Resurrection Dawn

by Marc Secchia

  After a while, he whispered, “Sorry, Alomonster, but Tamanzi’s going to kick you out in a min. What was that about the Oraman? You didn’t finish.”

  “Dad, did Mom know where she came from?”

  “We never found out. We’re not sure, but we think someone might have wiped her memories from the time before she was captured. There would be occasional nuggets or suggestions of recollection, but nothing solid.”

  “Oh.” Self-defence, or someone’s doing? “Well, some Oraman believe that Dragon spirits can live in people and that all Dragon spirits in the Universe originate in a magical Dragon world called Torc. They originate there and return there to be reborn. They named this world Resurrection Dawn in the hope it would turn out to be Torc. We have carnoraptors which are somewhat like mythical Dragons – insectoid wyverns, to be precise – but, unfortunately, no actual Dragons. Giantixx remains a believer. She says we are small and the world is large.”

  “What do you think, Alodeé?”

  “I think that if you can marry a telepath, then the Universe is indeed a larger and stranger place than I’ve ever imagined. No, I’m not reading any thoughts. Never have. Neither can I walk through fire, unlike Mom. Giantixx calls her ‘the firewalker.’ She was pretty special.”

  “Yep, Samodeé certainly was. You, apparently, have some kind of built-in hyperdrive mode.”

  “Bedtime!”

  Medic Tamanzi appeared at the doorway.

  “Do I get a kiss if I’m good?” her Dad flirted.

  “You’re always bad.”

  “Eh, I believe that’s a cue for the teenager to leave the room,” she said, pretending to make a face. “See you both tomorrow. No staying up too late, alright?”

  “Yep, boss-lady,” said Tamanzi, flipping her a salute.

  “Safely home,” said her Dad.

  “Too many bosses around here for my liking,” Alodeé sassed him. “Night, Dad.”

  One last kiss. Then she slipped out of the Infirmary, heading along the dark paths for their home. How much longer would his recovery take? Her mind and heart were so full, she feared to burst. Pausing, Alodeé took a long look at the clear night sky. Thick ropes of stars braided the heavens, thick as dust in places; a pink rope here, a mauve patch there … great nebulae spanning the eastern horizon.

  Incredible.

  Mom, the telepath. Which star did you come from? Dad, the merc rogue.

  What am I?

  Breaking into a jog, Alodeé headed for home. Late now. How was it that a person could flash to some of the conclusions that she had been capable of recently? A frisson touched her spine. Slipping her small blaster onto her palm, she scented and scanned the night. Nothing.

  A few secs later, her left ankle snagged on an unseen trip-wire.

  Toppling, Alodeé squeezed off a shot on pure instinct, striking a dark form hiding in the bushes alongside the path directly in the face.

  BOOM-BOOM! She fell as if scythed through the knees.

  Next she knew, she was groaning, dragging her face off the plascrete road surface, trying to feel for her weapon. Unnh, what … hit me? Stun grenades?

  “Still with us, girlie?”

  Alodeé touched the blaster. “I’ll –”

  “Smash her!”

  A mountain collapsed on the back of her neck.

  * * * *

  Alodeé woke slowly, with a headache that threatened to split her head in half with a laser cutter and then scoop out the insides for fun. The low thunder and vibration nearby did not help. She tried to move. Strapped down with heavy nano-steel link cargo straps. To a bed?

  No. Hard, cold metal. She forced her eyes open.

  Wind whistled across her uncovered face. She lay face down, gazing into a mauve canyon more immense than anything she had ever imagined. Her eyes focussed reluctantly. It carved between islands not of rock, but of … trees? Dense foliage. A thousand vertical kloms of burgundy branches and leaves, shaped like improbable puffs of cloud spotted with white flowers. Moving at what she sensed was great speed, she overflew the end of the tree islands and saw a waterfall curving off for maybe 50 kloms before it vanished in sprays of rainbows.

  Freaking lumoslugs, where am I? So beautiful.

  Nowhere she knew.

  As she shifted, fighting the heavy straps, a holo readout appeared in the aether 20 cents in front of her eyes. It read: Flight time, 41h 11m 1s.

  Ticking upward.

  41 hours? Had she been sedated? Alodeé shifted, trying to see above and around her. Oh, wonderful. Someone had strapped her to the belly of one of the old-fashioned, chemical-powered explorer probes. The type the settlers had been forced to try because everything else kept vanishing into the …

  The wind ripped a howl right off her lips.

  The display switched to: Ground speed 247kph. Heading 90 declination 0.7.

  Alodeé said a lot of things, not one of them acceptable in polite company. Someone’s idea of a joke. A sick joke with a terminal punchline. She fought the straps with a silent scream, but these had a breaking strain north of 5 kilotons apiece. Whoever had concocted this idea was more than vindictive.

  Pure sadism.

  She could just imagine a moron like Yane sniggering, “Shot her like a rocket. Right over the sun. Whoosh!”

  This is no time to panic, kiddo. What would Dad tell me?

  Stop and think. Take an inventory.

  After a quick spot of mental math, she estimated she must be in the region of 10,000 kloms from home on a non-stop express journey to the Settlement of, ‘You’ll never come back from there.’ A heading of 90 meant due east. The issue? Simple. She was going nowhere unless this thing had a release switch or timer, or the rocket crash landed. That would end one Alodeé. Wipe-out, dead.

  Second issue, tools, weapons and armour. The narrow swords dug into her spine. She had her clothing, light armour and the combat skin. Her belt was intact – peering past a large, odd bundle strapped to her chest, she located the nanodagger a tantalising 5 cents or so from her fingertips. Wriggle, squirm – no, she would not be reaching any useful tools unless she could shift these blasted cargo straps. Her arms had been strapped flat at her sides, not a cent’s give. No blaster at her thigh. No food, no water.

  Not that any of that will matter if you can’t get off this flying skyhook in one piece.

  Now would be a great time to discover a skill of breathing fire. Yep. Grasshoppers flew backward around the sun, she had it on good authority.

  With a hysterical laugh, Alodeé remembered to check the sun’s position. Not that it mattered – these probes had basic manoeuvring capability designed to prevent them from smashing into the sides of flying islands. She could be flying in circles, for all she knew. No. Astronomy 101. The location and angle of the planetary rings could in theory help one determine position in the atmosphere. The declination had changed visibly. Only one conclusion: this truly was a straight shot to nowhere.

  She was lost somewhere in the habitable atmosphere of a world Isska had once informed her measured a mere 1.09 times 10 to the 15th power cubic kloms. Yep. As in, 10.9 quadrillion cubic kloms. That put hide-and-seek into a whole new perspective. No strolling back tomorrow.

  In another Canid-sucking humiliation, my bladder’s about to burst.

  Fourth issue? As best she could tell from this angle, her wrist Comms bracelet was blank. Another strike for her home planet’s tech-frazzling capabilities.

  Dad’s got to be worried to death. Sorry, Dymand. Planning my return. Don’t give up on me yet.

  Fifth, her immediate environment. Alodeé swivelled her head. No telling what her altitude might be, but since the air felt thinner, she might be in A-18 or even as high as A-21. Light headed? Could just be a lack of food and water.

  Her unwelcome transportation made steady, unabated progress toward a glistening blue wall up ahead, shaped as she imagined a hurricane storm wall would be. Those sometimes tore through A-15, visible from above as immense, coiling bands of grey-p
urple cloud with a clear eye. They could reach 3,000 kloms in diameter. One reason why Atmospheric-16 had been an obvious choice for habitation, she recalled from her Climatology course. It offered relative stability, with the unfortunate bonus of carnoraptors and a gazillion other forms of hungry, predatory wildlife. Craning her neck until it creaked, she gazed at the phenomenon ahead. Upwelling? Water?

  Upwellings were as enormous a phenomenon as the world which birthed them; ways of the planet cycling its atmospheric layers, waste, nutrients and gases. Studying the precipitation cycles of normal water-bearing exoplanets was a similar idea, but the accepted thinking was that Resurrection Dawn was a gas giant with a stable molten metal core. It could not be very heavy, or the gravity would be crushing. Gravity itself was a nonsense here. Macro studies informed scientists it was simply not as strong as expected; micro studies confirmed localised qualities to the phenomenon, leading to oddities such as upside down lakes and volcanoes, flying islands and rivers that flowed through the atmosphere or between islands. Craziness.

  Alright, maybe that was an upwelling, a mighty mushroom of a light azure colour that suggested water, originating beyond the reach of her sight below and extending hundreds of kloms above and across her flight path. An ocean, just not textbook. Maybe.

  1 hour, 38 mins and 6 secs later, her answer arrived with a splot and a glub. Water! The probe continued to bore onward, roaring more throatily than before.

  Torrents of water pulled the probe this way and that, tumbling over and around one another in a display of ferociously misbehaving micro-gravity of the sort she had just been thinking about. Ropes, rivers and lakes of liquid thrashed about her in an ebullient frenzy. Air! She sucked in a greedy breath. Licked her lips. Yum. Tasted decent, actually.

  Somewhere in the middle of her fiftieth impromptu shower, she decided, To heck with this. The combat skin’s breathable. It’ll wash out.

  She peed in her trousers. Totally humiliating.

  Then, she slaked her thirst. No telling when her next drink might be.

  Squads of amphibians that looked like blue frogs, but moved by spinning a motor tentacle attached to their rear end, came to investigate the rocket. After that, it was a swarm of micro-fish, barely a cent long but coloured every hue of the rainbow. As they moved, they created living rainbows soaring up and down the ropes of water. That was, until a creature that looked like a brown, roughly-woven basket 100 mets across turned up and ate all of the rainbows.

  Must be an art critic. Her hysterical laughter frightened even her.

  Many of the local wildlife struck her as dangerous or poisonous, but the rocket’s roaring appeared to put them off. Not so much the giant, house-sized jellyfish. The rocket punched through curtains of jellyfish tentacles into a region of lightning playing between these torrents of water that looked and moved like great thunderheads. The tentacles left trails of burning dots on her exposed skin, but then a swarm of fish shaped disturbingly like chopped-off Human fingers turned to eat the green tentacles and suck at her face and fingers. The stinging abated.

  Thunder! The water-clouds pulsated deep purple with each beat. She could follow the storm’s progress visually as it played percussively about her, deafening and terrifying and awesome. Alodeé prayed she would not be struck by lightning.

  Oh. This is a parachute pack on my chest, isn’t it? They really wanted me to survive. Strange. Why not just do me in then and there?

  After 300-plus additional showers and one traverse through a vertical, violet-coloured lake the colour of her eyes and inhabited by glowing white crystal spiders – thankfully not the cave-dwelling monster sort – the rocket broke out into breathable air again. She gasped in relief. Close one. Almost blacked out.

  Oh, nice. Time for a rain of fire, anyone?

  A band of clouds ahead rained a very thin, fluid type of lava, Alodeé imagined, turning the sky ahead an orange-crimson colour. Monstrous black clouds billowed above the phenomenon. Perhaps there were burning islands located inside the clouds? Either way, the rocket’s systems responded for the first time, changing course to fly parallel between the fire curtain and the watery mushroom cloud, giving her new perspective on the immensity of these phenomena.

  After flying north into the early afternoon, she saw a gap in the fire curtain. Predictably, her transportation angled for it. Nothing but a perfect one-way ticket for the Class U freak, right?

  Chapter 12

  Standard 1301.05 Date and Time uncertain.

  COUGHING, CHOKING and GASSED within a millimet of her life, Alodeé blinked her raw, streaming eyes to try to clear them. “Gaah, you freaking – whatever!”

  If that did not make her sick, nothing would. Brutal, but she was through. Hacking more ash out of her lungs, she sneezed violently half a dozen times in quick succession. Grey snot. Stinging eyes, nose and throat. Then, wondering when this joyride might be over, she craned her neck yet again to squint at the way ahead.

  In her life, there had been times she felt tiny. One of her first clear memories was of rising above an island in an AVACS. She perched on her father’s lap. Extra harness strap for the little one. She had to strain to see over the holo displays; lightly, he touched her fingers upon the throttle controls, explaining how to tip the nose while hovering in place. A swathe of wedge-shaped green isles stretched out like a long, flat fish hook before them, each floating pristinely in the middle of immense, still nothingness.

  “Daddy, where did the ground go?”

  “There isn’t a ground, Alodeé. Our world is – it’s like a giant and the islands float around inside his belly like he ate too many cookies.”

  “Ew, that’s not true!”

  “What do you think of all this? Beautiful, right?”

  “We’re so tiny, Daddy!”

  He ruffled her titian locks fondly. “Alomonster, you’re right. We’re specks in a world far larger than anything else we have on record. Our corner, the bit we know, is just a tiny fraction of what’s out there.”

  “I miss Mommy.”

  “Me too, my precious. Me too.”

  Daddy’s cried so very much. Why does he cry when he looks at me, too?

  The moisture that gathered in her eyes at the memory definitely helped soothe this physical pain. Blinking the tears away, she gazed out of the corner of her eye. Tiny. Gnat. Mote. Great words to describe how she felt now, for her rocket bored steadily toward what she took for a wall that filled the sky. Fairly much. As in, its width and height and depth exceeded the limits of her Humanoid sight in every direction, perhaps curving very slightly, but that was it. The colour was like gazing through a water droplet suspended in space – almost translucent, but with a teasing glimmer of rainbow colours perhaps thrown by the westering sun.

  Funny how the colonists had decided that the sun ought to rise in the east and set in the west. This world had no magnetic pole, so the directional choice struck her as arbitrary.

  Alodeé wanted to rub her eyes. A glistening wall in the world. Despite the 100 kloms of ash and smoke she had just flown through, the atmosphere here was extraordinarily pellucid, as if rinsed clean of any particles or pollutants. Even over at Settlement Central, line-of-sight of islands up to 230 kloms distant had been measured – well, by the Avian Class with their superior ocular capabilities, to be fair. This? Glancing past her toes at the crimson-orange rain of fire, then to the sides to try to gauge her limits, she gave up with a mystified snort. What was one, two, or three thousand kloms between friends? It did not matter. Definite curvature toward the edges, however.

  That thing’s heeee-uuugee. A world within a world. She had the oddest inkling it must be a cage. So, which side of the bars am I on?

  Also, her rocket behaved as if the wall were not there.

  Right. It was definitely something. The light misbehaved as it spangled through. Only, the phenomenon was so insubstantial, it was hard to fear that she might be splattered like a bug on a ceiling. Closer and closer she flew. The rocket shook and stuttered,
before something clicked inside and it regained its healthy thunder.

  “Flight time?” she asked clearly.

  The holo popped up. 49h 21m 19s.

  “Speed?”

  Ground speed 244kph. Heading 90.2 declination -0.4.

  Should she try to work through protocols for potential release? Maybe not. The options right now appeared to be one, return to the fire; two, drop into a bottomless atmospheric well with no apparent islands below; or three, try to ram her head against the wall.

  Mmm, tough choice. Has to be the wall. Mostly, because I’m that stubborn.

  Probably got it from Dad.

  With nothing better to do with her time, Alodeé worked at the straps, trying to find some give somewhere. The surface of this probe was smooth metal. Her abductors must have used ratchets, but they could not have applied them at full tension or she would not be alive to be thinking about it right now. That meant … yep, was that the tiniest bit of give at her left wrist? One strap ran beneath her body, securing her wrists with an additional loop around each wrist. One ran over and around her ankles and a third had been run up beneath her right armpit, over her chest above her breasts and down through the left armpit again, before being fastened somewhere well out of reach. That one hurt the most; it restricted her breathing.

  From close up, the wall resembled a fine lattice made of a substance close to water, but not quite. The shimmering quality teased the eye. It clearly did not register on the rocket’s sensors, because it hurtled toward the phenomenon at the same unabated speed. Alodeé could not help wincing and ducking.

  As they collided with almost-nothingness, the strangest shiver she had ever felt encased her bones in ice. No, not an outward sensation. Something deep within, fundamental, terrifying.

  As if talons stroked my soul.

  Alright. She was that scared, she said a couple of words to the Dragon spirits. Forget not being superstitious. This girl needed all the help she could get.

  11 mins 46 secs later, the probe burst through the other side and Alodeé found herself flying into a place that resembled scenes of underwater swarms of medusa jellyfish she had studied in Biology. One small issue. These pink jellyfish were the size of mountains, each dome-shaped body measuring 1 to 2 kloms across and their tentacles trailed hundreds of mets beneath, crackling visibly with lightning across their surfaces. So thick was the swarm, spreading in every direction, that it entirely obscured the sky and any view beyond. The world was mauve air and pink,fleshy bodies floating about in it.