[TOR] The Many Justifications of Kipper Holtz

[Vilidius]

First off, let's get one thing straight.  I was never drummed out of the Republican Guard as a discipline case.  What happened is that the Guard ran out of every last damn thing in the universe to care about aside from what I was doing with my own bloody time and suddenly I couldn't do a damn thing right.  I was plenty good enough for anyone's tastes when there was still a war to fight.  I got decorated so many times I can't even tell you what it was all for.  But then we made peace with the bloody Sith and the Republic went and turned on its own.  And that's the truth.

My last posting was on the most remote shithole you can possibly imagine.  We were stationed there to guard salt.  That's right - salt.  They said the planet was "strategically important" because it mattered a lot to our allies in that barren corner of nowhere.  Our allies were the Slaarzeen.  Probably you ain't never heard of them.  That's because there's not much to tell.  They're huge ugly lizard things that crawled out of the muck maybe a few hundred years ago and somehow learned to use their opposable claws.  More's the pity.  They don't use much technology but what they lack in finesse they make up for in brute force.  It just about takes a blaster cannon to knock one down, and then a few more shots to keep it down.  Somehow these scaly ass bastards are our allies in the region.  They help keep the Sith back and so we help them with what they need.  Which is salt.

The way it was explained to me, the Slaarzeen never bath.  In fact, water is halfway poisonous to them.  So to avoid soaking in even small amounts of it, they rub themselves all over with salt.  They go through gobs of it.  And this planet we were on, LRD-47 - too remote to even have a real name - was practically made out of salt.  We didn't even have to mine it.  Cargo ships just dropped out of space and scooped it up.  All we had to do was guard it.  Just us, some Slaarzeen, sun shining down practically all day and all night long, and nothing at all to do.

By this time I was a third class private again.  All through the war I was up and down the ranks so many times I couldn't keep track of it and no one else could neither.  Most of the guys called me Sarge back then - no matter whether they were low-balling me or high-balling me to say it.  I swear one time an officer meant to demote me and accidentally promoted me because he forgot what I was that week.  But ever since the war was "Private this" and "Private that."  Pencil-necked kids I would have scraped off my boots just a few years ago were giving me orders.  And when they told me to fetch and carry for some of them leathery, salt-sucking freaks it was just the end.  I told them exactly what they could do with their strategically important salt and where they could stow it for safe transport.  Well one thing led to the next and before I knew it I'd accepted a challenge from one of them - some brute with a little more guts and maybe a few less brains than the others.  Went by the name of Tslan.

Things got complicated fast.  The Slaarzeen fight practically naked in a duel, relying on tooth and claw.  And I don't got a lot of either. Fortunately what I did have was at least one good friend - smart fellow named Karlov.  And he convinced the Slaarzeen that we should use some proper human rules as well, with seconds and negotiated terms and such.  Probably the most important advance towards civilized behaviour their race made in all this past century.  But he gave me a fighting chance at least and that's all I needed.  The terms were that I'd get to wear my armor but powered down and I'd still be bare handed.  And Karlov was my second, with some nameless scaly thing that looked like all the rest of them standing for Tslan.

Needless to say, this wasn't exactly an official exercise in interstellar diplomacy.  We arranged to meet out behind the supply shed that night.  I say "night" but the sun was almost enough to blind a man even then.  The Slaarzeen have these three layers of eyelids, I'm told, so they can cope with the sun as it comes.  I had to make do with my heaviest visor.  Anyway, the details hardly matter but by the time we finally started it seemed like half the camp was there - ours and theirs.

So now comes the part of the story that I can't properly tell.  A man who has seen a few tough scraps doesn't need to boast about how they go or what he did.  Also, I can't really remember.  I know I shoved my bloody fist down his throat at one point - armor and all.  If he'd managed to bite down that might have been the end of it but I shattered half his teeth.  And he ripped my armor half open on the left side with one of his back feet - and took some of me with it as well.  You've seen the scars.

I do remember the end of things.  We were both half dead and tearing at each other.  He finally clawed off my helmet and it seemed like that was the end of things.  There's no use lying about how long a human's unprotected face and throat can last against sharpened claws and teeth.  The cheering and the hissing and the yelling was long over.  Everyone was just waiting for the kill - man and lizard alike.  And then when he came in for the deathblow I up and spat in his eye.  And he fell back just like he was burning cause of course he was.  The water was eating right into his eyeball. 

That's when the Republic showed up to p**s on everything again.  My commanding officer and all his cronies and even the scaly head honcho had to shove on in and break everything up and keep the galaxy safe from man and beast just trying to settle their differences the way nature intended.  We were both carted off first to the infirmary and then to the stockade.  For me it was apparently the "last straw" or some such.  After I finally recovered I was told to shove off.  And not a moment too soon.  I'd seen enough to know the Republican Guard wasn't a place for men anymore.

Tslan was allowed to stay.  The way I hear it, it's only because he was supposedly winning that he wasn't killed on the spot.  Well, the Slaarzeen welcome to their version of things, but at least those uncivilized bastards know how to respect guts and blood and a good fighter.  I lit out and I haven't looked back since.  Leaving the Guard was the best damn thing that ever happened to me.  Next to joining it of course.

Oh yeah, and what happened to LRD-47 and Karlov and the rest of them?  Little more than a year later they were attacked from space.  No kind of battle ever happened.  Just a couple of cruisers dropped out of light speed and bombed everything out of existence.  The Republic cared enough to garrison the planet, apparently, but not enough to support it from space.  Tslan died there too.  And that was the end of the Republic's "strategically important" salt planet.

So here's to Karlov and the rest of those decent bastards who died there.  Shame they have to share a grave with the idiots who led them.  And here's to Tslan too.  Stupid scaly bastard wasn't hardly fit for civilization, but at least he could fight.  With a lot more evolution and a little bit of luck the Slaarzeen may yet be worth something, if the Republic ain't screwed them all to hell by then.