by Marc Secchia
The experimental tugging turned into being dragged backward out of her cover. Fast. Growling. That sensation woke her up like being hurled into an ice bath from the height of a 50-met tower.
“Freaking lumoslugs!”
Fangs champed at her leg armour. A smallish young carnoraptor eyeballed her in shock as she kicked it in the head with her free foot. Holy Resurrection Dawn, meals were not supposed to fight back? Drawing her nanodagger in a blur, she took a swing and nearly lost her hand for her trouble. The carnoraptor tried to eat the blade; she found a nanosword and, with four wild chops, managed to hack its head off. Nasty business.
Grrrraaarrgh!
Crud! Mommy or Daddy raced toward her, probably somewhat unhappy that breakfast had just popped up and killed their baby.
GNARR – BBRAARRGHH!!
Plus relatives! Half a dozen flame-orange beasts converged upon her hiding place with furious roars. Alodeé did not wait around to count fangs. She bolted for the nearest woods, 220 mets around the lake. Top speed. Clearly startled by her turn of speed – nothing if not highly motivated – the carnoraptors launched over the lake, angling to cut her off. These creatures were no slouches, but she dived into the thicket several mets ahead of the pursuit. Slipping behind a tall, grey trunk, she whipped out her nanoswords. Ready.
Kerump! An enraged beast hacked at the undergrowth, its nostrils sniffing massively, taking in her scent. Her ears pricked. Worming deeper? Judging the moment, she whipped out of cover and stabbed it in the skull. The ultra-sharp nanosword, named for the nanotech blade which kept an edge as fine as a single atom, sliced through insect carapace and bone with ghastly ease. The creature convulsed.
She slipped away deeper into the undergrowth, every sense on the alert.
“Freak! Almost lost a foot there.”
She rotated her ankle gingerly and eyed the fang dents in her leg armour. Despite that its fangs had not penetrated her combat skin beneath, this was bound to hurt. That beast had to be able to pulverise rock with one bite.
Not a happy Alodeé, but alive happens to be a good result.
One more mistake for her growing list. Thankfully, this one had not cost her foot, or her stupid neck.
Shortly, she sensed that there was no longer movement out there. Not close to her, anyways. Slinking onto her belly, she checked in every direction, including the treetops. What was that crunching sound? Ah, even more charming. Evidently, dead carnoraptors made for an excellent breakfast. The family scrapped and growled at each other as they consumed their own.
Mmm, it’s an all-you-can-eat insect meat buffet! Feel free to invite your least favourite relative, or your kids. Remember, younger is juicier …
Feeling somewhat greener than her usual shade of chlorophyll, Alodeé snuck off to explore the island. She’d retrieve her pack and parachute later.
* * * *
Over the next few weeks, she travelled slowly and cautiously up into the islands, until the wide flower ocean and all that came before faded in her memory. The immediacy of her survival needs kept her on edge at all hours, whether scouting through outlandish emerald crystal-wood forests, evaluating life forms, or jogging along a horizontal rope between islands.
She spent six days skirting the edge of a suspended bubble lake which housed many fish and strange monsters, visible through the clear water like pets in a fishbowl. Only, no Humanoid wanted to be swimming in there. All of the jagged, toothy creatures came furnished with impressive sets of tentacles, barbs, stingers and many more creative ways of murdering one another.
Further east lay a section of islands arranged like platters of luminous yellow fungi. She was forced to leap and parachute from one stack to the next – there must be a way around, but the detour would be many, many kloms. Being forced to breathe through dense clouds of light green spores clogged her lungs and made her sick for several days. After that, she pushed on again through a horizontal strip of small connected islands, like tiny white and golden outposts upon the floor of a canyon that reached the stars above.
Now, just for variety’s sake, it was back to island staircases once more. Feeling hardened and more confident, Alodeé took on five or six traverses a night, at last attaining a grassland of light blue crystal filaments that looked like rippling water, but was not. Pushing through sharp blades that stood shoulder-height to her, she encountered a sleepy diamond-backed constrictor guarding a nest. Giving that a wide berth, she continued to press eastward until she spied the major denizens of this land – shaggy, dark blue six-legged bovines comfortably twice the size of her house, grazing peaceably on the sharp grass blades. Wow. Decent lawn mowers. They shovelled swathes of grass into their maws with what appeared to be a set of mandibles on their lower jaw, fairly much eating their way through each day.
Since they moved at her hiking pace, she trailed the herd for a couple of days. Counting the behemoths was a trick. She eventually settled on 76 adults and 15 youngsters.
Her fifth night out on the grassland, with her water running out, she woke well after midnight, pleased to sense a storm sweeping in. Rain! Less pleased to see the madness of lightning playing about in the chunky, deep purple thunderheads, for she had seen no cover out here. For the first time, the bovines lowed – long, sonorous notes that carried a fair distance over the waving grasses. Rising to her feet, Alodeé saw other bovine heads popping up to view the phenomenon with rising alarm. Stamping feet. Snorting breath. Tossing their shaggy blue manes, their 4-met-wide horns suddenly stood upright like a jagged forest. Quivering.
Quite the chill on the breeze rising ahead of that storm front. Her head swept from the bovines to the storm, then back again. Twice. Her eyes narrowed as she stared into the distance, watching a silvery grey curtain beginning to sift down from the fast-moving storm. Realisation settled languidly in her belly. That was not lightning. Those were … creatures of lightning. Winged, two-limbed creatures similar to her least favourite predator, the carnoraptor, but these were a brilliant eggshell yellow and they appeared either to be playing with or shooting lightning bolts amongst themselves.
Yep. Let’s call those Storm Raptors. And, I need to get out of here. Stat.
Snatching up her pack in her left hand, she checked the ground around her small campsite. Nothing but a few fruit peels.
Two distinct rumbling sounds reached her ears. One was a rising and falling grumble of thunder arising from the storm, which now bracketed the northern horizon. A second, she felt through the soles of her feet. The grass mowers were on the move, en masse. When one said ‘mass’ related to these beasts, that was no laughing matter. Massive they were, with a turn of speed not to be underestimated. The earth moved with it, trembling under an immensity of tonnage. The family groups drew together at the same time. She stood a very real chance of ending up a green smear on the grass.
Snap decision. Turning on her heel, she jogged toward the closest family group, the one she had been following for days now. They had mostly ignored her even when she came close, perhaps not aware of the dangers of chatting to enigmatic red-headed girls wandering about their grassland.
Something like that.
Now they all rumbled into motion, picking up speed. Running from hunters? Or was this merely fright? Either way, she bounded though the grass, coming up alongside one of the bulls. Tomaxx thought he was a pillar of muscle. This bad boy stood 8 mets tall at the shoulder and must be at least as wide; a compact, walking juggernaut. His musky male stench was the stuff of legends.
“So, hope you don’t mind,” she panted, increasing her speed to a bounding sprint as the giant bovines began to pull ahead, “but, I’m hitching a ride. Please don’t dump me and run me over, alright?”
The creature lowed mournfully.
Hitching up her courage, she leaped for the dangling coat. His second knee smashed into her breast as she climbed the heaving, bounding wall of muscle. Naughty word. Suppose she deserved that. Either he was too big to care, or he didn’t feel her at all. Either way
, as she found a position atop the massively broad mane that bearded his vast shoulders – the first set of three, she supposed – the bovine entirely disregarded her presence.
Flea boards behemoth.
Idiot, she giggled, then reached out to pat his back. Nice cud-chewing bovine. Not her sweetest thought. Ashamed, she muttered, Sorry.
Loneliness did strange things to the mind.
As if hearing her apology, the creature bellowed again. This time, a mighty chorus answered his cry. She glanced about, her neck prickling with shock. Hundreds! Where had they all sprung from? The charge spread out in a great curve, thundering across the grasslands, flattening a swathe of stalks as the herd fled from the storm into the deep purples of night.
Lightning crackled behind them. Here came the Storm Raptors! Fascinating to watch what happened now. Were these predator and prey? Or was something even stranger about to unfold?
Alodeé’s heart stood in her throat as the gleaming raptors closed in. Multiple branches of lightning sparked between their wings and gleaming talons and the upraised horns of the hindmost bovines. Suddenly, one of them came alive – his great shaggy coat blazed as blue as the stars and his legs twitched with alarming violence. Fffwwoooossshhhh! Blink. The beast stormed past her at such a velocity, he broke the sound barrier not 20 mets from her right hand. With that detonation, he streaked off into the distance.
Blink again. “What the freak?”
Fffwwoooossshhhh! There went another!
Fffwwoooossshhhh! Fffwwoooossshhhh! Off they shot like blue rockets, disappearing toward the horizon in glorious blurs of speed.
The storm swept over the herd, crackling and spitting. The raptors plunged in droves for their prey, but the self-defence mechanism of these creatures kicked in every time – charged up, they discovered a new pitch of physical exertion that put the most competent Class 4 sprinter to shame. Had they hit something out here they might very well have exploded, but there was nothing save hundreds of kloms of beautiful, flat, otherwise featureless grassland.
Yep, the grass smouldered where they shot past.
Spying movement above her, Alodeé crouched down and wound her hands into the thick coat. Please don’t let this be my most ridiculous idea yet …
Kerack! Kerack! Fffwwoooossshhhh!
Insane acceleration! She screamed for sheer, effervescent joy as her mount thundered away, the air shrieking over the tiny, quivering lump she had made of herself. The hurricane force of wind tore at her eyes and fingers, trying to wrench her loose, but her grip strength kept her locked in place. Deafening thunderclap! There went the sound barrier! Her skin threatened to peel back from her cheeks at the force of the acceleration. Perhaps it was only her insane heart rate that kept her conscious, because the G-forces were beyond anything she had ever known – until the beast entered cruising mode, its six legs making brilliant blue blurs beside its body. Impossible to tell if it even touched the ground anymore.
Laughing though she knew he could not hear her, she said, I’ll tell you who’s the cud-chewing bovine around here. You’re incredible, do you know that? I’m going to call you Thundering Lightning Beasts.
She kept a death grip on its fur.
Sound travelled at 1234.8 kloms per hour under normal conditions, of which Resurrection Dawn had precious few. An estimated six hours later, Alodeé peeled her cramped fingers apart and slid down off the Thundering Lightning Beast, tottering for a few secs before she found her footing.
“Wow. Thanks for the ride.”
The bovine eyed her and said, ‘mrr?’ It masticated its cud peaceably.
She approached the edge of the grassland charily, mostly because she did not trust her own balance after that crazy ride.
Left and right, the laser-cut edge of the grassland continued as far as she could see, unchanged. Ahead? An air canyon of impossible dimensions. So vast, she saw nothing on the far side. Just a glorious dawn breaking over the end of the world – well, knowing this world, more wonders waited out there, beyond the horizon. Below, islands, volcanoes and rivers of lava churned in a pit hundreds of kloms wide and deep. An upwelling. Huge clouds of avians played upon the thermals, the biggest creatures she had yet seen – but they did not appear to be aggressive. Not right away.
No flying over that.
She sat down with a bump and put her chin in her hands. One should just soak in the wonder for a while. Breathe. Be.
Her thoughts turned to Ash’s death, to Tomaxx and Isska and her parents and she wept. I wish I could show you this.
Chapter 15
Standard 1301.06.21 Estimated – the Canyon of Chaos.
SITTING ABOVE THAT CANYON, Alodeé considered her determination to continue travelling east. She could not have placed a finger upon why, but she still sensed something out there. Call it a Dragon spirit sense. Might as well, since nothing else about what she discovered in her heart of hearts approached logical, sane thinking.
I’ll cross this … this Canyon of Chaos.
No mind the thousands of islands churning each other into a slow, grinding soup. Never mind the cubic kloms of erupting lava shooting rocks with fiery trails in all directions, like a slow-motion movie explosion.
I am Alodeé, a girl with a talent for doing idiotic things that end up keeping me alive.
That would be why she was considering jumping into this canyon, right? Her eyes traced the route she planned to take. Snaking through, or over the tremendous churning clouds and billows of smoke and islands being smashed together, was a hair-thin ribbon of blue, one of the atmospheric ribbon rivers that somehow clung together and flowed as a coherent tube. This one left the cliff 10 kloms below and to her right, at a rough reckoning and flowed out over the chaos until it disappeared out of sight maybe – maybe – where the insanity ended.
Basic plan: parachute down to the water and float downriver. Not that ‘down’ river made much sense in the context of Resurrection Dawn’s weirdness. Flotation would be a good idea. With that in mind, she began to cut down grass to see if she could weave it into a coracle – a small, doughnut-shaped craft which could be fashioned out of almost any organic material. This idea was not her own, but a Master Bold survival favourite.
Building a raft out of sharp crystal-infused grass blades was less fun than she remembered. By evening, she had a shallow, lightweight bowl boat that should float and about a hundred new cuts on her hands. Perfect. Eking out a sip from her tiny water flask, she considered the options. Exhausted and almost out of food and water, that thin ribbon of blue winked invitingly. Yep. Sleep tonight, rest tomorrow and take off in the evening. No big rush to defy death one more time.
She woke in the morning, screaming, “Mom, no! Not the fire!”
Great dream.
Nearby, ten or fifteen of the Thundering Lightning Beasts regarded her with dark, dewy eyes. ‘Mrr?’ one inquired.
“Good, thanks. Been better.”
Mrr, moo, a couple of them noted, in earthquake tones.
“Oh, is that so?”
MOOARR!!
Phew, almost rearranged her hairstyle there. With that, the bovines went back to mowing the endless blue lawn, which sort of assured one that all was normal in the world. Nibbling down her last piece of fruit, Alodeé sprang to her feet and stretched until her shoulders creaked. What to do with this glorious day?
So much to do. So little time.
After doing an hour of exercise, weapons and balance training, she lay down again and enjoyed a power nap in the sunshine. Could not wait to have a proper wash. Maybe she was not the best with only her thoughts and no other company. By evening, she felt horribly maudlin and a great deal like kicking herself for being such a soppy wet blanket. Really. When had all her courage leaked out through her toes? Now, the ridiculous doubts? Alright, give herself a bit of credit. Questioning the risks could be construed as a smart survival strategy.
Alodeé growled at herself, “Freaking pushover. Get on with it.”
Time for a glor
ious dive off a cliff. Anyone else could call this madness. Using her last piece of loading strap, Alodeé tied the coracle to her waist belt. Waving goodbye to the stoic, undisputed masters of lightning-fuelled travel, she jogged up to the edge and committed herself to the void.
She listened to voices in her head. Madness.
The parachute fabric fluttered reassuringly above her head as the bright yellow aerofoil took shape and filled with air. She gathered forward momentum, dipping into the deeper shadows cast by the cliff. From the last light into full night in a breath. Clutching the grips, she set course for the threadlike river course. No fear. Only purpose.
Somewhere out here, she intended to discover who this Alodeé truly was.
Buoyed up by a surprise thermal, she drifted out into the void. Good. If the farthest shores or realms of this world were her goal, best not to grow rusty from disuse. Adjusting, she tried to assess the turbulence that awaited her below. The river snaked over epic hills of storm and disturbance, somehow maintaining its integrity despite a world of mayhem not far beneath. Above, the night sky was a deep, deep purple that reminded her uncomfortably of the underwater mine’s depths. Nothing moving across the stars that she could see. Glancing down again, ice slithered inside her belly.
Bat-like shadows peeled off the cliff face below her, thousands strong. All she could see of them in the gloom was inky silhouettes that appeared to merge together, before heading in mighty, ring-shaped groups of animals out to where those gentle giants played low down, visible against a backdrop of orange lava. Her jaw dropped as she watched their hunting technique – creating a living sphere around a creature to entrap it, before closing in for the kill. After stripping it to the bone in a seething feeding frenzy, the creatures parted and formed up in their flotillas again. She puffed out her cheeks. The coordination, the skill … the casual brutality – she had never seen anything like it.
One consolation. Considering the size of predator and prey out there, they might simply not bother to snatch up a gnat of her size.
