Resurrection Dawn Read online

  Resurrection Dawn

  A Sci-Fi Novel

  By Marc Secchia

  Copyright © 2021 onward Marc Secchia

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher and author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  www.marcsecchia.com

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  Table of Contents

  Resurrection Dawn

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Standard 1301.05.02.26 Cal Week 17. Late afternoon.

  “FREAK!” ALODEÉ GLARED AT the holographic monitor. She scanned the DNA readings one more time. The figures did not lie. “Dad, you’re dead. So dead!”

  Drawing back her heavily-bandaged left hand, she came within an inch of swinging at the readout – the impossible, shattering truth printed in gleaming white upon a deep azure display field – before remembering exactly how much her fingers had been mangled that morning. The wall behind would not be forgiving. Flicking the DNA readout aside with a narked swipe, she compared her other readings to the standard parameters and ranges. Bone density. Muscle function. Blood constituents. Hormones. Blood pressure … her titian eyebrows shot upward.

  Off the canid-sucking scale!

  A soft musical chime from the Comms console caught her attention. Entry-node activation. That could only be her father, arrived home early. Command must have laser-messaged him about her accident.

  Liar! Why did you never trust me with the truth?

  “Hide all, Alodeé voiceprint protocol 11-7,” she said clearly. The holo flicked to the homework she had been studiously avoiding.

  Her father rushed through the airlock in a wild kerfuffle, dumping most of his body armour and a few weapons in a heap in the hallway as he yelled, “Alodeé? Alodeé? Emerald cream, are you alright?”

  Alright? Sure. Not weirded out in the slightest by his reviving that old nickname for her either. What a pang! Her mother used to call her emerald cream. Before that day … before everything. Four years ago, she had begged him never to use it again.

  Squeaky voice. Frantic Dad rushed into their living quarters in a grey-uniformed whirlwind, still wearing his tough compo breastplate. Holy Resurrection Dawn, she had never seen him as flustered as this. As Head of Settlement Security, his job defined staying calm while everything blew to hell and back. He never lost his temper. Temperament like honed, ice-cold plasteel. Alodeé sometimes wished he would reveal actual feelings; yes, she had misspent several of her teenage years in occasional fits of trying to push all of his buttons at once, just to see him crack.

  He never had.

  Today was different. The way he looked her over, she almost forgave him on the spot. Almost.

  Why am I always such a lame-brained pushover?

  “Alodeé,” he groaned. “How did you – it’s – they said –”

  “Flew off the obstacle course. Landed in the garbage processor chute,” she shrugged. “Lucky to be alive, I guess.”

  “Poor girl!”

  “Got a bit busted up and bruised, Dad, but really, I’m fine.”

  Fine? Makes me a liar, too. Get a grip, Alodeé. Blood pressure alone says I should have exploded years ago. Now she had a mental image of her head blasting off her shoulders in a spray of blood. Great. I love this guy, but so help me, that’s not going to stop me killing him this time.

  Dad checked her over – classic soldier behaviour, taking the visuals first – as if he could not believe she was standing in the living pod of their compact cell home, remodelled out of an airlock and storage bay sourced from one of the old, failed colony ships. Medic Tamanzi had not believed it either. Those hydraulic compactors were designed to grind plasteel into dust. A girl should have come out of the other side as a nicely imprinted crimson stain on fresh substrate, her only future being part of some building’s foundations.

  “Alodeé,” he croaked, rushing to her. In a moment, her grazed-up nose pressed against his travel-stained uniform shoulder. For a girl, she was tall at 192 cents – six foot three inches in the old jargon, still popular among crusty colonists – but he was taller still; 199 cents minus the boots.

  He held her like the finest spar of crystal.

  She breathed in the scent of his patrol skimmer, the distinct cinnamon tang of the crystal drive and the military-grade weapon oil of his ever-present Crysto-Laser Blaster, the CLB-4001. Dymand was a crack shot. With dynamic spectral scoping, he could hit a grass blade 3 kloms off with that weapon. His talent never went to waste. Despite its hopeful name of Resurrection Dawn, this planet was no place for the faint of heart. Year after year, it served up new surprises with monotonous regularity.

  Lethal surprises.

  Surprises like girls who could survive ten tons per square cent of roller-compression and be squirted out the other end – unconscious, sure, but with only a collection of fresh grazes, a dislocated elbow and spectacular bruising to show for it. On her light emerald skin, bruises went deep purple, fast. Then they turned more and more orange, until in a week or two, she’d look like flames licked across her whole body.

  Leaning back, he gave her a second examination – this one, the penetrating kind she expected from a Head of Settlement Security.

  “Medic Tamanzi said there was a machine malfunction?”

  “Must have been.”

  She smiled wanly at her Class 1 Humanoid father. Who am I? What … am I?

  So mad, she could barely see straight. Woozy with all the painkillers pumping through her system. Holding it all together – how? She had no idea, but she did.

  Deeply bronzed of skin with straight black hair, Dymand had almond-shaped eyes all the women remarked upon. Asiatic Hegemony Planets eyes. She had heard them talking. Romantic interest abounded. Neither did the name hurt. Dad, bless him, had been on exactly one date in the twelve years since the generator explosion blew her mother to high heaven and killed 33 others – that date had been with Medic Tamanzi. He had never got over Mom, which was kind of sweet and kind of useless at the same time – and here she was, making excuses for him all over again.

  I’ll get a grip, alright – on his throat!

  Nice to be lied to all her life. Perfect end to a perfect day.

  “What exactly happened out there?” he asked.

  Ugh, here it came. Dad just could not let an incident like this go, could he? Not since Mom’s death. It made him an incredible Head of Settlement Security. Everyone relied on him; work demands meant that they spent less time together than either of them wanted. She would turn seventeen next week. The pang of this loss, on top of everything else, hurt more than she could ever have imagined.

  “At the obstacle trials this morning,” Alodeé said, deliberately casual, “I was making ace time against the Class 4 girls and boys
…”

  Kicking their fast-as-hell butts. Quickest time in base history through the first half of the course – by 7 secs. That fat a margin? Against the Class 4 set? Gave her the shivers.

  “Anyways, I made a mistake on the slingshot turn. That’s all. Woke up on Medic Tamanzi’s table hurting like a plasma cannon blaze. She –” come on, Alodeé, spit it out “– she ran a full battery of tests, Dad. Said you’d told her not to, but she did it anyways because I looked so … pretty.”

  Her voice cracked. Alodeé ducked her head, letting her loose titian curls slide forward to hide her face.

  “I’ll speak to her, stat. Get –”

  “I already hacked her computer and altered the records, Dad.”

  His face cleared with miraculous speed. Hard as plascrete. About as friendly. “Alodeé? What is this?”

  “Are you … my Dad?”

  Her heartbeat probably hit higher than the 817 beats per min the Medic had measured. Hummingbird speed. Freaking canid spit, what a time to vomit that beauty into the middle of a conversation! No going back now. She had reset everything according to the fake readings and bogus DNA stats and other rubbish he had been feeding her for years. Subversive activity ran in the family, eh Dad? Suppose she should be arrested by her own father.

  Dymand spat a few words he must have learned in his soldiering days, when he first made it into the now-infamous Parsec Blazers. “The answer is yes, Alodeé. Absolutely yes. I held you within a min of your birth. You do remember that you were one of the first children to be conceived on Resurrection –”

  “And Mom?”

  He gestured toward the framed hologram that lit the space above their Comms console. “Can you doubt that?”

  Well, no. She was twin to Samodeé’s tall, willowy build, wavy titian hair and violet eyes – apart from the shape of her eyes, she had to concede. Those were Dad’s, through and through. Her skin tone was a mix of Dad and Mom, a much lighter emerald than her mother’s near-gemstone hue.

  Hence the nickname.

  Misery camped in a hot, thick clot high in her throat. Numbers don’t lie, she reiterated to herself. Stick to your guns. You have to see this through.

  He growled, “Alodeé, why don’t you tell me –”

  “What Class Humanoid am I?”

  Alodeé clapped her good hand to her mouth. Curse it, she had not meant to say that, but she had this way of thinking aloud. Too much time spent alone.

  Dymand jerked involuntarily. Way to accuse her father of a forbidden liaison, girl! That act – marriage, or fathering a child across the Class line – could get him executed, even here on a colony planet lost in space and cut off from all other Humanity in the galaxy. His gaze leaped to Samodeé’s picture and in one torrid instant, something in their steely black depths melted.

  In one split sec, she knew.

  Confirmation.

  Speaking to her mother, the wife he had lost, Dymand grated in a voice born of a grave, “What are you saying, Alodeé?”

  She sat down with a bump on the curved couch and groaned behind her hand. Cruddy crud-crud-crud! With every breath, she had convinced herself she would not cry. Here she went. When last had she cried?

  When he touched her shoulder, she lashed out, “Get away from me! I don’t know who you are – who I am anymore! No! Don’t you speak a word, unless it’s the truth – for once, Dad, I want the truth! Tell me – tell me how my blood pressure hits 950 over 410! Tell me why my DNA is a 0.7 percent match with Class 1 standard pools! Freaking hells, Dad, don’t you just stand there and tell me it’s nothing. I know you fed forged data into our database. You even programmed the house medical monitoring to spit out false readings and feed those to Settlement Central!”

  Drawing himself up, Dymand said, “It’s not what you think.”

  Shivers all over. So cold! “Isn’t it?”

  “I can explain. Look –”

  “More lies?”

  Blazing now, like one of those crazy inverted volcanoes she’d seen out near the gravity wells, east of the Settlement – as if direction held much meaning on this crazy planet. Spirals of magma slowly drifted into impossible lattices that they suspected floated away to become the foundation of new floating islands. Resurrection Dawn was a planet that broke all the rules, including being found in the first place. Eighteen years after landing, no scientist knew how they had survived – heavily damaged, with hundreds of casualties – but alive. A miracle, everyone had agreed, until paradise turned out to have unimaginable numbers of teeth and they worked out exactly how lost they were.

  Miracle or disaster?

  Like my colonial shipwreck of a life.

  “Dammit, Alodeé, don’t be like this. I just want to know that you’re alright.”

  “No! I am not freaking alright! Do you think I’m stupid? Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

  “Calm down.”

  “One question, Dad. One!”

  Stubborn hunk of junk, he half turned toward her. “Which question?”

  “Class?”

  Unbearably gentle of voice, he said, “I will answer that question if you tell me exactly what happened today. Alodeé, it’s important that I know for reasons you can’t yet understand, but I promise I will share with you. This talk is long overdue, but being a classic workaholic idiot father, I’ve watched you sprouting these last years and I could never bring myself to – you’re still my little girl in here, don’t you see?”

  He thumped his chest.

  Grief, he knew exactly how to turn on the guilt party, didn’t he? Despite herself, despite how much even a touch upon her back hurt, she let him hold her this time.

  She owed him. She looked so much like her mother, she often saw the anguish in his eyes, even if he did not.

  Then, he gently pushed her toward a chair. “Sit.”

  “Dad …”

  Holding up a hand, he said, “Activate total lockdown security protocol one, Dymand voiceprint. Additional: disconnect backup systems.”

  Things just turned serious, kiddo.

  Nausea turned her gut into a churning cesspit.

  Nothing visible changed in their Spartan living quarters, but her sensitive ears caught the very slight whine of electronic interference starting up. The outer airlock hissed shut; multiple locks turned. The window polarisation changed to opaque from the outside. Dad was the best for a reason. When he said total lockdown, not even the most sensitive snooping equipment would have a chance of overhearing their conversation now. They were cut off from the Settlement outside. Cut off from the Universe.

  She cleared her throat. Determinedly, she growled, “Full disclosure?”

  Grim nod. “I promise.”

  If she was trying to do her best to explode everything she had ever known and believed to be true about herself, this was one way to start. Taking a deep breath, Alodeé prepared to hold her father to his reputation of faultless integrity. He was a man of his word.

  Did she have the courage to hear it?

  In her mind, she cast herself back to that morning and forced herself to speak.

  Chapter 2

  Standard 1301.05.02.07 Cal Week 17. 19 hours earlier.

  WHISKING HER PLATE OUT of the prep chamber, Dymand set it in front of his yawning daughter. Spicy green eggs with slices of processed capybara ham on thick, nutty chunks of bread baked to perfection by their custom-programmed kitchen unit. Mom’s old recipe.

  “Dawn’s fires, Alo! Obstacle trials today, remember?”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  “How ready do you feel? You’ve been training like crazy! Juice?”

  “Thanks. Ready enough to give those Class 4 girls a decent run, once I wake up.”

  “You’ve grown 30 cents in the last year alone, Alomonster. How’s the balance and agility coming on?”

  “Surprisingly good, actually.”

  Somewhere in the sleep-thickened recesses of her brain, a tiny alarm signal peeped, Good? You’re a freak. Physical scores have g
one through the planetary rings – who am I trying to impress? Does he love me more when I train hard, improve, excel …

  She kicked that thought where it hurt. “You patrolling the outer Settlements today?”

  “Yep, flying all the way up to Hazmuri Falls. Vitamins?”

  Slugging down the tasty vitamin brew, she said, “Beautiful. You ever planning to take me there, rather than just showing me pretty pictures?”

  “When you’re a qualified Ranger,” he said crisply. “Won’t be long now, the way you’re eating up your coursework and training. Say, drone package arrived early, addressed to you. Guess what it is?”

  “My combat skin?”

  Ugh, nice squeak. Yay. My very first combat skin.

  Dymand dropped the silver package in her lap. “Suit up. Then, tear them up, hear me? I want your best results today.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  An alarm pinged on the house console.

  “Drat. My skimmer’s early. Gotta dash, Alodeé. I guess I’ll be home late …”

  As usual. “Chat then, Dad.”

  His eyes apologised as he dropped a peck on her cheek and dived behind the dressing screen beside the doorway. When a series of clicks, crackles and snicks abated, he emerged fully equipped with silver compo armour – the colour could change to chameleon or invisible mode via thought-modal control. Whipping his CLB-4001 off the weapons rack, he checked the charge before holstering it with a fancy twirl. He snatched up his sleek helmet. Ever the complete warrior.

  “Stay safe, Dad.”

  “Always.”

  With that, he was gone. Just another morning pep talk in their household. Brief as a sneeze. Gone like the wind.

  Treated her like one of his soldiers, too.

  Given her latest batch of results, her developing physical skills certainly pointed in the direction of her becoming the youngest full Ranger in Settlement history. Dymand could not have been prouder. Alodeé puffed out her cheeks and put her breakfast where it belonged. Basically, inhaled it. More to come.

  After letting the bathroom sanitary pound her with its usual combination of cleansing pellets, skin exfoliant, a personalised sonic treatment she had developed to alleviate the severe growing pains she had suffered over the last year, she suffered the obligatory hair-styling aimed mostly at taming her unruly tresses into something that would not be ten thousand times unrulier by the end of the obstacle course trials. Next, she threw the combat skin into the dressing screen’s receptor field.