Resurrection Dawn

by Marc Secchia

  Not terribly neighbourly of you, she grumbled.

  Still, she would not be arguing with any 7-met reptiles of that persuasion. Hmm. The purple bamboo might suffer itself to be woven, surely?

  She ended up spending three days at this site, one due to a spectacular lightning storm that she waited out and a further two to build a new coracle from the more pliable top 3 mets or so of the super-tall bamboo and to experiment with building herself a ranged weapon. A bow. Her first four attempts snapped, but her instincts about the pliable crysto-bamboo turned out to be correct. The longbow had a heavy draw, but should provide excellent power once she worked out what she might use for arrows and flight feathers, or maybe thin slivers of bamboo would suffice?

  Second time around, boat building resulted in a craft rather more comfortable and buoyant than the first effort. Alodeé sailed upriver, whittling away at a bamboo stalk in the hope of turning it into a handy carnivore-sticker. She eyed her hand, curved about the nanodagger’s tough grip. Interesting. Perhaps it was the sun exposure, but her skin colour did appear to be turning a noticeably deeper emerald hue. Removing her forearm armour, she peeled back the sleeve of her combat skin. Not the sun. Did she even suntan?

  Nice to know her extra weirdness was still intact.

  Vitamins.

  That vitamin supplement her Dad had always been fixated upon. She had taken it every morning for as long as she could remember. ‘Take this, it’s good for you.’ ‘These will help you grow big and strong.’ Only recently had she realised, chatting to her student friends, that no-one else took extra supplements aside from the cure-all yoghurt. Isska was the exception, due to a skin condition peculiar to the Troome. She had meant to question Dymand about her supplement regime.

  Could that have been some Class U masking element?

  If Mom could never remember her past, how had she and Dad settled upon this treatment? Or could Medic Tamanzi have been involved? Classogenetics rarely covered the issue of cross-Class inheritance because it was peculiar to each combination; clearly, as a forbidden practice, the pool of potential data was extremely small. Tamanzi had noted that certain parts of a genome might inherit perfectly, so for example, Alodeé might be 100 percent Samodeé in appearance, but fully Dymand’s brain. Accepted science held that this cross-Class inheritance led to terrible issues with children being born with genetic deficiencies and abnormalities.

  So, what else did this marvellous supplement mask? My astonishing telepathic powers?

  Right. She could read minds about as well as she could read the average wall. Then again, in a world where rivers flowed up mountains, what else might be possible?

  Several kloms upriver, Alodeé had the disconcerting experience of travelling up a waterfall – eh? Waterfall? Reverse waterfall, if anything. The gravity changed perfectly in time with the river’s bend to the vertical. 350 mets later, she turned back to the horizontal and then took a second, even taller vertical rise. Smooth as nanosilk. Over the top she went, burbled cheerfully around numerous crystal towers that divided the flow and swept on into a forest of tall, reddish-purple trees that bore a succulent fruit she could pick right from the comfort of her coracle.

  Exiting the forest, for the balance of the day she flowed and bobbled up a long, long valley between the knifelike white peaks, whereupon the river lazily took the jump to the next floating island, circling a peak three times for no apparent reason she could discern, before deciding to meander upward, ever further into the mountains.

  Each day the river flowed higher and deeper into a world of gorgeous white peaks, purple vegetation and never-ending valleys. Water birds abounded, as did the carnoraptors that feasted upon them and so she took to pausing each morning to leave the river and hunt or make repairs, before returning in the afternoon and floating onward all night.

  She wondered what air pressure meant in a world where she kept rising first in tens of kloms, then hundreds and she still had no trouble breathing.

  In her spare time – nothing but time in the world these days – she sang silly songs, composed imaginary letters to her parents, Tamanzi and especially Tomaxx and planned a scenario in which she discovered some amazing new Humanoid civilisation and flew back in a gleaming white lightning-craft, returning to receive the adulation of her peers and … yep. Silly, right? Handily, she worked out how to carve straight lines with her nanodagger. After that, producing milli-met perfect arrows was a matter of concentration and repetition. She carved fletching to a template she developed, again from driftwood and practised with her powerful bow. With her enhanced strength, she could shoot a shaft over 300 mets, but the aim would require practice – especially, hitting a moving target.

  Plenty of friendly carnoraptors to pick on. From a safe distance. Under cover. Not drawing the slightest attention to her presence or position.

  Despite her vigilance, Alodeé tangled with carnoraptors four times in the course of three weeks on the river. One ambush failed when she fired an arrow through the roof of the first beast’s mouth into its brain, only to have its three other friends come within a whisker of terminating her existence. So quick! She could be quicker, but she needed to learn to fight smarter as well. Carnoraptors did not play fair. They did not pause for a taunt or let their intended meal recover her balance when she stumbled. They were not fussy as to which body part they might start with.

  Each time, she came out alive. She trained relentlessly with the blades and bow, driving herself harder and harder each day. Stronger! Higher! Quicker!

  She observed changes in the terrain, at last. The sharp white peaks grew more jagged and broken, like carnoraptor teeth. In the gaps, other crystal inclusions pushed through, garnet and peridot, chalcedony, quartz and amethyst, to name but a few. Great, thick veins of gold and silver burst out of folds in the ground that made the river run like a roller coaster. Riches forever in the culture she had come from. Looking ahead, she wondered if the whole range of mountains, so many, many layers tall, might be ending, for she saw gaps that led only to sky rather than more peaks.

  Try as she might, she could not shake the feeling that she was being watched. An itch crept around the nape of her neck. The tingling of her ear tips. She woke multiple times each night, panting or staring at the darkness, but never saw a thing. Neither hide, carapace, nor scale.

  “This isn’t the feeling you get from carnoraptors, Alodeé,” she told herself. “This is different. Something’s out there. An … intelligence? Maybe. Or a barrier like that first transparent wall you passed through?”

  Just being jumpy?

  She took extra precautions.

  At last, after five weeks on the river and innumerable islands traversed, she came to the edge of the world. The flow had picked up considerably. Having anticipated this moment, Alodeé forced her coracle through the strong current to a landing and dragged it onto a flat sheet of garnet crystal. Then she walked up to where the stream jetted out of a fissure between two sharp-shouldered slopes of white crystal and took her first look at paradise.

  A crown of intensely beautiful laser-cut white peaks surrounded the deepest fully solid valley she had ever seen. This was not just an island. It was a … she struggled for words. Not a continent, no, but for Resurrection Dawn, to see such an immensity of contiguous solid land was more than unusual, in her experience. So huge was the bowl, it began to curve only a few kloms to either side of her and stretched into the distance out of sight both ahead of her and to either side. It was a world within a world, all verdant green and purple foliage beneath shimmering amethyst cliffs cut by many frothing waterfalls, twinkling mauve lakes and towering columns of different coloured crystal brooding over the realm here and there, each 10 to 15 kloms in height, she estimated. Similar to the sheer, probably unscalable cliffs.

  Beyond breathtaking.

  As was right and proper, she sat down for a while on a flat rock to goggle and be a proper tourist on her home planet. The sun descended at her back, throwing longer and longer shadows
across this land. She checked several times, but despite a recurrence of those annoying shivers, she saw only a few flights of carnoraptors soaring above the cliffs. Even this magical land had not been spared their depredations. Totally annoying.

  She frowned. Now that the sun lowered behind the peaks, she saw a shadow out on the horizon. Could that be the lip of a giant sinkhole, a central hole toward which all of these rivers poured? Hard to tell in this gorgeous light. Supper called.

  Halfway through her seventh oily fish, she realised that her shadow stretched in the wrong direction. Alodeé swivelled slowly, tingling all over in realisation. Light. Glorious radiance filled the bowl, pouring up from that sinkhole in fingers so thick and lustrous, they seemed to stroke the peaks with trembling glory. Every crystal tower stood ablaze in addition, lending its unique hue to the blaze. So brilliant did the luminosity wax, she developed sunspots on her eyes and had to shade her gaze or be blinded – but this was only a precursor to seeing how the light reached for the moons and stars, like a beacon blazing from the side of Resurrection Dawn itself.

  This phenomenon must be visible from space, surely?

  For half an hour, perhaps, the light continued to pour forth, making her wonder if the setting sun somehow lit this world from beneath, its low beams striking some kind of crystal mirror or prism that in turn created this unique effect. Her body tingled as if the radiance conducted some special photonic resonance into her flesh.

  Then, in the course of a min or two, the glorious light faded into a deepening evening.

  Robbed!

  That night, as she sat beside a small fire hidden in a gulley tucked well away from the edge, Alodeé reflected upon and remembered each and every person who was important in her life. They were the reason she must keep strong, keep going, find her way back home – but first, she must satisfy this strange soul’s craving that kept her moving eastward, ever eastward. That meant travelling down into that immense bowl.

  She had a long dream about kissing Tomaxx in full view of everyone at Settlement Central.

  Phew, Alomonster. Racy stuff.

  Then, he turned into a carnoraptor and bit her lips off. Yane danced about her as she clutched her mutilated mouth in horror, calling, “Freak! Class-hopping pervert! What’s the matter with you?”

  Awake before dawn.

  Ugh. She rubbed her temples, fighting off a throbbing headache. Check the weapons, scout her campsite, check the sky in every direction, do a quick recce for tracks. Habit, long-ingrained. Much more fun than trying to peel a carnoraptor’s teeth off her body armour. No sense of humour, those brutes.

  Breakfast. Yep, it would be the fish, yet again. Holy Resurrection Dawn, could she ever do with some meat of the four-footed, red-blooded kind!

  Or an epic smooch-fest with Mister Scrummy-To-the-Maxx, her traitorous brain suggested, serving him up with garnish on the side. Alodeé blushed at her own thought, fanning her face. So, it’s not just danger that can send my pulse rate through the planetary rings, I see!

  As for you, Yane, you can just kiss my green, skinny Class U butt – not that you’d ever catch it.

  On that memorable note, time to sail down water that fell, for a change.

  Before setting out, she checked her weapons and equipment. Dymand might skip checklists, but he was a pirate. She sheathed her swords across her back, added the parachute pack and touched the nanodagger just in case. The longbow went crosswise across her shoulders. Picking up her two-handed paddle, she rechecked that everything else was secure.

  Check, check, chekkity-check-check.

  Deciding that obsessive-compulsive people probably stayed alive longer, she pushed confidently out into the current. Just another cliff.

  When the coracle tipped over the edge, Alodeé’s attention was on the way ahead. Any predators out this early? Dawn’s warmth blazed on her head as her raft rotated 90 degrees to face a 12-klom vertical drop … and kept right on tumbling. She pitched out of her coracle, out of the flow.

  “Freaking lumoslugs!” she howled. “Now the gravity gives up?”

  Unfortunately, as she tumbled into space, a dozen or so carnoraptors woke at her cry. She saw the burning orange heads come alive, the eyes narrowing in calculation, the wings rustling eagerly. Meat! As she dropped away down the waterfall, the entire colony of insectoid predators peeled away from the cliff face and gave chase.

  Having breakfasted, I just wrote myself onto the breakfast menu. Brilliant.

  Chapter 17

  Standard 1301.07.16 Estimated – Egg on Your Face.

  ALODEÉ ASSUMED THAT WHEN she reached terminal velocity, she would outpace the carnoraptors. Instead, two problems immediately presented themselves to her furious brain. Not the need to kick herself black and blue for a moment’s idiocy. Over that already. One, carnoraptors had powerful wings. They threatened to catch up all too quickly. Two, the cliff face was not entirely vertical. Not very far ahead stood a ledge which partially broke the first vertical fall of water. Beyond, the waterfall smashed down onto jagged rocks, exploding away in a frothing fury before taking a second, far longer leap into the void.

  Her neck swivelled frantically. She must find a place, any place; a cave, crack, or bolt-hole where she might stand a gnat’s chance of defending herself against twelve of these beasts. There!

  A dark crack right beneath the flow caught her attention. Snap decision. Flinging out her arms and legs in order to flatten her body, Alodeé slowed her plunge before pulling the parachute release. Whap! Up went the aerofoil. Now, her bow – which she could not use, because the parachute cords had trapped it behind her shoulders.

  Second error of the morning. Will this be the one that kills me?

  Grabbing the controls, she luffed hard to lose height, before swinging around to calculate the timing of her approach. Enough of a gap between the thundering water and the crystal face? Check. Carnoraptors? 75 mets and closing at speed now. Chance of finding something worse hiding inside there? Yep, check.

  Decision time.

  Yanking the handgrips, Alodeé swooped for the crack. Hide, little Humanoid. Hide deep.

  Pray nothing too nasty called that crack home.

  Thunder filled her ears as she raced into the flow’s edge. One third of the aerofoil crumpled as a stream of white water caught it, but the rest did enough to help her snag the edge of the crack, first with a foot, then a deeper reach with her hand. She bundled up the cords and fabric frantically. Here they came, punching straight through the water in hot pursuit of an absconding breakfast.

  Go! Get out of here! Ditching her pack at the entrance, she ran for her life.

  This skinny green butt could shift gears when needed, which was just as well, because the lead carnoraptor hurtled in overhead, getting its wings tangled on the crystal spars that lined the entryway. A snap of the jaws yanked out a chunk of her flying titian hair, but not enough to stop her headlong dash. She hurdled boulders and fallen garnet spars like a champion obstacle course runner. Deeper in – more light? Alodeé broke out into a compact grotto, barely 15 mets across. Sheer garnet walls. Roof 120 mets overhead. No obvious exit, bar the way she had just come in – worst news of the day, that.

  Or that!

  In the middle, near the back, stood a clutch of eggs protected by a nest fashioned from garnet crystals. Her jaw dropped. Fiery eggs. One emerald, one ruby, two gold, one platinum. Fiery eggs, as in literally afire. Jagged ropes of fire ran across their gorgeous, gemstone-stippled surfaces. Each was an artwork, like the jewelled egg Giantixx had on her mantelpiece above the fireplace.

  What the blazing heck are these?

  Hide behind the eggs? Not an option. They stood mid-thigh to her and the heat was intense. Better idea. Whipping the bow off her shoulders, Alodeé took aim down the narrow gap. Pin a few of these boys; they should turn on one another.

  Adult carnoraptors measured 8 to 10 mets across the wingtips – at least, those she had run into since being rocketed away from home. Unable to fly dow
n the gap, they crawled sideways along the walls or snuck along the ground, fighting one another to be first. She took down two in five shots – hard to miss from this range, but carnoraptors boasted tough, chitin-covered skulls that stopped anything but the most precise shots. Eye shots or firing into the mouths seemed to work best.

  Ignoring the fallen, they came for her. Or … the giant eggs? Their gazes seemed oddly fixated upon the clutch of eggs, as if they could not wait to drink the yolk or crunch the soft bones of whatever young might be forming inside. Another eye shot! Yep! Alodeé stepped backward as the first carnoraptor joined her in the dell, its muscles flexing and jaw already champing with eagerness. As it lunged forward, she slid a shot down its throat, smooth as glass. The creature groaned and shuddered, stopped in its tracks. Only four more arrows. Make them count!

  She managed one more fatality before a trio burst through. A wing she barely saw smashed her aside, but the carnoraptor snapped for an egg rather than her foot. Rebounding, she drew her swords with a sharp zing of metal.

  Alright, boys. Want to see some action?

  Two carnoraptors attacked her. Another three or four leaped for the eggs. With a scream, Alodeé slid beneath the first blow, hacking at the wing that buffeted her. She introduced the incoming fangs to the point of her elbow before wriggling away beneath one of the beasts. They snarled and scrapped as they clashed above her; she took the chance to leap over a slashing tail to stab another carnoraptor deep in its back, trying for the spine, or anything vital.

  Krack! Skiss! One of the eggs flared, cracking near the top. A baby … something!

  That could only be another toothy nasty, given Resurrection Dawn’s reputation. Dancing forward, she cleft through the neck of a carnoraptor just as it tried to take a killing bite. The severed head bounced off the platinum egg. Krack! Another egg wobbled and cracked across its tip – now was the right time to hatch? Freaking lumoslugs! Cruddy timing or what?

  Sliding beneath another terrible, hook-clawed blow, Alodeé bounded into the air and landed atop one of the carnoraptors, stabbing her blade into what felt like neck gristle. It went crazy, screaming and smashing the eggs into a pile against the wall. Small, albumen-slick bodies shifted in the carnage – tough eggs, however. They did not tear apart easily, nor did they burn up as she expected. Finishing this enemy, she leaped free as it fell, landing between the carnoraptor gang and the spitting, hissing, growling babies fighting to break free of their beautiful prisons.