost several exploration teams and called this world Imthe-Seth which meant Death World.
Then after Terra ascended and the Union was formed a Union explorer ship came this way and another attempt was made to explore this world. A garden world with a breathable Nitrogen Oxygen atmosphere was rare and valuable to any expanding society. Again the Planet proved deadly to those who landed on it, not one of the survey teams returned alive.
Unlike the Saresii or the Sarans however Terrans were much more stubborn and could not leave it at that. It was even suggested at one point to P Bomb the world from orbit and then Terra form it, but instead of doing that it was decided to research what it was that made this world so dangerous.
Instead of scientists and explorers they send Ultra Marines next and they managed after losing some men to clear an island of its vegetation and sterilize it of anything alive and establish a permanent base. Scientists returned and with them came technicians and service personnel, then their families and finally shop keepers and small businesses and the small island base grew first into a town and then a small city called Ant Hill. The Planet became known as Green Hell
Jungles covered sixty percent of the surface. Instead of real oceans the planet had an almost uncountable number of large and small lakes, vast swamps, and slimy bogs. There were a few rugged mountain ranges and cool less overgrown poles.
What made Green Hell different from any other planet was its vast abundance of life forms. Every single living thing on this planet was a killer and had an array of body weapons deadlier than anything ever encountered. The strongest organic acid ever discovered was produced by the Dragon Ants of Green Hell; the deadliest organic poison ever encountered came from a flowering bush. Some clouds were actually living gas bags that attacked with aimed lightning bolts of pure energy.
There were tiny microscopic mites aggressive as battle Nanites; insects able to fly as fast rifle bullets with inch long stingers as hard as steel. Everything alive on Green Hell was lethally dangerous. Even the local moss and grass was lethal.
He saw one of the heavily armored, yellow painted floaters of the Institute descent and dock at the air lock clamps on the north side of the house.
A few moments later, with his parents aboard it soared back into the sky.
Roy smiled and locked his door. Then he opened his closet and put his micro mesh jacket over his bio-barrier suit. The Bio-barrier suit everyone on Green Hell was wearing was a one piece garment that hermetically connected with his heavy all-terrain boots. The suit was to protect the wearer from the tiny Buzz-saw Micros and similar mite like mini life forms that feasted on any organic matter with tiny rotating mouths full of teeth. Real Greenies however, like most of the larger life forms on Green Hell had developed their own defenses against those tiny pests, Buzz-Saws never really bothered him and he knew how to evade their drop shaped cocoon like nests hanging between the branches of Plague trees. All you had to do was use the a few drops of Plaque tree sap and the Buzzers thought you were a Plaque tree then girded a belt around his hip with an attached holster, in it his Thompson E-Blaster. On his left he carried a Vibro-machete and also attached to the belt was his K-Bar combat knife. He chuckled while thinking about what his parents would think if they knew he had those things.
Green Hell had a natural gravitation of 2. 6 gees above standard and all Off-Worlders carried a personal Gravi-Adjuster. A device that reduced the graviton influence on the body mass to standard level; until his sixth birthday he didn’t have one as he was born here and adjusted to the natural gravitation. Uncle Sam told him that carrying one increasing the gravitation would make the body stronger and every single move was an exercise. So he did carry one and he dialed it up every year a little more and now didn’t even feel the constant 2.5 gee the device created. He switched it off and left it behind. Then he crawled under his bed and snickered even more, imagining the shock his parents would get as he touched a hidden contact
Part of the wall slid open and he crawled in a secret air lock. His mother would probably faint if she knew it existed. Maria his friend who was a wizard with tools had cut the Ultronit and installed this small air lock some years ago, allowing him to leave the house unnoticed.
The inner door sealed and moments later the outer door opened. He slid over the smooth curved metal to get momentum then pulled his feet under him and pushed himself with one fluid motion off the wall. His now unrestricted muscles catapulted him almost 12 meters across the vegetation free area around the house. Charles maintained that area by burning everything that grew inside that area with his blasters and he had to do that every other day.
Roy grabbed the branch of a Tantalus Oak, with only two fingers of each hand, avoiding the five inch long thorns. Thorns that were hard enough to pierce steel, secreting a deadly nerve poison that paralyzed a human sized being in mere seconds.
He swung himself over to a Trappers Palm, oriented himself for a mere heartbeat crouching on a branch, just above the sticky substance that covered the trees trunk and its branches below. The Trapper Palm glue instantly bonded with anything that came into contact with the sticky goo on a molecular level and then tiny creatures akin to the Buzz-Saws would come and disassemble and devour whatever had been caught in the glue.
Roy filled his lungs deep with the warm almost hot steamy jungle air. He loved the musky, moist odor. The jungle was full of smells and scents, some pleasant, some sweet and fragrant, yet others putrid and foul. Yet every smell signaled a different plant or animal and knowing the smells was part of being able to stay alive out here. For most of the things he had no names, and he was fairly certain his parents hadn’t seen or cataloged a fraction of what he knew and seen.
Out here he felt alive and right as rain, there was no doubt, no hesitation. He was one with the jungle and somehow he felt as if he was one with the planet. He used all of his senses to the extreme. He listened to all the noises and sounds, he felt and touched. Some of the deadly trees and lethal plants had parts that could be eaten. The flower butts of the Nightmare cactus were delicious and had a nutty fresh taste. All you had to do know was where to touch and not to be showered with tiny needles. A beautiful orchid like plant as big as a man, he had no name for it, had liquid nectar inside the funnel shaped leaves that tasted like a mixture of honey and orange juice, to get it without getting killed took some skill that was all.
Out here he could feast on a hundred things, without being poisoned, killed or paralyzed.
This was his true home and he knew how to act and behave. He didn’t need an eight ton energy shielded Armor suit to stomp through the jungle only to sink into a mud bog and be cracked like and egg after the energy ran out. He was a Greenie.
There was a sense, a feeling of being certain without any doubt. This sense told him what to do, that alerted to imminent danger and told him on an instinctive level what to do and how to behave.
This sense, this knowledge he absorbed somehow by an unexplainable osmosis directly from the planet. Everything here was a deadly killer, but that didn’t mean everything was constantly killing. It was more like a careful delicate balance and life and death kept itself in balance out here, just like anywhere else. Waltzing through all of this in an Armor suit disturbed that balance and directed everything on that intruder to kill it, to neutralize it so the balance was restored. All this he just knew, he didn’t know how and it was not book knowledge or the knowledge cramped in his mind by Cerebral uploads in school, it was a knowledge that could not really be put in words or expressed in writing. It was different.
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