Laelan's Run

By John Robert Shagena

I sat down, a little dazed. A moment ago I had felt great, now my head hurt
and I was confused. I tried to think of my name but nothing came. I looked about
me again to try to understand. There were twelve dead reptilian somethings in a
bunch around where I was sitting, one was detached from its head.------- Join
Laelan in his run across far away lands in his quest for a direction to take in
his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493171255

Book preview

LAELAN’S RUN

Book 1

John Robert Shagena

Copyright © 2014 by John Robert Shagena.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014902331

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4931-7126-2

   Softcover   978-1-4931-7127-9

   Ebook   978-1-4931-7125-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 02/04/2014

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

602658

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER ONE

STARTING OUT

It was early in the spring of the year and the night air was a perfect balance of warmth and a light cool breeze freshening the room through the open sliding glass door. The still and silent darkness outside was contrasted by the soft melodic rhythms issuing from the wall mounted flat screen com-apparatus opposite the low couch where I sat. River cats drifted and swirled about in liquid ballet in the full wall aquarium and aerators and filters bubbled in accompaniment to the soft music.

My birthday had come and gone and I had technically become an adult, and it was time for my coming of age rite. Since the beginning of my people, the Shaerah, male children at the beginning of adulthood were in times of war enrolled in the militias or the professional standing military, for all of us are considered warriors. In peaceful times like we were currently experiencing, young Shaerah instead left home and spent some time exploring the wider world to get some real life lessons away from the overcare of father and mother and the familiar security of the mansah and local community.

Since coming to Starhomah the Shaerah had established themselves on a large continent isolated by wide oceans from other lands and inhabited by no other aggressive sentient species or human races. We had the land essentially to ourselves though there were non-numerous others who, by their nature used the ecos in ways different from us and with whom we had no conflict.

I had already chosen a far land to visit and I would be stepping through a portollah to an outburgah established by Shaerah colonists generations ago. I had packed most of the supplies I had chosen to take and I drifted off to sleep while contemplating which weapons to carry on my adventure.

First light was breaking around the edges of the lowering overcast sky when I was awakened by my foundling gray female bearcat as she climbed onto my chest and proceeded to piddy pat me with her wide front paws, as her eyelids slowly closed. Half as big as me and four years old, she nevertheless considers me her adopted mother and never hesitates to make herself comfortable when she can catch me in a resting moment. Her ancestors were feral kittens on the old home world that were genetically revised by my ancestors in the times of the origin of the Shaerah.

The bearcats of the local area are predominantly gray with white paws and a white patch on the chest and under the neck to the face, usually, and with faint black rings about the tail. Bearcats in other localities and among the lands of other gens of the Shaerah exhibit other color patterns and there are even other variations on the theme of altered domestic cats.

When our grandfathers came to Shaerahgardah they brought with them a wide arkload of genetic variations of domestic and many wild breeds of the creatures which had shared their old world ecos and the lands of the thirty gens were liberally salted with them, the evolutionary children of old Terrah.

Fully awake now, I stroked Nupengyou’s back with my left hand to the rhythm of her purring and found the remote with my right. I switched the com to a news channel and quelled my impatience to arise from under the weight of my adopted little girlcat to give her some time to re-establish our bond in the eternal present, which is the place in time inhabited by my less than sentient siblings.

One important consideration in my planned leave-taking was how to care for the numerous creatures and the botanical extravagance of my current arrangements. My parents had always indulged my obvious love for the living expressions of God’s creative impulse and the estate was flush with gardens, crops, and various creatures I have raised in the spare times between my education and home care chores. My three younger sisters had volunteered to take over the care of my numerous pets and widespread gardens and one of my older brothers would come around as necessary to supervise the helperen in the cultivation and harvesting of my crops.

The helperen, plural of helperah, are near sentient animals genetically created by Shaerah bioengineers from various animals to help their owners with the physical labor involved in the building and maintenance of the mansahs and surrounding estates of the largely agrarian Shaerah civilization. Helperen males are vaguely primate appearing red-tan furred bearlike creatures sixty to seventy inches tall and twice as heavy and strong as I am. Their females are about fifty inches tall and half as heavy as the males.

Helperen are big friendly non-aggressive teddy bears who are anxious to please their owners and are capable of fairly advanced labor, and work hard when not overworked and when given much loving attention and care. Large estates usually have housing resembling small villages where the helperen maintain family life between their work time. Females bear one or two cubs about every five years, which is how long it takes for them to grow up, and their lifespan is about sixty years.

Helperen are capable of understanding and speaking a limited vocabulary of basic words but much of their direction comes direct from mind to mind by their Shaerah owners who communicate telepathically with all their pets and between each other in certain circumstances. My brother, an officer of the professional military, lived at the local air fleet barracks but also maintained his own rooms in the family’s mansah in the same wing as mine and stayed there while home to supervise the helperen. My father is often away on voyages between near worlds a he is an operating engineer on a space cruiser of the Shaerah fleet.

Mother is fully capable of supervising the estate, including the farm operation but is usually more concerned with the mansah and care of the family, as the wife is considered owner of the home and household manager while the husband is head of the family and generator of supplemental wealth. Such an arrangement is considered valuable in balancing the disparate capabilities and inclinations of wife and husband in Shaerah society.

Grown children often retain rooms to return to at need or to visit even after establishing their own living arrangements if they marry and establish their own mansah. The very long lifespan of Shaerah who avoid fatal accidents insure that very many children may exist who with their own children, grandchildren, and more may come back to stay from time to time at the old ancestral home. My own mother was the youngest daughter of her mother and inherited her mansah over six hundred years ago.

Nupengyou sensed my impatience and leaped off my chest in her usual manner, her weight launched by her stout legs serving to compress my diaphragm and take my breath away. She never seemed to consider just how heavy she was and I never complained, much.

I stood and climbed the spiral stair to the upper room where I kept my books, my collections of specimens and artifacts, my equipment and weapons, and whatever else I valued. Across the room I took a handful of fish food pellets from a carton on a small desk and spread them along the surface of the upper portion of the wall length aquarium which extended from the floor below to waist high in this upper room. The river cats and other fish rose to eat and I turned to the open closet on the next wall and viewed the arms in the racks and behind wood and glass cabinet doors.

I would be gone for quite a while in lands not altogether safe or friendly to one such as me. So, I needed to take some useful protection, but I couldn’t carry much, and I had to think about the best selection to serve me. I had to consider how to carry enough ammo if I took a gun or arrows if I took a bow. I could take knives and a spear or sword and hatchet, but they would not serve well for hunting away from settlements, and ammo would be hard to replace and arrows might be fabricated if I could find materials and fletching, I had to consider wisely.

A large bore rifle would be very useful for protection from the great variety of large dangerous creatures I could expect to encounter in the wild lands but it would be difficult to carry very many cartridges. A small bore rifle would be better for small game I would need to hunt for food, but would be little use against the great beasts. Arrows are bulky and though capable of putting down the big ones I could easily be fully consumed before such creatures finally bled out. My pulse laser requires batteries which are only available where Shaerah traders may be found out there, but probably not found.

In a large drawer under the glass doors I found my sling which I had mastered as a young boy, I slipped it into my lower right pocket. There would always be stones available somewhere along the way and I could use the sling to kill small rabbit size creatures for dinner and even scare off smaller predators with my targeting skill.

Next I chose a long tactical knife, more a short sword, with which I could guard my personal safety against the menagerie of sentient strangers with whom I would likely mingle. I picked out a light hatchet to supplement the knife. Now I had to decide on a gun or bow.

Since my youngest days I had been trained by my father and older brothers in the use of various projectile weapons and I was competent in their use. I owned several heirloom rifles, bows, pistols, and revolvers. Most were made in the factories and craft shops of the Shaerah but I even owned an ancient relic pistol brought from old Terrah that had belonged to my pre-Shaerah ancestors. It was manufactured in the early twentieth century. It was point thirty inch caliber, loaded semi automatically with a toggle mechanism and had an eagle impressed on the blue togel with an old Latin fancy script engraving of DWM. I wouldn’t be taking it out to be lost in the farlands.

I held a finely made old style trap-door action rifle of titanium and stainless steel built in the under-mountain craft halls of the Undrulah far to the east in the great central mountain range of Shaerahgardah. It was a black powder cartridge rifle in point fifty-five inch one hundred twenty grain caliber, which might be adequate for some of the medium sized beasts I knew were out there but it would be hard to carry any more than a couple hundred rounds and reloads would only be available in the settled region immediately around the outburgah I would start out from. The rifle was one of my favorites and it had the added advantage of being set up with a bayonet mount on the end of the long barrel with a full length wooden stock, it could double as a panther spear in an emergency.

Starhomah is a vast irregular world constructed by hidden, technologically advanced beings of mysterious origin. It is a world of refuge for races and whole biomes rescued from natural planets threatened by catastrophic destruction from novas, asteroid collisions, and other disasters. Unlike natural planets, Starhomah is a huge hollow sphere with lands inside and on the outer surface and in caverns and passages between the surface and the interior. There are satellite worlds orbiting the outer surface and the central radiant energy source in the interior.

Huge continents and endless seas were planted with Terran and other worldly organisms from many geological ages of the salvaged worlds. The whole huge construct is maintained in working order by the Gardeneren, as the mysterious controllers are known by the Shaerah, through control of incredible energy, gravity, and temporal technologies.

We Shaerah, genetically upgraded and altered humans of Terran origin, came to Starhomah by our own initiative, we think, from a world undergoing a series of natural and manmade disasters. Life still exists there but under much altered conditions from the twenty second century world we left behind. We brought and here further developed a much more advanced technology than generally is found on and in Starhomah, with the clear exception of the Gardeneren.

On any particular land area one might encounter a biome consisting of mixed Terran tropical recent era vegetation and animals or maybe a mix of giant alien crustaceans and dinosaurs with non-Terran sentient species.

Some regions are nearly unadulterated original