Resurrection Dawn

by Marc Secchia

  Somehow, the majority of the Dragons squeezed through as the jaws of the trap did not so much spring shut, as collapse in a great, writhing orange heap. Still, dozens of Dragons went down at the edges, bellowing and flaming and rending everything in sight. Tight, concerted Pygmy barrages freed the nearest, but many Dragons did not emerge again – although, as they raced the wave of wakening carnoraptors toward the west, she saw the heaving knots of beasts continue to struggle for longer than she would have thought possible. Her eyes burned. Eaten alive. What a way to go.

  Alodeé slashed out twice more with her mind before Samodeé ordered her to stop. Blinding pain. She curled up in that paw, grinding her teeth, groaning and crying at the same time.

  We’re ahead of the wave now, Alo. The Pygmies say that they have your fast glider ready. We all have a bad feeling about what we might find at Central.

  What’s that?

  Insurrection and invasion. The most perfectly abysmal timing for whatever the Classist Hazmuri Falls crowd have likely tried to accomplish – don’t you think?

  Yep. She kept her head perfectly still, although she badly wanted to shake it. Can I –

  Stay down. We’ll get ahead.

  By that she meant, don’t explode your head, my dear daughter, by trying to do things she firstly, knew nothing about; secondly, had no idea how to control; and thirdly, hurt as if she had pickled her brain in hydrochloric acid. So sore was she, Alodeé opted to speak aloud.

  “Are we safe?”

  “Soon. There are carnoraptors everywhere in sight. Behind us there’s an orange wave as tall as the islands and as wide as the horizons, is all,” her mother said tightly. “Nothing to worry about, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Do you think –”

  “Yep. Proof positive those Obsidian things are behind all this.”

  “Are you reading my mind, Alomonster?”

  “Are you reading mine, Momonster?”

  Her chuckle sent smoke wafting beneath her. “Rest. I’ll brief Ssirinssar.”

  Dad came closer. Ever closer. Alodeé hugged her knees. Please let him be safe. Please let Central still be fighting. Please help Tomaxx, because if she knew that Oraman in the slightest, he’d be right there on the front line …

  Yep, universe. I’ve a great many requests right now. Listen up. I need your help.

  * * * *

  To her everlasting surprise, she fell asleep during the flight over to Settlement Central. Probably spoke for how much she had wrenched out of herself to try those telepathic attacks. To her further surprise, Rainflash sat beside her, humming softly as she massaged the back of her head with strong yet gentle fingers. The charge in those fingertips did weird yet decidedly amazing things to her head.

  “Umm,” she moaned. “I’ll go right back to sleep if you keep on doing that.”

  Rainflash purred, “Is good?”

  “Don’t you dare,” her mother growled. “Time to rise and twinkle, daughter.”

  Canid-sucking suicide run time, her brain translated – thankfully, for once, without broadcasting her thoughts to a gazillion Dragons.

  “Situation report?” she asked. Ace Dymand speak.

  “Yes, sir,” Samodeé gurgled. “Central is under heavy attack from millions of hostiles, all directions and all points of the compass. Plasma and photon cannon firing. Blasters blasting. AVACS and gunships deployed. All fire is concentrated around one of the three hills. No sign of Humanoid hostiles.”

  “By the hills?” she queried.

  “Yep. We’re trying to get scouts higher, but the migration is in full flow here. I assume that means they’ve failed to close the blast doors –”

  “Canid-sucking poxurix!”

  “Alodeé! Language.”

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  Such a normal conversation. She could have killed to have her mother tell her off these last twelve years. The miracle struck her afresh. She’s here.

  Yep, darling, I’m here. Mom’s mental tone was grief and joy, intermingled.

  Her mind jumped. The old colony ships had been turned into underground bunkers. They were no longer used as residential accommodation, but Dymand had always talked about their utility in case the need ever arose to ‘go mole,’ as soldiers called it. No idea what a mole was, but she assumed it was a derogatory term for underground dwellers such as Class 5s and 6s. Maybe. Or an animal? Anyways, given half a chance, Dad would have ensured the populace was locked away beneath all that nice plasteel and plascrete. A pattern of defending one hill meant that the outer doors had not been shut – otherwise, they’d just hunker down and wait for the carnoraptors to move on.

  That could only mean sabotage, right?

  She could not see that far, but the amount of smoke rising from the direction of Central was also not a great sign. Nor were the sheer numbers of carnoraptors. They seethed over the nearby islands, pouring toward Central in an unrelenting, unrelieved sea of orange.

  Samodeé said, “The plan is for us to sneak around behind the nearer islands while you fly in and alert them. No way we’d get through the automated defences to help, otherwise.”

  They both stiffened as a distant flash resolved into a mushroom cloud.

  “One less plasma cannon emplacement,” Alodeé snapped.

  Her mother said something even less tasteful than she had managed a min ago.

  “Listen, Mom, you need to get line-of-sight exactly right or you might be toasted by a plasma blast, alright? If we can sneak up behind that island cluster to the northwest –” she pointed “– we’d be a great deal closer. Will you wait for my signal?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you think some of those batteries are on manual?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Then we’ll launch me from up there.”

  “Alo … you will be careful, won’t you?”

  “Don’t worry, Mom. If they attack and get the glider, I plan to run over their backs at hyper-speed. Let out that beast you were talking about. Whatever it takes.”

  She even sounded slightly confident. Liar.

  Fighting off regular attacks from the carnoraptor horde that still undulated toward Central, the flight of Dragons flew 7 kloms closer. Although beams of light from the interstellar class photon cannons periodically sliced through nearby, the attack was so intense that the defence systems had effectively been overwhelmed. Could the main generators even sustain this level of barrage for long? Alodeé also saw how the towering jungles outside the Settlement had been overrun. The outer perimeter and fences had been destroyed in many places. Smoke rose from the Social Hub and from the control tower beside the Spaceport. Surely carnoraptors were not into destruction of this type and scale?

  Was that Dad’s AVACS up there, cutting through the carnage above that main blast door? He must be her target. She checked over the triangular glider with the Lightning Pygmies, pulling the shoulder straps tight as directed. Time for a big slice of nothing.

  Her Comms bracelet crackled.

  Alodeé nearly jumped out of her skin. Voices came through – Isska, Asmurti, Maruski. It was on the same channel they’d used at Bryllintine Mines!

  “Isska! Asmurti! Dad!” she shouted.

  The voices continued as if they had not heard her. She bit back on a cargo ship’s worth of rude words.

  “No transmission?” Samodeé said.

  Alodeé fiddled with the device. “Come on, come on … Dad? Dymand?” It crackled again and went blank. “Marvellous. That went well. Ready, Mom?”

  Ssirinssar called, “Dragonish luck strengthen your paw, Alodeé!”

  7,000 voices roared as one.

  Alright. Gulp. Standing on her Mom’s paw, she bit her lip as the Dragoness of Emerald began to poke her head around the edge of a cliff. HSS! She jerked back. If she had possessed a hairstyle, Samodeé would have lost it there and then. Those photon cannons were brutal, high-energy weapons, but she already thought she detected a slowing in their firing. Enormous
quantities of energy fuelled the blasts of concentrated energy, piercing long lines of destruction through the carnoraptors, but they were not even close to stemming the orange tide.

  “Sling me around the corner, Mom –”

  “Do you have any idea how hard this is for me?” she snarled. “Obviously not!”

  “About as hard as it is for me? Only just found you!”

  To her surprise, a pair of green Dragon lips kissed her from her shoulder to her elbow. “Sorry. Stay safe, Alomonster.”

  Wow. Serious smooch power there, Mom.

  Then, with a parting, Love you, she lifted her paw and slung her daughter out into the open like a darts player taking a long, long shot. Yep. A mere 4-klom shot through seething flights of carnoraptors, down a klom to a set of three previously green hills that now looked like a mini volcano crossed with the light show for the annual Settlement Ball.

  Love you, too, she called back.

  Adjusting her weight, Alodeé tipped the nose forward to pick up speed. Time to see what the Pygmies had made for her. The yellow parachute material had been converted into a neat swept-wing glider with a sling beneath and basic controls for the intrepid – make that crazy – pilot. A strong but lightweight bamboo frame kept the wings rigid. In theory, the Base weapons AI should be keyed with quadruple-redundant algorithms to pick a Humanoid out of a mass of predator bodies and not instantly return them to the dust from whence they came.

  Yep. In theory.

  What she did not expect, was a volley of shots aimed to clear her flight path. Several burned by so close that her hair frazzled at the tips, but that was deliberate. Close. Too close. A larger explosion somewhere near Residential 5 advised the demise of another of the photon cannon batteries. Not good. They’d run out of firepower at this rate. The group of perhaps forty AVACS craft had already been whittled down from when first she watched. Carnoraptors saw them as enemies.

  Her bracelet hissed again.

  “Paging Dymand, priority critical!”

  Nothing. Except, she now knew it was definitely Isska and the gang up there in that AVACS. No sign or sound of Tomaxx. Could the Oraman tanks be protecting the front door to the underground units? That was where she would deploy them. Alodeé swept forward, holding her bow lightly in hand. A marauding carnoraptor spun away, gifted with an arrow to the brain.

  Jink. Dodge. Pick up speed! She flattened out in her sling, holding her body still and praying the carnoraptors would not notice one more body flying in their midst.

  At her first sight of the main blast doors which were meant to be protecting the citizenry, Alodeé growled beneath her breath. Toasted. A dense wedge of Oraman fought to secure the smoking gap, wearing their heaviest full white armour, which basically transformed tanks into near-impregnable battle machines. They needed to be. Carnoraptors swarmed over and around the entrance area in their thousands. The disciplined regiment swung their famous photonic hammers, each blow landing with a blinding flash of light that knocked four-foot craters into the sides of the carnoraptors or blew their heads clean off. Nice one. Several ranks of soldiers knelt or stood behind them, wielding CLB rifles to keep the hostiles from hitting them from above.

  What they could not see, was that the hills behind them and the jungles beyond seethed with ever-increasing swarms of carnoraptors, a living wave of bodies.

  Things were about to get worse. Much worse.

  One klom to go. Alodeé downed three more carnoraptors, watching the swarms beneath and around her arrowing toward Settlement Central. Her gaze roamed over all the familiar buildings, even the obstacle course and the garbage compactor beside it. Someone had usefully moved that tower well away from trouble.

  Nice afterthought.

  Where would Dymand be? Up in that AVACS, for sure. Must be. He’d be in the thickest of the fighting, but she could not see him yet.

  Half a klom. On target. She had to shoot constantly now, burning through her stock of arrows at a rate that did not bear thinking about. Soon, it would be down to swords.

  HHSSSS!!

  Alodeé screamed as the wing above her back exploded in a ball of flame.

  Thanks, auto-defences!

  She dropped right onto a carnoraptor’s back. The screeching fiend carried her on a wild, careening flight a couple of hundred mets closer before diving into a knot of his fellows with a grating bellow that probably meant, ‘Clean this meat off my back, would you?’

  Alodeé did not hang about to make their acquaintance. Kicking off, she hit the next one on the run. Time to let her inner beast out to play.

  Setting her sights on the all-black AVACS with its instantly recognisable orange flares and custom mods, she embarked on the obstacle course run of her life. Leaping from back to back, she dived, twisted, somersaulted, hitched a brief ride on a wing, dropped 15 mets to tackle another unsuspecting ride and fought her way toward her father’s vessel. Fire spurted out of its nose and gun ports. Any grenades or bombs must have long since been spent, judging by the carnage around the entrance they defended so grimly.

  Come on, Asmurti. Give me a shot.

  The AVACS swerved and dipped, tossing off the swarming hostiles, burning them off with the engine ports, blasting them from all angles. Alodeé blurred toward them. No time to think anymore. She hardly knew where her feet or hands landed. Green smear of speed.

  The back door was shut. Crud! Another plan needed. She had expected them to be firing out of the rear.

  Dad! Dad! It’s me, Alodeé!

  He was supposed to hear telepathic communication, right?

  Her legs scissored across a long gap. She bounded off a startled carnoraptor’s skull, sliced through a speculative talon with her blade and landed atop another creature for long enough that it screeched and bucked. Up! Riding the motion, she took an ultra-long spring! Asmurti jinked the AVACS again, throwing off her attempted 40-met long jump record. Alodeé whizzed past the nose, actually seeing Isska looking right through her as she tucked up her legs or she would have lost them to a plasma cannon blast. Smacking a carnoraptor in the ribs with her feet, she rebounded, caught a gun port and swung herself up atop the vessel.

  “Dad! Dymand! Come on!” She banged the metal as hard as she could with the flat of her hand.

  Carnoraptor! She ducked and whirled, her blades dancing. Asmurti, rotten non-friend of the worst ilk, rotated the craft to throw off what she must have thought was another attack.

  Alodeé slid off, kicked something in the head and found her way back aboard once more. No, not over the nose! Suicide, to chance the forward-firing weapons a second time. Instead, she read the corkscrew rotation and ran over the belly of the craft, up the far side, caught one of the stubby wings and skidded across the curve of the upper nose. She slapped down perfectly on the forward view screen, splayed like a splattered bug for everyone inside to see.

  “Dad! Asmurti! Open up!”

  Yep, as if they could hear her through the armoured plasglass. Her face probably looked a sight, too, all splotched with green ichor and unmentionable bits of carnoraptor gunk. She almost wet herself laughing at the expressions on their faces. Isska’s mouth formed an ‘O’ big enough to swallow Tomaxx whole. Asmurti had the gall to look peeved. Then, as she slid aside given the centrifugal force of the craft’s spin, she saw them both yelling, ‘Alodeé!’ at the same time.

  Things inside went a bit ballistic.

  Kind of warming to a girl’s heart, since this pirate planned to commandeer her own father’s vessel.

  Chapter 27

  Standard 1301.07.26.21 Estimated – Dymand for Dad

  THE BACK DOOR HAD barely begun to crack open when Alodeé decapitated her latest victim and kicked off, hyper-strong, for the catch. 7-met jump. Ace judgement on the leap, but she very nearly broke the bridge of her nose with a not entirely expert landing.

  Gloved hands reached out to haul her inside.

  “Alodeé! Alodeé!” Dad screamed right into her face. Quite beside himself.

 
“Dad!” She wrapped her arms around him. He turned purple. “Sorry, but Dad! You good?”

  “Yep – all – where did you – how?” he spluttered, tearing off his combat helmet. Crying! So was she. “Alodeé! Thought you were gone forever, oh, darling!”

  He kissed her forehead tenderly, shaking from head to toe.

  “I’m a tough kill.”

  “That’s for sure! Alodeé! Girlie, you’ve got some explaining to do.” He tapped his temple. “I heard you. Where’d you spring from?”

  “Oh, it’s a story, Dad.”

  “Alodeé!” Maruski yowled from the other gunnery station.

  “Hey, furball!” she yelled back.

  He stared at her, shook her, gave her the Head of Settlement Security once-over. “I’d demand answers, but as you can see, we’re in the middle of a little something here.”

  “Yep. I know. It’s called a super-migration.”

  “Guns? What do you want to – here to help out? Or what? Huh?”

  Wild eyes. This was one father, beside himself with joy. Alodeé promised herself she’d have a good cry on this man’s shoulder just as soon as the chance arose.

  Instead, she held him by the shoulders and gazed right into his grey eyes. “Dad, I’ve brought backup. Heavy backup and lots of it. Come with me to the front, stat. Listen up.”

  He muttered, “Backup? Heaven knows we need any help we can get, but from where?”

  In the Nav area, Asmurti and Isska squealed her name. Isska budded out a limb to hug her. Heavens, they had shrunk in size and looked – well, battered was a nice way of putting it. Asmurti had heavy strapping on her left knee.

  “Dawn’s fires, friends,” she smiled. “Listen up. I’ve brought along some serious backup, but we will need to either reconfigure the automatic defence systems or switch them off in order to call it in. Can we do that?”

  “Switch it all off? Are you mad?” her father demanded.

  “No, I am not mad,” she returned, biting her lip to help keep calm. “Neither am I deranged. I need you to trust me, Dad. We need to switch to short-range plasma only, at the very least. How tight are the recognition algorithms?”