Shalilayo Read online

  Shalilayo

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 Celdic

  Chapter 2 Sneaking Out

  Chapter 3 Dead Zones

  Chapter 4 Possessed

  Chapter 5 Yar

  Chapter 6 Unfortunate Spider

  Chapter 7 Fight

  Chapter 8 How to Lie

  Chapter 9 Soul Snare

  Chapter 10 Swarm

  Chapter 11 Judgement

  Chapter 12 Terrance

  Chapter 13 Bodyguards

  Chapter 14 Riah

  Chapter 15 Leave taking

  Chapter 16 Zeran Continent

  Chapter 17 Visions

  Chapter 18 Torture

  Chapter 19 Invincibility Suit

  Chapter 20 Money

  Chapter 21 Squid

  Chapter 22 Brawl

  Chapter 23 Welcome to Earth

  Chapter 24 Alien Hunt

  Chapter 25 Contact

  Chapter 26 The Cave

  Chapter 27 Planning

  Chapter 28 Road Block

  Chapter 29 Healing

  Chapter 30 Alpha Team

  Chapter 31 Terrorists

  Chapter 32 Attack of the Cyborgs

  Chapter 33 Michael

  Chapter 34 Return to Shalilayo

  Chapter 35 Selindria

  Chapter 36 Yar Restored

  Chapter 37 Decoy

  Chapter 38 Battle

  Chapter 39 Demons

  Chapter 40 Lori

  Chapter 41 Incoming

  Chapter 42 Rescued

  Chapter 43 Links

  Chapter 44 The Bar

  Chapter 45 Congress

  Chapter 46 Exiled

  Chapter 47 Sorcery

  Epilogue

  SHALILAYO

  Copyright © 2010 by Justin Lee Mitchell.

  Smashwords Edition

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  www.shalilayo.net

  Another Reflection in the Mirrors of the World Adventures

  Prologue

  Dennis always knew he would become a police officer. Six generations of McMillan’s set the family trade firmly in law enforcement. Dennis felt like it was a trade, or business, rather than a government department. When he received bonuses for how many tickets he wrote in a month, the job stopped looking like a peacekeeping force and started looking more like a government-sanctioned parasite that existed to harass the very citizens who paid its wages.

  He was grateful for his employment though, especially with the unemployment rate sky rocketing all over the country. Ever since the short, televised broadcast where a girl claiming to be an alien aired on every television network in the world, investors were holding on to their money more tightly. It did not matter that the government reported the incident as a terrorist attack orchestrated to create chaos by Muslim extremists. Everyone knew the government lied about everything and that there must be some truth to what the alien girl with the strange eyes said. After all, where would terrorists come up with the ability to take over every broadcasting station in the world and in every language?

  The internet crashed the same day, which the FBI also blamed on Muslim extremists who were working in unison with the other terrorists. A week later, the internet was barely functioning. All of the video sharing sites were mysteriously offline because they were ‘vulnerable’ to the cyber terrorists and were the reason the terrorists were able to shut the internet down in the first place. All of the social networking sites had collapsed from viruses. None of the IT security experts could develop a patch to protect the internet hosting servers from the quickly-mutating virus that was as close to an artificially intelligent program as Wall Street’s financial forecasting computer.

  Even with the internet locked down, the video of the interview with the alien girl managed to get widespread circulation. People who recorded the original broadcast copied it to their phones and flash drives. They shared the video with family and friends via Bluetooth, since the cell services were also not allowing texts or emails with any kind of attachments.

  The world had a strange, expectant silence, as if everyone was holding their breath. He thought crime would increase with the chaos following the broadcast, but it caused the exact opposite. The street brawlers and gangs almost disappeared. Everyone in the city of Rochester felt a need to be with their families, instead of on the streets. All of the religions were in overdrive, claiming the signs of the times were confirming these were indeed the last days. It had been less than a year since the first supposed meteorite exploded in the atmosphere, turning night into day, an occurrence astronomers claimed only happened once in a decade. Now, it was almost a nightly occurrence to see the sky turn white from what experts were still claiming was an unexpected, massive meteor shower. Most of the religions claimed a battle between demons and angels was raging in the heavens.

  He pulled his patrol car up to Tim Horton’s Donuts on Fairport Road. He knew people loved to associate cops with donuts, so he always made sure to give the stereotype some credence. He was pretty sure he could survive the collapse of civilization if he still had the ability to get coffee and donuts. He was convinced donuts were the original manna from heaven that rained down on the Hebrews in the bible, though he was not sure he believed in the bible.

  After getting his usual jelly-filled donut and cup of coffee, he sat down at a small table, which they obviously made uncomfortable on purpose so customers would not stay long. Aside from traffic violations, his police radio had been silent all morning.

  He watched the empty streets in a bemused state, enjoying the lack of real work he was required to do. The only thing moving were the birds in the sky. There did seem to be a lot more of them than usual today. He squinted at a cloud of dots just barely visible. Usually flocks did not fly so high; at least, he did not think so. They were growing larger too quickly to be birds and they were the wrong shape. He dropped what was left of his jelly donut and walked out the door for a closer look. The cloud of dots was now close enough for him to be sure it was not a flock of birds. They were definitely disc-shaped. There were at least a thousand of them descending toward Rochester. The police radio finally started making noise and the dispatcher reported their phone lines were jammed from the amount of people reporting hundreds of unidentified objects flying around the city. The few people driving down the road quickly pulled over to get out and gawk at the shiny silver discs hovering a few thousand feet above the city. He could not be sure of their size. They did not look much bigger than ordinary jets.

  He should have been terrified. After all of the explosions in the atmosphere at night, it was obvious there was some kind of war going on. The only emotion he felt was curiosity. It was almost as if he had been waiting all of his life for this moment to happen. He glanced back into the donut shop to see if the clerk had seen what was happening yet. He had not. He was staring with terrified fascination at the television mounted to the wall that usually only played the news or sports. He walked back into the donut shop to see what the news had to say about these discs.

  Rather than seeing the Channel 2 news anchor he expected, there was a young woman with green eyes and long blonde hair. There seemed to be an aura about her, which made him feel like she was more complete than humans. She was a lot more beautiful than the normal news anchor, too.

  “Right now our drones are patrolling every city on your world to prevent crime,” the woman said in a pleasant voice. “If you cannot cohabitate peacefully with the other races on your world, we will relocate you. We have prepared several worlds where nuclear technology cannot be created. We have already begun relocati
ng the members of the shadow government who have kept your world in a state of perpetual ignorance. Please do not shoot your weapons at our drones because the ricocheted bullets may inadvertently harm another person. We will broadcast information every day at noon on all of your television and radio frequencies. From now on, we will make sure everyone on this world receives the food, water, shelter and medical attention they need. Several thousand Zeran healers will visit the hospitals around your world to cure the sick among you. You will need to change the way your society functions. We will speak with your current leaders to try to facilitate these changes through normal government channels. We are a peaceful race and we hope to help you become a peaceful race that is one with your world as well. I will speak to you again tomorrow at noon.”

  “Can I get a dozen of those jelly donuts to go?” He asked the stunned clerk.

  Chapter 1 Celdic

  Celdic liked to think things through thoroughly. He studied his room carefully before sitting up in bed. He sat still and looked for any sign that someone had tampered with his clothes. When he was satisfied his room was safe, he climbed out of bed and dressed. He wore the same soft, thick pants everyone in Tenral wore. Tenral was completely self-sufficient, and had no trade with the outside world, so there was not a lot of variety in the apparel industry. The gray shirt was made from a durable, soft cloth the Gardeners harvested from a poisonous spiky tree in the Rajan Gardens. The Gardeners made the sturdy, brown boots from a rubber plant much less dangerous to harvest.

  Celdic was an ordinary looking young man. His blue gray eyes were as unremarkable as his sandy brown hair. The fact his easily forgettable face had hair on it and that he had to shave regularly was one of the more amusing topics in the mountain city.

  At twenty-five years old, he had been sprouting facial hair for a long enough time that it was not a constant thorn in his side. His classmates only called him “the monkey man” until they saw him on the combat field. While his inability to use yar was an additional handicap his peers made the more obvious by their omission of mentioning anything about it, he was still the most talented student on the combat field. There were not very many students who mentioned monkeys, or any other related primates within range of his hearing. They thought his mother, Elinor, came from one of the wild human cities down on the plains, where humans constantly tried to kill each other for some reason nobody understood. She had an amazing talent for finding the most unpleasant tasks for him when he tried to get more information about her homeland.

  He shook both of his boots carefully before searching the insides with his hand. Once he was satisfied no unwanted occupants awaited his foot, he put on the resilient boots and walked up to his door. He touched the handle experimentally, then grasped it and turned it slowly when nothing happened. He carefully opened the door, looking up to the ceiling as he did so. The hallway was empty. Something was obviously wrong. Getting from his bed to the kitchen in the morning was rarely uneventful. He slowly moved down the hallway, his nerves winding tighter as he moved closer to the kitchen without incident. He could see his father in the kitchen cooking some breakfast. Celdic was in the safe zone now.

  “Boo!” Chale jumped out from behind the wall in the kitchen to land in front of him. Her boo was far too loud to be the result of her natural voice box. After his feet hit the ground again, he stormed past his sister to his usual seat at the kitchen table. His heart was pounding so hard he could actually feel a vein throbbing on his forehead. The gales of laughter assaulting his hears were somehow worse than the boo, even though the laughter lacked her yar's amplification of the sound. How could she still send him shooting to the roof in shock after all of these years?

  Chale had what her father liked to call a healthy sense of humor. Her mother called it an abominably ludicrous, extremely overdeveloped sense of humor, which years of threatening, cajoling and begging had failed to refine. If anything, her jokes became worse with her increasing age, especially as she learned how to control her yar more powerfully. She made it her personal mission to ensure he received enough shocks to guarantee he lost hair somewhere.

  Chale had one of those faces that made people automatically assume she was innocent and incapable of sinister deeds. At twenty-four years old, and despite her two-inch advantage on his own six feet, she could have passed for ten years younger. Her large eyes were a brilliant green, like her mother’s. She had the perfect lips for a trembling pout that would make the mere suggestion of doing something wrong set them to quivering. She had a fragile appearance that always made people want to protect her. It was not until she got to the combat field that people could see just how savage she really was. That was also the only place he ever got some of his own back at her.

  When Chale finally recovered from her fit of mirth, she walked back into the room and sat across from him. She was wearing a slightly more feminine version of the same clothing he wore. He was not sure how she managed to fill out the front of her obviously female shirt and still look like a teenager, but she did. She had inherited her blonde hair and otherwise hairless body from their father, along with the ability to use yar.

  “Good morning, Celdic,” his father, Denrik, said with a smile as he cut up some fruit from their lush garden behind the house. He had the same mischievous look in his blue eyes Chale possessed, but his sense of humor was more mature. Denrik worked for the Department of Agriculture. They were in charge of harvesting the Rajan Gardens where especially skilled gardeners entered the dangerous, and sometimes lethal, dense foliage. Denrik had never shown much interest in his work, unlike his wife. His children were his life, and he spent all of his free time making himself a part of their schoolwork and training. Like all of the other people in Tenral, he was hairless, aside from the hair on his head. It had been an extremely amusing moment for his mother when she was the one who had to show Celdic how to shave when he began sprouting hair on his face. Denrik thought something was wrong with his son and was on the verge of taking him to the healers before Elinor intercepted the two of them. Denrik took the oddity in stride and always referred to how much better he would be with a blade, with all of the practice of shaving every day.

  “We’ll see,” he muttered, looking at Chale sourly.

  Denrik caught his look and a grin broke out on his face before he could restrain it. He hurriedly changed his features to a reproachful look. “That was a very cruel thing of your sister to do.”

  Celdic gave him a level look. His mother, Elinor, entered the kitchen and saw his disgruntled scowl. “What’s wrong with you?”

  There were not very many women with jet-black hair in the mountain city of Tenral. His mother’s green eyes were another oddity among the mountain people. She was the youngest member of the Elder’s council. She spent her days hearing complaints and disputes from the citizens of Tenral and making judgments with the other Elders.

  “I was just ruminating on how pleasant it would be to get to the kitchen unscathed for once in my life,” he said with another glare at Chale.

  His mother shook her head with a sigh. “Sometimes I think she will never grow up.”

  “There is nothing wrong with staying young forever,” Denrik defended his daughter.

  “You would certainly be the authority on that,” his mother said pointedly.

  His father shrugged. “We can’t all be serious, or all the important people would start to take themselves too seriously.”

  They quickly ate their breakfast and bid their parents goodbye as they began their short journey to school. The street outside was made of hardened achnetic, with a wide sidewalk on either side. Lampposts spaced throughout the streets shone brightly with the nightbright algae from the Rajan Gardens. The sidewalks were already filling with people making their way to school or work. Hover carts filled the road, the main medium for transporting goods throughout the city. Several centuries ago, the Rajan Gardeners discovered a plant they called melanetic that emanated a slight magnetic field. After several years of exper
imenting and crossbreeding the magnetic plant with some of the other strange plants in the Rajan Gardens, the Gardeners enhanced the plant’s magnetic field to a much greater strength. The final hybrid of melanetic was a crossbreed with achnis trees, the same bamboo-like trees they used to build their homes. When achnis trees died, they petrified into a substance much harder than diamonds. The new hybrid plant, achnetic, resulted in an extremely hard magnetic material. During the first year of their growth, they shaped the plants into the desired road design. In their second year, they let the plants die, resulting in a magnetic road of hard, glassy material. They made the hover carts from the same plants, except their polarity was reversed so they were repelled from the surface of the road. They hovered about an inch above the pavement, with almost no friction. Most of the technology in the city of Tenral originated from the Rajan Gardens.

  Two-story houses dotted either side of the street, sharing the same design as the surrounding structures. This was one of the residential districts of the mountain city of Tenral, home to just over a hundred thousand people.

  His chest tightened as they drew closer to the corner where they met their friends. Lendel, and his sister Li, had been friends with him and his sister since they were barely able to walk. He had grown increasingly nervous around Li as she matured, and he found it difficult to find a safe place for his eyes to rest, usually settling for the ground or some distant object. It did not make any sense. He had known her all of his life. It was not too long ago he and Lendel tried to lose their sisters because they did not want their feminine company. Now he leapt for any chance to be around Li, even though he spent most of his time tripping over himself.

  If that were all, he would have been happy with the situation. Unfortunately, Chale found his newfound interest in her closest friend extremely amusing and went to great lengths to embarrass him. Questions about whether he thought her breasts were bigger than Li’s were usually followed with a suggestion that Li show him so he could better gauge the size. Fortunately, Li was almost as embarrassed as he was, though she contained it much better. She even played along with Chale sometimes.