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X.
"I have tracked you here, human child." Croach leaned against the highest of the ruined walls and crossed his arms, looking as close to peevish as a Martian could manage.
"I perceive that fact," the red-headed girl replied, her tone far more subdued than her body language would suggest it to be. She kicked at a rusty-colored pebble. It skittered across the dusty soil and disappeared into the hollow square of the remains of a homestead.
"I did not need to utilize any of my sensory organs to know you would return to the ruins of the town in which you were discovered as a youngling by our tribe, as this is the third time in a row you have done this."
“I can ride a hover-saddle and shoot a quantum bow with equal to or greater skill than most adults,” she informed him. “I do not need to be retrieved.”
“Incorrect.”
“I do not wish to be retrieved.”
"It is worrisome that you leave the sensory range of your adoptive caretaker without permission."
"There are many reasons why I am worrisome," she snapped. Though no one had ever taught her appropriate emotional tones, she didn't need lessons in how to be sullen. "I presume you are going to return me to my adoptive caretaker now."
Croach uncrossed his arms, let his hands fall to his side. He was really just a few cycles older than her, still gangly and adolescent, barely past B'ar Mitz Va and already acting as sole tracker. There had been no one under whom he might have apprenticed by the time he was of age. It wasn't uncommon in his generation. Too many had died in the missions.
"I am under onus to your adoptive caretaker to track your location and return you to the tribe."
Her shoulders dropped.
"I am not, however, explicitly required to do the latter upon the moment of completion of the former and I choose not to do so."
She side-eyed him, trying to figure out his intent. “...I am under onus to you,” she mumbled experimentally.
He nodded. Well, that was pretty much that. If she was under onus to him, she would have to follow him back right away next time, or maybe not run away at all. It was perhaps more bother than it was worth, but she really didn’t feel like going back yet.
She wouldn’t be in trouble, necessarily, when she returned. She would just be… worrisome.
When she wandered off, he followed, ten or twenty feet behind her and watching all the while. It ruined the scene of quiet desolation. Truth be told, there wasn’t much to do around the ghost town. She’d already picked it over the first time she’d run away, and found no clues at all to who had left her there as a baby.
She sat on a ruined wall, kicking her heels at it sullenly. Croach didn’t join her, instead standing stiffly a few feet away.
"I fail to understand why you come to this place. There is nothing here but rubble and the unsalvageable remains of human vid-screens.”
Red thought about it for awhile. “I do not know,” she admitted eventually. There was a reason, somewhere under the fire in her belly, but she didn’t have words for it.
“To be unaware of your purpose is a quandary for which I have no frame of reference. It appears to be difficult.”
“Hmmph.” She didn’t want any sympathy, but it wasn’t the worst thing to hear. Rarely did anyone try to see things from her perspective at all.
Croach didn’t make her go back until it was almost sundown, the light all thick and warm and making long shadows across the plains.
XIV.
Techno arrows twanged into the ground and dissipated their charge, falling inches behind the heels of the fleeing lavamen. There were already several in their retreating backs.
The Red Plains Rider replaced her bow. She had received her signifier the cycle previous, her thirteenth. It wasn't her designation within in the tribe. It was just what she did.
“Admirable shooting, The Red Plains Rider,” Croach commented, leaning on the handles of his hover-saddle.
“It does not matter. Their Nah-Notek will soon restore them.”
“It is likely they will not aggrieve the local humans further.”
“That is not my concern,” she countered sharply. “The lavamen were outside their designated territory.”
“The human who owns this property approaches once more.”
Red fell silent as the rancher drew up nervously.
“Fine bit of shootin’ there, miss,” he said with the kind of sheepish admiration that only comes after having your livelihood saved by a teenage girl.
“Your hypercattle are safe,” she informed him flatly.
“Reckon I owe you and the Marjun, huh, and I don’t fancy owin’ one of them. I ain’t got much here I can part with, but shootin’ like that with one of them old bows, I’m guessin’ prolly you can do more with this than me.” He pulled a laser gun from an inner holster slowly, grasped the barrel, and handed it up to her.
She gave the weapon a once-over. The handle was dinged up and it wasn't close to new, but she liked the feel of it, heavy and faintly warm in her fist.
She aimed experimentally and shot at a fencepost. She missed, but not by much. She was a quick study when it came to shooting, and it drew faster and fired smoother than a quantum bow.
"I will accept this and consider the onus between us completed," she said, ignoring Croach's discomforted attempts to nonverbally call her attention. She kicked off her hover-saddle and split, leaving him in the dust.
A minute or two later, he caught up to her, shouting against the wind. "The Red Plains Rider! A single laser pistol in poor repair is clearly insufficient repayment for the onus that human owes you."
"I do not care."
"You bring dishonor to our tribe, both for the disregard of an onus and for the use of a human weapon."
"I am not part of your tribe."
He did not respond. She spoke truly and he could not argue, not even to make her feel better. She wasn’t expecting anything else, but it still made her mad.
A few minutes later, he spoke. "I place you under onus for diverging from my tracking route," he informed her, very nearly sullenly. Maybe her sulking was rubbing off on him. "Will you also disregard this onus entirely, The Red Plains Rider?"
"...No," she said after a long moment. "I will not disregard my onus to you."
It wasn't so bad, being under onus to Croach in particular. It gave her an excuse to hang around.
The next time she saved someone's farm, she got a better gun.
XV.
Red lost her accent pretty quick. People weren’t put off as much by a fifteen year old girl putting a lot of laser bullet holes in lavamen and robot outlaws as they were by her speaking in the precise manner of the Martian natives, and it was just… easier not to.
It fit her head better, anyway, to not always say exactly what she meant. Besides, she still had a subconscious layer of vocabulary from retellings of Western Sector novels when she was a child, so it took root in her surprisingly fast.
That it annoyed Croach was just a bonus.
“‘Nother robit outlaw been hanging around the tribe’s territory. Reckon you could track ‘im for me, Croach?”
“My designation--which I am still displeased you are failing to use in its entirety, The Red Plains Rider--is Croach the Tracker. Yes, I can track the metal aggressor.”
“Well, wouldja?”
“You would be under onus to me…”
“It ain’t you I care about bein’ under onus to.” It was gonna take a lot of shooting dangerous things to pay back fifteen years of onus to the rest of the tribe, but Red and her guns were up to it.
“I will help you, The Red Plains Rider, because it is my designation and because it serves the tribe. There are also personal feelings involved in this decision.”
“...Right. Prolly we should get going, then.”
It didn’t take long for Croach to track down Billy the Bot. They circled around up to higher ground, and caught sight of his camp in the space-mesa, the usual telltales of solar panels and linked up generators half-covered in tarpaulin.
Catching sight of him meant he got eyes on them as well, though. They rode up directly rather than attempting subterfuge, and dismounted before the robot in his own camp.
Billy seemed amused, or at least intrigued enough that he didn’t shoot them on sight. “We-he-hell, a little human girly and a Marjun, come out ta visit me! Reckon I don’t have much in the way of hospitalities, but I can offer ya some of these bullets, if ya care to partake. And by offer, I mean shoot you with.”
“Why you been hangin’ around the Martian territory, Billy?”
“Why, ain’t it obvious?”
“Clearly, it ain’t.”
“Matter o’ perspective. Ah, well, since it rightfully don’t matter, on account of I am fixin’ to shoot you, so I s’pose I’ll tell ya--But only ‘cause I like the sound of my own speech generator. I’m after Marjun treasure!”
“...Martians ain’t got no treasure,” Red said slowly. “Leastaways, none that would mean nothin’ to the likes of you.”
“Really? Coulda swore they did. Who am I thinkin’ of then?”
“Perhaps you are thinking of the Spiders of Zyzyx, who possess large quantities of valuable ore within their intricate system of cave dwellings,” Croach supplied as Red ground her teeth.
“Y’know, I reckon you might be right, Marjun. I am always confusin’ y’all organic lifeforms. Ya just read the same to my optic sensors, no offense. Well, anyway…”
He shot Red, then Croach.
“Guh! The Red Plains Rider!” Croach spat through a mouthful of blood, but she had been moving before Billy had pulled the trigger. Before he finished his cry, she came up out of a duck-and-roll onto her knees and put a dozen holes in Billy’s head and torso.
With a crackle of explosive static, the robot crumpled to the dirt. She breathed out slow, and rose to her feet without lowering her guns. Billy failed to move, the red glow gone from his eye-bulbs. She stepped forward, barely registering a hot stinging throb a few inches below her right shoulder.
She stood over him, blasted him in the head a bunch just in case he was playing possum, then jimmied open his chest casing and yanked out his powercore. It was fist-sized and glowing. She crammed it in an extra pouch on her belt. She could pawn it next time she rolled through town, and without it, the robot wouldn’t do more than gently oxidize in the elements.
“Reckon that’s done with,” she mumbled to no one in particular, then turned back toward Croach. He was fixed up already, wiping the last of the blood from his lips with the back of his hand.
Red stalked back over to her horse, nerves still alight. “C’mon, then, let’s move out.”
She reached up, then sucked in a sharp breath, pain twanging through her arm. She clapped a hand over her the worst part and felt a stipe of missing skin through a hole in her sleeve, the raw cauterization broken by her movement and bleeding now. It seemed she hadn’t dodged Billy’s shot as well as she’d thought.
“You are injured, The Red Plains Rider!”
“It’s just a scratch.” Technically, that was a lie, but it wasn’t terrible, either. She was used to getting scraped up, riding around the plains. Laserfire cut clean and likely wouldn’t infect.
“I place myself under onus for failing to protect you.”
“Dang it, Croach, your designation is Tracker, not Looker Out for a Grown Person Like She’s a Dang Hatchling.”
“Unofficially, it is.”
Red honestly couldn’t decide if he entirely serious or not. Croach always was kind of weird.
“Ah, nevermind. If you wanna, help me tie this up. It’s hard t’do one-handed. Then we’ll be square.” She rummaged in her saddle-bag for the first aid kit, then tossed it over.
Gingerly, he undid the button of her cuff and pushed the sleeve up to her shoulder, dropped stinging grafting accelerant into the wound and bandaged it.
When she glanced over, catching sight of his face set in solemn concentration as he wound the medi-gauze around her bicep, she had to look away quick, out into the wide expanse of the plains, and hope like hell that her face wasn’t as flushed as it felt like it was.
XIX.
She’d heard tell that there was a new marshal, but of course she didn’t think nothing of it. Last marshal was a loon, anyway, and there were rampant outlaw gangs roaming the planet. She didn’t see how it could rightfully get much worse, and she wasn’t expecting it to get better.
Then she met the new fellow in person.
She saw him first, actually, showing down with a robot outlaw she'd been gunning for, showing down sincerely like the damn greenhorn he was, wearing ridiculous robot fists that, even though she was raised by Martians in the wilderness, she knew were antiques, and also a bowtie for some godforsaken reason.
Red rode her horse up quiet and watched from the lee of a space mesa, ready to chase after Piston Pete after he made short work of this cocky newcomer.
Only she saw the marshal win instead.
In case there was any doubt, he shouted it to the red plains themselves over Pete’s gently smoking chassis. Damn fool, but her mouth was twisting up into a smirk despite itself as she spurred her rocket steed out of the shadows and fired off a half-dozen shots.
The resulting explosion was pretty impressive. Well, what could she say? Red liked a dramatic entrance.
“Woah, what was--” He wheeled, and saw her. “Uh, hi, what just happened?”
“I done shot the four robits layin’ in wait that was about to shoot you for shooting their boss. One of ‘em blew up ‘cause of it. You’re welcome, by the way. Judging by that badge, you’re the new marshal, then?”
“Yeah. The name’s Sparks Nevada. I’m… from Earth.”
“Good fer you.” She scratched the back of her neck. “‘M The Red Plains Rider,” she said eventually.
“That’s your name? Like it starts with a ‘The’?”
“...You got a problem with that?”
“Nope. Not if you don’t.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Well, good for you.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Wouldn’t get into the habit of having someone else saving your skin, Marshal. Folks take their debts pretty serious ‘round here.”
“I wasn’t gonna. The opposite, actually. I’m aiming to clean up this place.”
She snorted. “Well, y’all can try, I suppose, so long as you don’t get in m’way. Keepin’ the plains safe’s been my beat fer the last six years.”
“Six years, huh? You’re what, twenty? You look, like, around twenty-ish.”
“Nineteen. So what?”
“So they ain’t all that safe, clearly. Hence me bein’ here, gettin’ attacked by and shooting that robit dead, and generally doin’ some marshalin’ around the place.”
“Don’t make me regret saving your dumb hide, Marshal.”
“I don’t plan on it. But… Thanks for that. The saving my hide part. Also, my hide’s not dumb. For the record.”
“Huh.” She glared at him a little more. “Reckon this planet’s big enough for both of us to do some helping,” she finally conceded. “See you around, then, Marshal.”
“Call me Sparks.”
“Prolly not.” She spurred her rocketsteed and took off without another word. Again there was a loony twist of a smirk hanging around her lips that she didn’t care too much to explain.
That same evening, she built a fire out in the middle of nowhere, and Croach came riding in before the last dregs of sunlight drained from the horizon.
“Good tracking, Croach,” she called before he could speak.
“I am under onus to you for that compliment.”
“Good. Then you make dinner tonight.”
She fiddled around with the other duties of camp-making as he did, laying out bedrolls and the like. Once she finished it to her satisfaction, she plopped down next to Croach, who was at that point only occasionally stirring a hanging pot.
“Met the new marshal today,” she said by way of conversation. “Fool nearly got hisself killed by robit gang.”
“I came into the acquaintance of the human designated Sparks Nevada approximately 20 hours ago. He encountered the tribe in the course of his pursuit of the outlaw Piston Pete. I do not care for him.”
“Don’t suppose you would. Hmm, reckon he ain’t so bad, though. Could be worse, anyways.” She leaned her head against Croach’s shoulder. “I mean, there are more robits causin’ trouble than you an’ I have been able to handle as of late, and maybe puttin’ ‘em in in the freeze’ll keep their gangs from rebootin’ em once we shot ‘em.”
“It is not my designation to defeat nor imprison robotic combatants, The Red Plains Rider. Mine is merely to track when required.”
“It kinda is, though, anyway.”
“It is not.”
She nudged him bodily. “Shaddup, Croach.”
“Onus.”
“Nah, you’re under onus to me for not shuttin’ up now. Cancels it out. That smells good.”
“The meal is nearly complete.”
She pulled herself off of him so he could stir the pot again and take it off the heat. She accepted a plate full of hypercattle hash and dug in.
The food was good. The night was still warm and being beside the fire was warmer. The comet bugs were just coming out, rising from the rocks to chase after each other, leaving streaky trails of light in the darkness. Croach was silent beside her and it was all alright for once. She wanted things to stay like this a while, everything looking up but not so far up that it was boring and there was nothing left to shoot.
That probably wasn’t too much to ask, right?