by Laer Carroll
Books by Laer Carroll
Laer Carroll
The Eons-Lost Orphan
The Orphan in Near-Space
The Once-Dead Girl
The Super Olympian: Bloodhound
The Super Olympian: Mystic Warrior
Sea Monster's Revenge
Shapechanger's Birth
Shapechanger's Progress
Shapechanger's Destiny
(forthcoming)
Disclaimer, Credits, Copyright
Disclaimer: This story is from an alternate universe similar to ours. This universe is imaginary and should not be taken to represent any actual persons, places, things, or events.
Credits: The background in the cover image is from the web site Photos Public Domain at web link is www.photos-public-domain.com.
The human figure in the foreground and its clothing and staff is a 3D image I purchased on DAZ3D.com. I rendered it on DAZ's Digital Studio, a free app which is used to display and process 3D objects in various ways. Those objects are where DAZ makes their money. They include many hundreds of photorealistic human, animal, and other 3D models. You can combine them to construct scenes from imaginary contemporary, historical, fantasy, and sci-fi universes.
Copyright © 2019 by L. E. Carroll
Lady Death
Screams woke Heyalna green gene-line Wilet-34 cross orange Aluet-237. She was instantly awake and on her feet. Automatically increasing the sensitivity of her eyes she spied orange light in the tiny cracks in the back wall of her small cottage against which she stored her healer's supplies and tools in several shelves. That was also the direction from which the screams came.
Heyalna wasted no time donning clothes. Two pantherish steps took her halfway across her bedroom toward the nearest window. She leaped through it, arms tightly covering her head. Window frame and oil-washed near-transparent paper exploded outward.
She struck the close-cropped lawn head-on, her forearms still covering her head, her legs tucking against her body. As she rolled forward and over she uncoiled, arms first, forearms acting like springs flinging her into the air. She came down in a crouch, spun around, and leaped atop her small cottage.
Beyond the back of her home were two larger houses, one to the left and one to the right. Torches flung atop both had started fires, little ones atop the left one and an inferno atop the right. The screams were coming from the right.
Heyalna leaped toward that house, hitting the ground running. Anyone watching would have seen an inhumanly fast woman moving at speed that blurred her pumping limbs.
Rounding the house she saw about a half-dozen family members who had escaped the house being speared by warriors from across the border several miles to the north. Two of the family were down and sprawled unmoving, which was not keeping three warriors from standing over them and stabbing them again and again, probably (from the downed warrior between the two) because one or both villagers had successfully fought back.
Three other family members were also fighting, near naked and barehanded against armed and armored opponents. A young girl crouched near them, staring at the fight with horror. Four more family erupted from the house, all young boys armed with heavy sticks except one who held a spear.
Rage exploded in Heyalna. For twenty-three years she had lived in Creekside village, a hamlet of nearly five hundred people, healing them and slowly teaching basic medical knowledge such as the need to wash hands with soap before and after dealing with injured and ill people. A century and a half of life in an interstellar society with no war and little violence and high ethical standards had made her what to these people was a near saint. All softness instantly washed away from her soul and she became as near an incarnation of Death as a human could.
Naked she leaped toward the downward-stabbing threesome, her reflexes and perceptions jolted to near twice normal speed, her muscles already three times human strength and growing stronger every second. She grabbed the shoulder of the nearest warrior from the back with one hand and swung a stone-hard fist to shatter his helmet and skull.
She flung his crumpling body aside and leaped forward. She landed astride one of the fallen men and grabbed the throats of the two warriors facing her. One of them was able to spear her body before she crushed their windpipes. The spear point skidded off her abdomen as it struck her skinsuit. The weightless chain mail armor was made of invisibly small links that flowed over her skin like water. When struck the armor became momentarily rigid and thousands of times tougher than steel.
In the next instant she was behind then among the several other warriors, killing them efficiently with just-sufficiently-lethal fist strikes now that her rage had cooled. In moments every warrior was down.
Heyalna glanced quickly around. No warriors were near though she saw perhaps a hundred feet away along the village perimeter a squad similar to the one she had just dispatched. They were tossing torches atop another house.
They and any other squads could wait. The vanquished warriors at her feet seemed to be the first to reach Creekside. She had time to help her villagers.
She knelt near the dead and dying villagers and, placing a hand on each of their bodies, sent into them a dose of healing nanotech messengers. Within days each of the villagers would be healed without scars. The dead would survive, their brains undamaged but with all memory of this day gone and perhaps the day before.
"They will be all right," she said to an older man who had just come from his burning house, nodding at his fallen family members. "Get everyone out of your house. It's lost."
The grey-bearded oldster nodded. He seemed numb, but his brain was beginning to work as he glanced at the top of his burning house.
He looked back at her then quickly away, then back at her with dawning wonder and fear in his eyes.
"Get to work, all of you!" she said, catching the eyes of each of the women, men, and children who had left the house, a few of them clutching possessions, and waved at the house next door, the fire on its roof now being put out by its owners.
"But what about them?" said the greybeard's oldest son. He pointed toward the squad of warriors at the next house who, interrupted at their destruction, had turned and were now running toward Heyalna and her companions.
Heyalna's lips peeled back in a near-snarl. "Don't worry. I'll take care of them."
Then she turned and beginning running toward the oncoming warriors. They seemed angry rather than fearful. But that would change. For it was Death who ran to meet them.
<>
An hour later all the invaders were dead and all the injured villagers in good health or on their way to it.
Heyalna stood up from her last patient and glanced across the living room turned into a hospital at her apprentice of six years. He was still working on one last patient. He was doing a good job. Her eyes turned toward an older grey-haired man talking with a very old woman. Heyalna walked quickly toward them.
Nodding at the old woman she turned to him and let him know she must go to the next village over as she was sure they had been attacked as well. Shortly she rode out on the road to the east on her horse Beauty, a large horse with a sleek ebony coat and a white four-pointed star on his forehead.
Its dual saddlebags were stuffed with food and little else. She would no longer pretend to heal using her considerable collection of medicines and medical apparatus. Her secret was out, or so everyone would think. She healed her patients with a magical touch.
The collection would not go to waste, however. Her apprentice would need them when he took over for her. Everyone soon would think she was a supernatural creature. She would have to leave Creekside. She could no longer usefully work as a hist-techneer, a technician skilled in applying historical engineering. She was on this primitive planet to catalyze i
ts uplift toward a more modern planet eventually able to become a full member of the Human Interstellar Confederation. The work had to be done secretly to avoid unduly warping a planet's culture.
Presumably the Confederation Uplift Agency would find another place for her, on this planet or the hundred or so other primitive planets surrounding the Confederation. But for now she had another, self-assigned, job to do.
Beyond the village the naked bodies of all the enemy were sprawled in a heap. She spat on the heap as she rode by it. Several minutes later programmed nanotech agents penetrating the bodies set them aflame.
She had earlier connected with her neural link to the web of Confederation satellites which monitored the planet and its surroundings out to several light-months, as the web had been doing for the last thirty years since an automated explorer had discovered the planet. She had sent a command.
So it was that as soon as she was out of sight of the village that one of the several dozen space shuttles assigned to the planet appeared before her, sinking toward the packed earth of the road. Even she could only see it as a seemingly transparent bubble, which betrayed its existence only by a slight distortion in the air at its extreme edges.
As it descended it turned on its vertical axis so that it seemed to morph from a twenty-foot tall circle to a fat tail-less dart a hundred feet in length. A doorway flicked open to show a dimly lit interior. A seemingly wooden ramp extended outward and tilted down to touch the road with its nearer edge.
Having ridden in a shuttle before Beauty calmly walked up the ramp into a stall no different than he was used to at one the homes his owner kept in several villages on the northern border of the country Loseliath. As soon as Heyalna dismounted and removed his bridle he eagerly began to munch on hay. It seemed freshly cut but had been preserved in a stasis field until minutes before.
Behind them the ramp slid into the shuttle and the doorway snapped shut. The shuttle began to rise, turned toward the east, and accelerated upward at a steep angle. The tilting of the ship deck did not confound Heyalna. Gravity inside the shuttle was a comfortable standard gravity perpendicular to the floor no matter what the gravity was, or was not, outside. Within seconds the spacecraft was moving just under the speed of sound, leveling off at a mile in the air.
This speed was limited only because Heyalna chose not to cause supersonic shockwaves. Each shuttle could accelerate to near light-speed in a few days and, since its grapefruit-sized power plant tapped into a source of essentially limitless energy, it could travel for millennia far beyond the stellar system limits.
None of the Confed agents would travel so, however. Three interstellar hyper-speed ships were stationed on the opposite side of the larger of the two moons, two rested on the deepest ocean floors, and one lay in a cavern atop the highest mountain range.
She walked forward and sat in a comfortable padded chair facing forward. Its fluorescent yellow contrasted with the dull green interior, dark on the deck and light above it. The forward view screen showed the land and sky in front of the craft.
To one side a cupboard in the wall opened and a sandwich and a large glass of dark effervescent liquid flew toward her to alight in her hands. She began have breakfast. As she sat, seemingly staring vacantly at the countryside moving leisurely toward, below, and behind her, she consumed several sandwiches and drinks. She had used a big chunk of the energy resources she typically stored as highly compressed fat which sheathed her entire body. It made her tall slender figure half again as heavy as that of a primitive human.
The vacant stare was misleading. She was actually looking at images sent to her optic nerves from the monitor satellites. They showed recent events in the border villages and in the interior of the country to the north, Ketlow, caught by sand-grain sized invisible flying spies.
The next village had been worse hit than her own. It had only had the village's usual defenders to fight the invaders. Three-dozen villagers were dead, over half of them with brain damage too long untreated to revive.
The village beyond, of the three hit, had suffered least. An alert villager had detected the enemy approach and the village guards had ambushed their attackers and killed all but three of them. They had badly wounded and captured those.
At the second village Heyalna applied herself to the dead and wounded that she could help. Within hours she rode east once again with a furiously burning pyre of enemy bodies behind her sending flames into the air.
At the third village she healed everyone, including the three enemy warriors. Those she interrogated. One of them was grateful enough for her service to speak voluntarily, but the other two answered her questions only after being injected with nanotech that ensured their cooperation.
<>
"So the attacks were impulse attacks?" The speaker was a petite but curvy very-tanned redhead wearing a blue and green sarong and skimpy bra. She appeared to be perched on the top-most crossbar of an ocean-going sailing ship.
"Choia. You forgot again." The speaker was a blue cat-like centaur. Such was the kaleidoscopic nature of virtual chat rooms that he seemed to curl in an orange futon floating in the air nearby.
The young-appearing woman swore an obscure oath, shimmered, and was replaced by her current identity, a large hyper-masculine version of her previous form. This was his current body shape but he had been a woman for a long time before coming here, so his body image got confused when he was half-asleep, as now. And in a virtual lounge while physically lying in a bed a quarter of a planet away.
Heyalna and the other twenty uplift agents on the planet only needed a few hours of sleep each night. It was past midnight where Heyalna was stationed, on the western edge of a continent populated by several dozen feudal states who sailed in wind-powered ships. She was in a cottage in the worst-hit village pretending to sleep.
Elsewhere on the planet gunpowder had been used for several decades, and elsewhere still steam power was well developed, used in both land- and water-based vehicles. The agents were somewhat evenly stationed all around the planet.
All but one agent who was asleep and two agents who were involved in local emergencies were with her in the virtual lounge.
In it with them were two more Confed citizens. Unlike the uplift agents, who were all one to three centuries old, one was close to a millennium old and the other three millennia.
The first was on a ship floating in the ionosphere, a diplomat to the electrical intelligences whose presence was sometimes observed on the planetary surface as aurora. His actual body was presently human, but he projected an image of the glowing globe shape of the electrical intelligences.
The second was a scientist floating in the sun's chromosphere trying to discover evidence of residence by a star god or gods, intelligences so far evolved beyond humanity that they might as well be gods. Star gods (or THE star god--no one knew if there was one or many) were not those of any established religion. There was plenty of proof of star-god existence, including the ruins of interstellar civilizations which had broken the one commandment the gods/god had several times given to interstellar civilizations--do nothing that might threaten any star.
The scientist's virtual body was another centaur form but, unlike the seemingly catlike uplift agent, his humanoid torso was in the center of his quadruped body, rather than at one end as were the torsos of the other two centauroid species common in or near the Confederation. His skin was bright green and clothed in blue-veined green leaves.
"Yes. I'm very annoyed with myself." Heyalna bit her lip. "Ketlow military has been centralized for the last decade or so under the influence of a radical sect. I'd placed most of my surveillance assets in the capitol. But the people in the border villages to the south have been angrier than those in the main country. Some young warriors decided to have some fun, apparently. So I got some people killed."
She shook her head.
"Your first real brush with violence, isn't it?" The green centaur nodded sympathetically, the green leaves on his head
dancing with the movement. "It's really a shocker the first time."
The Human Interstellar Confederation occupied about a third of the trailing end of an arc off one of the Galaxy's spiral arms. Most Confed citizens lived on one of the six-hundred-plus Central Planets or one of the thousands of satellites and space habitats in the Center. Violence was very rare in the Center and deadly violence almost nonexistent. Not that Center humans could not think of or decide to murder. It was just...unfashionable. Not to mention nearly impossible, given that every person was linked to dozens or hundreds of web sites which would instantly flash an alarm should any Center human get hurt.
"Yes. My first. But that's not the real problem."
She looked around at all her comrades, took a deep breath.
"I liked it. I liked killing. So much that several times I forgot efficiency and just tore them apart.
"And when they screamed and pleaded not to kill them... It was all I could do not to kill them anyway."
<>
For the next several weeks Heyalna was busy helping the defenders of the country of Loseliath against Ketlow, the country to the north. As the warriors sent across the border in raids continue to fail disastrously, in large part due to Heyalna, the groups sent became increasingly larger.
She adopted a supernatural persona to hide that she was human but with strange powers. Otherwise centuries in the future it might come to light that off-planet humans had interfered with this planet's history. She let it be known that she was one of the elf-like ketling who myth said had once lived among humans but had long ago become reclusive.
Able to control her body via her built-in nanotech she changed her skin to stark white and her complexion to inhumanly smooth and perfect. Her dark-blue eyes became sky blue, larger, and slightly slanted. Her hair, which had always been made up of separate hair-like organs with superior heating and cooling than ordinary hair, became glossy gold that was faintly luminescent, unless she turned that off, and able to braid and style itself. Occasionally she let it move as if floating in an invisible breeze. That was usually quite enough to disconcert people who annoyed her.