Chapter 9: A New Game is in Play

Harlex had his arms crossed before his chest and leaned with his right shoulder against one of the supports that held up the sheet of heavy gauge translucent Dura Plast. It once had been translucent, but a thick layer of slimy green algae covering most of it made that a mood feature.

Heavy rain poured from the lead colored sky thick with billowing clouds and the rushing sound of the downpour almost drowned the poor quality transmission of classic Bombast music coming from inside the depressing looking bar room behind him.

High pitched, silvery gurgling streams of water running down the slanted roof splashed into the yellowish muck beyond the creaky Pour-a-wood Porch and joined the spidery network of water filled ditches that carried the water down the settlement’s main street and into Anars’s Lake half a klick away.

“Main Street my ass. “ He grunted to himself and shifted the smoke stick that dangled from one side of his thin lipped mouth to the other. He stood on the porch to Napha Beronou’s Paradise Tavern which was one of only two businesses of this sorry settlement.

The muddy road was lined on both sides with shacks, tents, and shipping containers modified to makeshift buildings; the homes of the 512 men that lived here.

A kilometer up the road was Lumber Mill Number 4 and the place where he worked, no one was forced to work in this bone breaking work low Tech Lumber Mill, no one was forced to be on one of the lumberjack teams or the log drag gangs, but it gave you something to do and it provided you with a meager salary everyone here spend mostly on the few liquor and beer choices offered here at Napha’s or at the other tavern Oryn’s Waterhole.

Harlex looked at his callused hands. He had been an excellent lab systems engineer with a great career and a good salary at Enroe Bio Lab Equipment Inc, but that was in a different life, back then he was Chief Engineer Harlex Gedde, here they only called him Greenie.

This was his fourth year here on Parajsa Planet. The word meant Paradise in some old Pre Astro Terran language and it was a joke of course. There was nothing beautiful or nice about Parajsa Planet, because it was also known as Union Felon Penal Colony 23.

His lawyer said this was the best deal he could get. Twenty years at UFPC 23 or voluntary Psycho Surgery. Having his personality completely erased and replaced with what a psycho surgeon thought a model citizen’s ego should be like. Back then he would rather gone to the gallows than accept psycho surgery so the choice to go to a penal colony was an easy one to make. On days like this he wondered if surgery would not been the better choice after all.

Tuzzzh, a yellow throat Shiss stepped from out the bar and stopped next to Harlex. “Hey Greenie, does it ever rain like that on Green Hell like that?” The Shiss was easily to understand as long as there weren’t many words containing S or Z sounds.

Harlex, who had been born on Green Hell, sighed deeply missing his lethal and dangerous world. “Yes it does, it rains often and without any warning, but there isn’t a real rainy season like on this cursed mud ball lasting for a month!”

“If it is warm and with lots of moisture, I think I’d love it there.”

Harlex laughed hard. “Tuzzzh, you would not last two minutes in our jungles.”

Muhlen, the soft spoken smooth talking former corporate lawyer who had killed his wife and escaping the hangman’s noose just barely had also left the bar room and must have overheard the Shiss. He said. “Two Purples, a few Takkians, a Pertharian, and a Saturnian tried that a few years ago and none of them made it. The Siliconoids did remarkably well and managed to survive for almost 20 minutes. It was all over GalNet when it happened.”

The Shiss raised his neck spines to express his disbelieve. “Takkians should be immune to anything a carbon based jungle can throw at them.”

Harlex gazed into the distance. “Not on Green Hell, Lizard. It took our dragon ants less than five minutes to dissolve one of the Takkians into silicon soup and the other found out why it is not a good idea to run into the net of a Moolax. Electrified mono-filament nets with a tensile strength of carbon nano tube fibers, do I need to say more?”

The yellow throat Shiss said. “We heard of Green Hell, even before the Union and the Terrans went there, I guess everyone in the Upward Sector knows stories and legends about Green Hell or Imthe Seth as the Sarans called it before Union Times, but I never thought they were more than fairy tales.”

The disbarred lawyer said. “I never been there myself, but I’ve seen GalNet reports that make any fairy tale you heard kids tales.”

Harlex felt very homesick, he was a seventh generation Greenie and like everyone born on this impossible, dangerous and beautiful world, he felt a deep connection to it and the pain his homesickness caused in the pit of his stomach made worse by talking about it. He grunted. “I need a drink.” With this he turned and returned in the bar room to drown the pity he felt for himself with the rough as engine fuel rug gut booze they sold here and called it Whiskey.

An hour or so later, Harlex didn’t feel any better and the longing to return to his home world still tormented his memories. The alcohol didn’t really help; just dull the details not the cause. He tried to listen to the Shiss. Tuzzzh told once more how he ended up here and not in a much nicer POW camp. First reason was of course that there was no war between the Shiss Empire and the Union at the moment and the second reason was that Tuzzzh wasn’t officially a soldier but had been caught as a pirate and trialed in a civilian court. Of course everyone knew that the Shiss raiders were directly sponsored and supported by the White Nestling himself. The Shiss government officially denounced these raider actions as pirate acts of independent individuals in no way sanctioned.”

Harlex had heard the story several times and could have told it as good as the Shiss himself, but there was nothing else to do and the disgraced corporate lawyer wanted to hear it.

To vent his frustration, he interrupted the story and said. “You are lucky it was a Federal Police cruiser who stopped you guys and not a fleet unit. The fleet deals with pirates in a much more terminal way.”

The Shiss didn’t like to be interrupted and felt his warrior honor tainted by the fact that he and his shipmates surrendered to Federal Police. He was still a Shiss and stronger than everyone in the room. The fact that he was intoxicated lowered his low threshold to act on violent impulses that were never far from a Shiss in the first place didn’t help. It took very little alcohol to get a Lizard drunk. He jumped up to teach the human a lesson.

Napha, the owner of the Tavern was sentenced for life to this place and was allowed to run this small business. The Warden however didn’t care if his place was trashed, torched or if patrons killed themselves. He could hold his own in a bar fight, sharing the genes of a Thauran mother and a father native to Hoffman’s World where humans lived under six Gee for over two thousand years, living the harsh life as a fringe region Scooper raider and running a tavern on a Prison colony steeled his fists and he knew almost all of the dirty tricks and moves. However going against a drunk and enraged Shiss was certain suicide. He needed to protect his business so he pulled the old chemical slug thrower from under the bar.”

The Shiss however didn’t fare as well as he thought he would against a much smaller, drunk human. The Greenie was fast and reacted even before the Shiss committed to his fast attack and evaded the claw swipe that would have maimed the human. Greenies had this unexplainable ability to somehow sense danger and react and the mysterious conditions that made every life form on that planet into lethal killing machines influenced humans that were born there as well.

Harlex didn’t have any stingers, no deadly poisons and never had any military or any martial arts skills, yet the palm of his right hand stuck the Shiss right underneath its teeth filled maw at one of the beings sensitive nerve clusters. The Shiss howled in pain and stumbled a few steps back.

The former lawyer’s only combat skills were honed in court proceedings and board rooms, so he tried to find refuge under the next table.

How the situation would end was almost certain, but then a sound everyone here knew and never hoped to hear on this side of the planet. The distinctive high whistle of a Union Arti Grav shortly followed by greenish light lowering into the bar room from outside the building. A space ship was landing where no space ship was allowed to land.