All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Now, Summon
Copyright © 2011 Odette C. Bell
Smashwords Edition
Now, Summon
Odette C. Bell
Chapter 1
‘Come on, why are you doing this?’ Lara brushed the dust off her nose, pulling the collar of her jacket further over her face. The high, rocky, gnarled crags above her seemed unusually unstable today. Either there had been some kind of earthquake nearby, or the stone had undergone an identity shift and now believed it was a waterfall.
There was no one to answer Lara; she was on her own, after all. What she was doing was dangerous, dumb even. And you never needed company when engaging in the harmful and idiotic.
Lara reached a hand out to the rock. She put her mind into the placement of her fingers like a poor drunk pours his ale into his mug; with every effort to ensure that it did not spill. Her fingers – scratched and bruised from too much climbing – latched onto the stone enabling Lara just enough purchase to pull herself up onto the outcrop above her. With a Herculean grunt – a term she’d heard off one of the human traders that had chanced upon her village one day – Lara managed to heave her heavy pack off her shoulders, resting it carefully on the thin lip of rock on which she now stood.
If her mentor knew she was up here, the old woman would likely shake the whole mountain down just to teach Lara a lesson. And that lesson would be that what comes up must come down; or more specifically, if you arrogantly pit your skills against the forces of nature, always bet on nature.
Lara ran her thumb over her bottom lip. It was a movement she’d copied off the village guard when Lara had been a young girl. Apparently you did that – patted your lips – when you were thinking, or so the guard had told her.
But regardless of where she’d picked it up, it was habit now. Whether Lara would be contemplating a medicinal brew in her loosely-termed lab, or whether she’d be staring off at the horizon and wondering if the brewing storm would rip through the village’s wall shield – Lara would brush her thumb against her lip. She could hardly think without doing it.
She stared up at the rocky ledge almost fifty meters above her. She pushed a breath of air through her clenched teeth. The sound was similar to the sharp hiss of a calthar – one of the animals that called these crags their home. One of the animals, Lara reminded herself with a quick look over her shoulder and out at the mountainous view around her, that she really did not want to meet today.
‘How am I going to get all the way up there and back to the village by night fall?’ Lara asked herself. She didn’t expect herself to suddenly answer; expecting a reply wasn’t why she’d bothered talking aloud when not a soul was around. No, she’d learnt that from one of the repurposed military bots that her mentor used to tend the vegetable patch. Apparently, talking to yourself – according to the bot, at least – was what all the space generals did. Talking aloud let other people know that your thoughts were important. And Lara liked to think that her current quandary was very important indeed.
Because if she couldn’t make it up to that ledge and find the exact plant she was looking for then back to the village by nightfall, then Lara would have a fight on her hands. There was a reason her village had managed to survive so long on this barren, weather-beaten, cruel rock of a planet: it had wall shields that kept the weather and beasts at bay. It was the same reason that no one ever ventured out after night too, and why there weren’t settlements dotted throughout this region.
Beasts and weather. That was what Calt – this planet – was famed for. It was also all it was known for.
Calt was out in the middle of some random sector on some random arm of the galactic spiral. No one but hardy or lost traders ever came out this far.
And that was why the villagers, and especially her mentor, liked it so much. Guaranteed peace, quiet, and autonomy - as long as the shields held, that was.
'Okay,' Lara spoke to herself softly, 'press on.'
She did. Taking a deep and steadying breath, she heaved her backpack on and began to climb the jagged cliff face again.
Just as she set off, she heard a noise far in the distance. It was low, throbbing, and sounded exactly like the exhaust ducts of a cruiser - a badly looked after cruiser in need of an engine change, that was.
It wasn't until Lara was half way up the cliff and a good ten meters from the ledge below her that she realised the noise was not exactly what she'd believed it to be.
The creature came at her with all the speed and agility of military flexi-bot - the ones they use to search tunnels and sewers for terrorists and criminals. The ones that can change direction with physics-defying ease. The ones that move with all the pent-up speed of a missile being launched from a cruiser. The ones that only have one thing on their mind: destruction.
Lara pressed herself further into the cliff, her teeth catching deeply into her bottom lip as she sharply swung her head to the side. She saw the streak of brown, grey, and black head towards her. It was just leathery wings, claws, and spikes.
Making her mind up before her body had a chance to countermand her with common sense, Lara let go of the ledge. She just spread her fingers up, allowing her hands to lose all purchase against the rock.
She plummeted. At first, her legs caught against one of the jagged lips of rock, her skin breaking with the sudden, violent impact. But then she managed to push herself free altogether and right out into nothing but air.
Lara didn't scream, even though she had two lungs full of trapped breath to give it a go. Instead, with the air whipping past her, flattening her collar to her face and sending her black-blue hair streaming above her like a flag caught in an updraft, Lara closed her eyes.
The ground, though at least 500 meters below her, was getting closer every second.
She had no time to spare. Which was an unusual thought, because no one in the history of the universe has ever had time to spare. Time was the most essential and sort after of resources and not something you ever squandered on boredom, Cra'lthan opera, or useless thoughts while you were plummeting to your death.
Instead, Lara let her fingers once again spread out. The air rushed through them with a strange, heavy reassurance, as if it were trying desperately to remind her that yes, she was still falling.
But she pushed it out of her mind and made space. She made space by grabbing all her thoughts up - as if they were parcels or neatly packed into boxes – and packing them up at the edges of her mind. She then pushed all her attention into one thing: the summon.
Feeling tendrils of energy escape over her skin, Lara called it to her. What ‘It’ was, was complicated. It wasn't a thing like a plant was a thing, or a cruiser was a thing, or the goo that sits at the corner of a storm drain was a thing. It was beyond that. It wasn't corporeal, for one thing, and nor was it continuous. It wasn't recognisable like the face of an aunt or a much-publicised politician.
It... was… just like truth or justice or right. It was something you could only understand through experience and never through thought.
It was the Summoned.
Suddenly, from underneath her, just as the whistle of air rushing through her ears was getting too loud to bear - her Summoned took form.
The Summoned was a bird. A giant, beautiful, winged bird with a tail of all the colours of the rainbow - with several more exotic, alien hues thrown in for good measure - and eyes that sparkled like the end of a comet.
She struck its back - her body pounding against the creature’s soft feathers with a force that should still have killed her. But it didn't; something impossible cushioned the fall. And what that something impossible was, was all part of the mystery of the Summons.
'They aren't real,' her mentor had told Lara one day after they'd administered a potion of special mountain herbs to a sick merchant, 'not like you and me, anyway.' Her mentor had then taken an awfully long time to stare out the window at the sky above. 'Depending on how real you are, you have different rules to abide by. You,' she'd pointed a gnarled finger right at Lara, 'have a body. That's real. You go climbing those mountains and tempt gravity anymore and you'll find out just how real your bones and flesh are. But your thoughts, those are real too. But not in the same way. They can't fall off mountains and die. Gravity can try to bring them to ground, but it can't. They can't be suffocated, drowned, beaten, electrocuted, shocked, frozen, or blown up. Your thoughts are real in a different way; and the Summoned, well, they’re real just the same.'
As Lara felt her body come to an easy rest against the warm, cradling form of the Summoned, her mentor's words rang in her mind with impossible clarity. It wasn't until those sharp moments you sometimes experience when your body comes under direct danger from some slip up of the mind - in other words, when you fall off a cliff because you thought it was a good idea to climb up it just to pick some herbs - that you could appreciate real-world wisdom. Real-world wisdom, according to her mentor, was what life was all about. Because without it, there was nothing but chance separating you from death.
Her trapped breath now escaped out of her mouth with a sharp gasp of air. Then, as the Summoned spread its wings and glided easily through the canyon, Lara finally allowed herself the time to scream. It was a sharp, short, and after-the-fact scream. But it still served all the functions it should: it enabled her trapped, tight muscles the chance to expend some of her pent-up energy. It also sent her voice echoing and playing all the way through this massive, dark, craggy canyon.
The Summoned seemed to descend, angling towards the dark, moss-covered ground of the canyon bed. Down there was nothing but slowly trickling streams and dank, darkened earth. Oh, and monsters. Her mentor hated her using that term, but Lara had picked it up off the visiting traders that sold everything from spices to computer chips. They usually came to her village in the spring - not wanting to risk the tumultuous weather of the mountains for the rest of the year. They'd bring with them their wares, news of the rest of the galaxy - which her mentor never wanted to hear - oh, and habits.
The traders and merchants - all of them, from the stubbly-chinned humans, to the repurposed military bots with their brightly painted metal bodies, to the lizard-skinned Barians - they all referred to the creatures that lived on this planet as monsters. The clawed, fanged, spiked, flying, crying, vicious creatures that had an irrational hate of anything that walked on two legs (though, Lara's mentor would correct that the hate was not irrational - the reasons were sound, the traders simply didn't agree with the conclusion). They were monsters.
So Lara called them monsters too. Sometimes her mentor accused Lara of copying everything that everybody else did without a care for her own thoughts and preferences. That wasn't true though, Lara didn't copy everything - only the bits she wanted to. Running a thumb over her bottom lip, talking to herself, calling the creatures monsters - she picked up the habits of others and took them on like someone stringing coloured knick knacks onto a necklace; the trinkets were derivative, but the result was unique. And Lara was unique, or at least she liked to think so.
The Summoned could not fly forever, Lara knew that. Even though the feel of the wind rushing through her hair and the look of the crags as they shot beneath her was something she could experience for hours. Soon, the Summoned would have to return to whence it had come, wherever that truly was. According to her mentor, the galaxy, for all its protestations otherwise, didn't truly know where these great mind-creatures came from. According to the Scientists of Progress - the governing body of science based on the Galactic Homeworld - the Summoned were creatures that lived in the Quantum Field. They were pure energy that took form from patterns, just like a human was meant to grow from the pattern trapped within the DNA of their cells. The Summoned too had patterns - a quantum version of some genetic blueprint. But that was as far as the scientific explanation usually went. Well, at least according to Lara's mentor. Because the Scientists of Progress were not willing to embrace the true reality of the Summoned – that they were creatures not of matter but of mind. In a universe replete with different races - different variations of the physical form - was it such a leap to suppose that there were creatures of the mind also?
It didn't matter at this point, though. The only thing that mattered was the flush to Lara's cheeks. The way her heart, that had once beat with a violent, desperate intensity, was now sailing and soaring on the sparkling blue wings of a Summoned. It was the way her fingers tingled, too, as they rested gently against the creature's back. It was the way her eyes were plastered open so she could see all that was around her and below her, despite the sheer of the wind that rushed against her skin.
All that mattered was the wonder of the moment. Oh, and getting back to the village by nightfall.
Chapter 2
By the time the Summoned had set Lara down on the ground, the sun above was already starting to set. The sun sent its purple and orange rays low over the mountains; the light filtering through the scraggy green bushes about her feet and making them look far more luminous than they were.
Lara didn't even have a chance to say good-bye to her Summoned - the creature just alighted as soon as she'd jumped off its back. And then, with a soundless flap of its great wings, it had simply disappeared. Though that didn't even seem right. What it had done was flown back to whence it had come, which just happened to be a place that Lara could not see, could not go to, and could not imagine; and thus, the creature had appeared to disappear. Her mentor always told her that there was an exceedingly fine line between concluding something does not exist and accepting you simply do not have the means to observe it.
Lara had walked in an almost happy daze for the first ten minutes or so. Though her backpack, with the light her garden bot had managed to salvage for her from a broken down cruiser in the desert, was heavy, she didn't notice at first. All she could think about was the experience of being rescued by such an amazing, impossible creature. The feeling of it sat deep within Lara's chest - right between her lungs and her shoulder blades - and it felt like a deep, heavy warmth.
But after Lara had stumbled a few times in the growing dark, her old brown shoes catching against the coiled roots of the low-lying shrubs that were dotted over the hills that separated the mountains from her home, Lara realised that she was running out of time. It was almost night. She had fifteen minutes, at most, to make it across the hills and back through the village gate before the wall shields were activated. And even though the incredible experience of being saved by a creature that lived by the rules of the mind and not those of the ordinary universe was still fresh in her mind, Lara knew that she couldn't count on being saved again. Summoning was an art, a way, a skill. And it was also something that Lara was very new at. In short, she couldn't hope to be saved again because she'd hardly known how she'd managed to call the Summoned in the first place. It was all still very instinctual to her, and she lacked any control above open-jawed amazement.
With the once sweet taste of wonder turning to a bitter, metallic worry in her mouth, Lara picked up her pace. She pulled the torch from her backpack and strapped it to her wrist with the strands of material she usually used to keep her hair tied into a neat bun. Then, trying not to break her legs on the exposed and twisting roots, Lara ran.
Climbing the crags for herbs and running through the roots in the dark - if her mentor ever found out what Lara had been doing today, she would likely throw a bucket of water over Lara's head. Then she'd probably hit her with the bucket for good measure. Her mentor always believed in consequences, see. And not in a nasty thou-shalt-be-punished way. No, her mentor simply believed in the sanctity of the Rules. And it wasn't even the rule of law; it wasn't even the moral and social regulations that kept people living together in supposed harmony. No, it was the Rules of Nature. Motion, thermodynamics, gravity: that sort of stuff. From the moment Lara’s mentor had taken her on, she’d always repeated the Rules over and over again. The Rules governed what your body could do on the ground, what ships could do in space, what birds could do in the sky, what traders could do on the streets, what bots could do in the gardens.
So you respected the Rules. If you didn't respect the Rules, you fell off cliffs and had to sleep the night outside of the village. Oh, and likely died.
Lara plastered her hand across her face, pushing her fringe from her eyes. It had an annoying habit of sticking to her forehead whenever it was covered in sweat. Then she couldn't see and she'd start tripping.
She kept an eye on the sky as she ran: on the way the light was becoming dimmer and the way the shadows of the great crags and mountains were becoming longer and far darker.
She could hear her percussive, short, punctuated bursts of breath. They sounded like the puffs of steam that would usually erupt from the broken-down cruisers that the village engineer had to fix.
As she ran, she tried very hard to keep one word from her mind. She thought of vegetable stew, bot oil, alien insignias, old-style boot polish, manure, and dust. She did not, however, think of monsters.
Finally, Lara crested a hill and saw the familiar circular wall of the village before her. It was high, and all around the perimeter it was dotted with tall, powerful lights. According to the village engineer, they were the same lights they used on galactic archaeological digs. In other words, you could see everything by them - from dust motes to creatures in the dark.
Lara sprinted the last few meters that separated her from the gate of the village. One of the wardens, who she knew would be just about to operate the shield generators, finally saw her fleeting form bounding through the darkness. 'Hey, hurry up!' he cried in a gruff tone that seemed to echo out through the night.
Lara didn't reply; she just pushed her body forward, finally making it over the threshold of the village gate and falling into a heap at the feet of the guard.
Without another word, but with a prolonged grumble, the guard flicked the several switches that operated the shield generator. At once, a sheer blue energy erupted out from separate points along the perimeter fence, encasing the village in a shifting, crackling dome.
'You been out in those mountains again,' the guard grumbled. The guard walked over to Lara until she could see the scuffed tops of his boots and the worn hem of his trousers.
She was still face-first on the ground and had no real intention of moving until her lungs began to fill with air at a respectable pace and her side stopped feeling like someone was stabbing knives into it.
'You do know Barta is looking for you, don't you?' the guard settled down onto his haunches and finally peered directly at Lara.
Barta was the name the rest of the village used for Lara's mentor. Lara wasn't allowed to use that name, though. According to her mentor, you had to call things by names that were appropriate to the situation. Names were tasked with identifying important things; and what was important to Lara was not the fact that the wizened old woman that taught her about herbs, Summons, and the Laws of Nature was called Barta. What mattered to Lara was that Barta was her mentor. So she had to name her as such. It was the same logic that stopped a child from calling their mother Magdalene or Judith or Tapala, rather than plain old Ma.
Lara finally took a hearty sniff and pushed herself up into a sitting position. Her hands were covered in dust, dirt, and scratches. And the powerful lights above only served to show how dirty they were. She scratched her head and gave a long sigh. 'Right,' was all she could think of saying.
The guard gave a short chuckle. 'Right? We'll see if you keep saying that, considering the mood Barta's in.'
Lara sucked in her lips and lifted her chin up until her gaze met the guard's evenly and clearly. Now that was a move she'd borrowed from her mentor. When people seemed to challenge you or belittle you or in any way deride you - if you were Barta, that was - you lifted your chin and stared at them. You did not scream. You did not raise your voice. You did not use the powers that everyone knew you had to establish dominance. No, you looked.
The guard slowly let a smile kink his lips to the side. Lara knew that he'd once been a cruiser pilot that had come to the village after crashlanding in the desert to the East. She knew that the other villagers assumed that he was worldlier than they were; that he knew more about what was out there and tended to show it with the nonchalant, experienced smile of a man that has been there and done that. Lara also knew, however, that even Guard never challenged Barta in such a way.
She pushed herself to her feet and flicked her blue-black hair over her shoulder. The powerful lights of the village always brought out the distinctly unnatural blue tinge of Lara's hair. During the day, she could get away with it. But at night, the blue, indigo tinge of her thicker-than-normal hair would always glisten with the kind of hue usually reserved for deep, dark pools of water. It was one of the things that reminded Lara that she wasn't entirely human - not that many were these days. Oh, her form was human enough – she was shortish, smallish, and had a normal looking face – but the hair was a touch wild. Somewhere in her bloodline was something else. And that was usually as far as she was willing to take that line of thought. She didn't have any maternal parents to ask the specifics of, anyway. She'd crash-landed on this planet as a very young child, just like the guard - just like so many of the inhabitants of this village.
So her history, whatever it was, stayed in space, and she stayed in the village.
The guard gave a throaty chuckle. It sent the scar that cut laterally across his throat and over the girth of his Adam's apple bouncing up and down. He didn't say anything like 'you aren't nearly as scary as Barta, stop trying to stare me down, kid', or 'you look far less frightening and far more constipated'. No, he just laughed, flicked a thumb over his nose, and walked back to the shield generators. Over his shoulder as he moved away, he called, 'we've got traders in town tonight. There's dinner in the Hall.'
Lara blinked back at him. She hadn't heard that traders were on the road, but then again, she usually didn't. It wasn't as if they rang ahead and scheduled in. They usually just showed up, dumped their cases of used computer parts, droid oil, and Barian spices on one of the repurposed flight-wing tables at the engineers house, and got straight to business. That being said, whenever one was in town, the Village always put on a dinner. They were hospitable people, it had been explained to Lara, and hospitable people always offer travellers dinner and a warm, dry bed for the night.
Lara ran her thumb over her bottom lip. It also meant that her mentor would be busy preparing things, possibly too busy to hunt Lara down and teach her about the vagaries of taunting the Laws of Nature. Perhaps if Lara stayed in the thick shadows of the Hall or even faked a stomach-ache and went to bed, she'd be able to ride this one out.
Perhaps, as she'd heard the guard say on more than one occasion, Hell would freeze over and the Devil would come and ask you for a blanket; in other words, fat chance.
Chapter 3
Lara yawned, scratching at her leg as she scooped a spoon-full of soup into her mouth. She watched the traders with only mild interest as she tried to ignore the deep fatigue that was threatening to send her to sleep right at the table.
There were two of them: a young man and an older man. At first they'd managed to pique Lara's interest; they didn't look like normal traders, after all. The merchants they got through these parts were usually dressed in a hodge-podge of dusty, scratched leather and bits of body armour they'd likely repurposed off an already repurposed bot. They were also unshaven - if they were the types of creatures that could muster facial hair, that was - and generally dirty. To your usual trader, a sale was far more important than a shower.
But these two, whoever they were, were clean, neat, and dressed in peculiar, matching tunics. Each had a badge on the left side of their chest of an insignia Lara had never seen. The older man had a keen cut to his jaw and seemed never to blink. The younger man looked everywhere, with sharp twists of his head that reminded Lara of some of the birds of prey she'd seen on Old Earth holograms.
But when the traders had still offered the engineer a rather bland array of computer parts, Lara's interest had waned. At first impression, she would have said that these two men weren't traders at all, but the fact they were clearly trying to trade was evidence enough that she was wrong.
Instead, Lara simply sat right at the end of the table – which was an old flight wing off one of the large transports that had crashed in the desert – and tried not to fall asleep. If anyone had been watching her, they would have seen that she'd yawned four times in the last two minutes.
She listened with half an ear at the conversation of the villagers around her. It was more excited than usual: quicker tones, tighter voices, and more questions than the normal trader visit would elicit. And for Barta’s part, the woman seemed to be strangely on edge.
Lara began to tune it all out though, and set her mind to finishing her soup so she could sneak out and head off to bed. She usually liked a trader visit and would be the one to sit right across the table from them so she could ask all the questions she could think of. Even though her mentor hardly ever approved, Lara would always try to find out about the galaxy from any visitors to the village: the stars, the races, the governments, the goings on. It wasn't that she was bored with her life in the village - far from it; Lara loved it here. It was simply that she desired to know. And that, really, was simple enough.
A desire to know, however - her mentor would warn - was where things always began. It was a desire to know what it felt like to be rich that turned a man into a thief, or the desire to know what it felt like to be safe that turned a boy into a soldier. Desire to know led to desires to act and thus weren't simple at all.
Someone jostled into Lara's arm, sending her spoon jolting right out of her hand and soup all down her front.
'Sorry,' the younger of the traders mumbled with a quick glance Lara's way.
Lara patted at her tunic. It was her good one. The one that hadn't had to be repaired a dozen times by the garden bot. The one that didn't have dirt all around the hems and frayed thread erupting from the collar. It was now also the one with soup all over it. 'That's fine,' she mumbled quickly. You never started a fight over something as simple as an accident – or so she'd been told.
The trader dipped his head in deference, his sandy hair flopping against his forehead. 'I didn't see you there,' he said by apparent way of explanation.
'That's because you were looking everywhere else,' Lara said, though she immediately regretted it. While Barta would get away with saying the obvious - that particular talent was a very hard one to control. It took years of practice to get your tone just right, to get the look in your eye just perfect. Because if you didn't get it right, saying the obvious turned into being trite and plain rude.
The trader gave a short, quick, almost choked laugh. 'I see,' was all he said with a little flick of his eyebrows.
Biting down on her lip, a warm flush engulfing her cheeks, Lara tried not to blink too quickly. She was tired, and being tired she'd just said the first thing that came into her head (which also happened to be the obvious). And saying the first thing that came into your head - unlike saying the obvious - was a trick only the dim-witted ever relied on. But she wasn't about to say sorry, or anything like that. The guy had jostled her, after all.
The trader looked down at her for a moment, possibly waiting for the ill-fated conversation to continue. But when it didn't, when Lara didn't pop out an apology or follow up on her blithe comments with a 'you made me spill soup on myself you clumsy, floppy-haired space nong', the man looked away.
But then he looked back. 'I don't suppose you know where the Village Labs are, do you?' he asked evenly, tone once again easy. He was obviously prepared to forgive and forget.
The Village Labs, as he'd so grandly called them, were two tiny rooms made out of shipping crates that had been hollowed out and joined together. The crates, that had been used to ship Baldarian sugar grain, still smelled so sweet that spending too long in them either gave you the giggles or left you as parched as the Eastern Desert. They also, contrary to their name, didn't have that much 'lab' to them. There were a couple of broken scanners, a box of tools the engineer had salvaged from a crashed transport that were too dust-encrusted to use, and several baskets full of pumpkins that were being kept for the winter.
'They aren't really labs,' Lara said quickly, after realising she ought to say something soon or appear incredulous, that, or exceedingly stupid. 'They've mostly got pumpkins in them,' she tried to clarify.
Now the man's face shifted slightly. Her mentor always told her that you could tell a lot about someone depending on how much of their lives they lived through their expressions. Some people lived through the broad, toothy smiles that would erupt over their faces at the hint of sunshine, the smell of baking bread, or the good news of a loved one. Some people would live through the scowls and warped twists of their lips at the hint of rain or the mere suggestion that someone had sat in their seat or stolen some screws from one of their bots.
Watch close enough to the expressions and you'll see the life. So Lara watched.
The young man's eyes seemed to squeeze together, his lips pressing closed, and his chin dimpled. He looked confused, amused, and just a little wary. 'Pumpkins? Only I need a functioning density scanner to analyse some....' he suddenly trailed off. Either he didn't think Lara would understand, or he'd just processed the fact that a lab that housed mostly pumpkins was not a lab that had sophisticated scanning equipment.
'If you want scanners, maybe the engineer can help,' Lara offered. She was feeling somewhat guilty at being short and rude with this man. He was an outsider, a visitor, an off-worlder. And you had to be careful with those, Barta would always warn, because they lived their lives by different Rules.
The man nodded sharply, his fringe flopping against the top of his head. It was a move that was strangely easy to watch.
'Okay, then. Thank you,' he bowed his head again then turned to leave.
'Hold on,' Lara said sharply. 'I get to ask you a question now,' she said quickly. She pushed the words out because they were strangely hard to say for some reason. Everyone in this village knew that you got to ask a question of whoever asks a question of you: it was a Rule. And even the traders who came through usually learnt it soon enough. That being said, Lara was being somewhat hesitant in exercising her rights today. Perhaps she was tired, perhaps she was embarrassed, perhaps she was something else.
'Oh,' the man dipped his head, 'yes, one of the other villagers has already explained this to me. Go ahead then,' he nodded encouragingly, his cheeks dimpling with a smile, 'what would you like to know?'
Lara's mouth felt peculiarly dry. She also had to admit that her heart was beating just a tad faster than in ought to be. It was probably all that falling off cliffs and running for her life to make it to the village by nightfall, she reasoned quickly. 'What,' she paused to lick her lips, trying to rack her brains for something intelligent to ask. It had to be something more than 'is your favourite colour', and something less esoteric than 'what is the meaning of life'. She finally settled on, 'is that badge you are wearing?' She pointed to it in case the man might become confused and think she was referring to the badge on the inside of his pant leg or on the underside of his shoe.
'It's the badge of the NOW,' he said clearly, patting a hand over the metallic surface. As he did so, the picture on the badge changed, revealing an image of a building on some great cityscape.
Lara had deliberately not asked an esoteric question, but that hadn't stopped her from getting a left-field response. The badge of Now sounded like the insignia of some alien cult that worshiped the ticking of clocks and the passage of time through moments rather than years, weeks, and days.
The man suddenly erupted into a smile, and it really was an eruption. At one point, he was looking fairly normal, and then his lips suddenly spread to the side and opened wide. 'It stands for the National Organisation of Warriors,' he explained, tapping the badge again until the picture of the building was gone and replaced simply by a circle with a dot in the middle.
'The what?' Lara asked automatically, her own eyebrows knotting together. One of the reasons she tended to be the one to sit opposite the visiting traders to ask them question after question was that there was a lot about the galaxy she didn't know. She understood that you had to keep pumpkins in a dry, dark place if you wanted them to last for the winter and that you also had to set the garden bot to stun any enterprising rats that went their way. She also knew where the herbs grew in the mountains – the ones that were just as good as the expensive, synthesised drugs at curing fevers and tremors. She also knew how to repurpose and reprogram a bot. However, when it came to her knowledge of the galaxy – the out there, the everything that was anything outside of the village walls – her knowledge could barely fill the bottom of a jar. It was just as sad and pathetic as watching several Government Credits roll around in the bottom of your purse, and just as useless.
But Lara had the desire to know.
The man looked momentarily confused. Perhaps he, once again, was having to reassess Lara and downgrade her from rude village brat to rude and ignorant village brat that had an unusual fascination with pumpkins. 'Ah, we are the mercenaries of the government,' he said as he pushed a hand down his tunic and flattened it.
'Mercenaries of the government?' Lara repeated, tone questioning. 'I thought a mercenary was a paid warrior, I didn't think they worked for the government. That would just make them soldiers,' she pointed out clearly. She had switched - in usual Lara style - from apparent ignorance to apparent arrogance.
'Well, I guess that's technically correct. The NOWs, whilst they mostly work for the government, also work for anyone who comes to us with a problem. We aren't beholden to the government, they just happen to be our largest contractor,' his tone was slow and clear. He obviously was treading through this conversation like someone trod through a mess of candied sugar on the carpet - hoping he wouldn't get stuck.
Lara had never heard of the NOWs, but doubted that they were exactly as this man described. She knew what a mercenary was and she knew that they didn't work for people who had 'problems'; they worked for people who had money. But just as she was going to open her mouth to point this fact out, a hand clamped down on her shoulder.
She hadn't even been aware that someone had walked up from behind her, which was unusual for Lara. This strange trader-mercenary seemed to be taking far too much of her attention than seemed healthy.
'Come with me, Lara,' a low, sure voice rumbled by her ear.
Lara didn't have to turn to know who the voice belonged to. There was only one person this side of an alien warlord that could put that much contained menace into their tone: her mentor.
Sucking her lips in with a pop, Lara stood up slowly.
The man watched with interest, the kind of interest that was making his head cock slightly to the side and his eyes narrow just a touch. Once again, moves that were strangely easy to watch.
'Seems Guard saw you out past nightfall,' her mentor whispered ominously. She always called people by their profession or function in the village. The engineer was Engineer, the tailor was Tailor, the guard was Guard. Only Lara had the ignominious pleasure of being referred to by her real name. But that was possibly because Barta hadn't found a proper use for her yet. 'Seems you were seen running - running, mind you - from the direction of the crags.'
Lara turned slowly, her lips so sucked in that she risked swallowing them and her teeth whole.
She faced her mentor: Barta, the old, wise woman of the Village. The one that kept everyone safe regardless of whether they wanted to be or not. The one that ensured everyone was well, that everyone was fed, that everyone had purpose, and most importantly that everyone knew the Rules.
She was a woman of middle height with a shock of pearl-white hair that seemed to surround her head much like a crowd of bees surrounds a recently-disturbed hive. She also had purple eyes; eyes that seemed to latch hold of things less like eyes should and more like wiry hands that would never let go. Her skin was smooth, though had lines here and there. She was proportioned, even though Lara had heard Guard refer to Barta as having a monstrously huge head at times. One other thing Barta was, however, was not particularly old. Well, at least she didn't look it. She didn't have wizened, yellow skin or deep lines emanating from her eyes and running over her forehead.
But Lara knew that Barta was old. She knew it because Barta acted old. And that was that.
'I....' Lara trailed off the second she tried to mount her own defence. There wasn't really any point.
'Now, I am not going to ask where you were, because I already know the unfortunate answer. I do, however, suggest that in the morning you acquaint yourself with gravity.'
The young trader-mercenary suddenly gave a light chuckle, though seemed to instantly regret it when Barta turned her purple eyes his way. 'Yes, young sir? Do you find something humorous?'
The man stood back a step, then tried for a smile. 'Ah, not at all.'
Barta turned her full attention back to Lara. 'Go to bed. Pull the covers over your head and think about the precise consequences of failing to make it back to the village before the shields are up. Wonder what it feels like to sleep amongst the crags at night, only to be woken up by the screech of a-'
'I don't really think that's necessary,' the young man suddenly cut in.
Lara squeaked. 'No, ah, that's fine. I'll be going.' She shifted back from Barta's grip. 'To remind myself of the laws of gravity and to remember - in toothy detail - why we don't stay out at night,' she said quickly to appease Barta's terrifying gaze.
She then nodded her head at the young man, even though it wasn't a move she usually did. Then turned on her heel and left. The young man had a peculiar look in his eye - something akin to righteousness. She'd seen Guard look that way when a trader had tried to fleece the engineer for credits before running away into the desert. It was a look that said a lot without the person having to say anything at all.
She knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that Barta was a cruel, officious, mean old woman - or words to that effect. But despite her acerbic nature, she wasn't any of those things. She had her ways and they were sometimes gentle but often simply efficient. She was also the only thing that stood between this village and the ravages of the planet.
And she was Lara's mentor. Without Barta, Lara would be.... Lara shuddered to think about it. As the only summoner in this village, Lara was a prime target for pirates, people-traders, and general screeching monsters. Summoners, so she'd been told, were valuable and valued somewhat like precious diamonds and expensive weaponry: they were rare and they could do marvellous, often sparkly things.
Barta was also the only person in the village capable of teaching Lara how to control and use the Summoning: hence the title of mentor. Even though Barta herself was not a Summoner, she understood enough to help Lara hone her skills.
No, this young man didn't understand the reality of it, just the appearance. And it was funny how often those two things do not match.
Lara quickly made it across the village and to her house - a small but very quaint escape pod that had been dug up from one of the dunes east of the village. It had still-functioning life-support, which meant that Lara could adjust the heating, air, and light to just how she wanted them. It had a bed crafted out of the once-upright chair that had sat right in the middle of the pod. On the bed was a patchwork quilt the garden bot had made her from scraps of fabric it had collected from seed bags and old clothes. It also had a pot plant in the corner on the metal, white floor - another gift from the bot.
In no time at all, Lara was snug in her bed, the activities of the day drifting through her mind somewhat like she'd drifted down to earth on the back of her Summoned. But then sleep finally settled in….
It did not last, however.
Chapter 4
It must have been several hours before sunrise when the noise had woken Lara up. It had been sharp, loud, and thundering. It had shaken her pod just like that earthquake had several years ago. Her pot plant had jittered around on the floor, its leaves shaking violently and its flowers fluttering down.
The electronic voice of the pod's computer - which still worked - warned Lara that outside conditions were harsh. The temperature was below zero, the wind was almost at 100km, and there was dust and grit in the air.
Blinking back the sleep that had collected at the corners of her eyes, Lara sat up quickly. 'What?' she asked the computer, 'repeat that.'
It did. And Lara didn't like what she heard. Because the conditions it was reporting were the conditions that the village's shields should be holding at bay; the conditions that made the rest of the land outside the shield generators so harsh and unliveable at night.
Another violent shake pitched Lara to the side so quickly she almost fell out of bed. There were screams too: harsh, high, quick.
Lara's heart seemed to miss a couple of beats as her brain skipped ahead to the logical conclusion. The conclusion that set a cold sweat quick and fast over the back of her neck and hands. The shield generators were down.
Lara jumped out of bed, pushing the covers right off her and grabbing at the heavy overcoat she had strewn over the back of the packing crate that served as her table. She pulled it on and raced for her door.
She opened it.
As soon as the metal furled back with a tiny pneumatic hiss, the cold hit her. It ate at her just like thousands of tiny, quickly-biting jaws. Her lips and cheeks seemed to take the brunt of it - instantly tingling with an unpleasant energy.
She blinked back at the sudden haze of dust that swirled before her, even raised a hand to try to bat it off. But she couldn't just pat it away; it was everywhere. One of the vagaries of this planet - or at least the uninhabitable chunk the village was situated on – was that at night the harsh, sprinting winds that came off the desert would collect the sand and furl it as far as they could. And standing in a gale blowing at 100km an hour full of dust and rock particles was just as bad as it sounded.
Lara grabbed at the goggles she kept by the back of her door. The garden bot had found them when it and Lara had gone on a reconnaissance mission in the Eastern Desert one day. Lara quite enjoyed it when they went out together. The bot was good company; it always had plenty of stories of its time in the galactic army and would recount them just like an old grandpa by the fireside, except in a tinny electronic tone. It was also excellent at tracking and scanning.
Lara snapped the goggles over her head. She fancied they'd once belonged to some speed-bike pilot that had travelled too far into the Eastern Desert and had lost their bearings in an unfortunately terminal way. They were rounded and had metal all along the sides. They didn't have any fancy add-ons like proximity sensors or bioscanners. But they did have night vision and, most importantly, they kept the dust out of your eyes.
Lara grabbed for her backpack while she was there and then finally set out of the door. She huddled into her jacket, trying to cover the exposed skin of her hands with her sleeves. The cuts across her fingers were stinging from the combination of sand and cold.
But that didn't matter. People were still screaming. Lara opened her own mouth to shout back, but instantly got a mouthful of sand for her troubles. Chocking, she stumbled backwards slightly.
It was so hard to see, let alone orient in this mess. Even with her goggles, the surroundings were still too sliced with fast moving sand to make out anything but the swirl of grit itself.
Protecting her mouth with her sleeve, Lara finally managed a shout. But her voice hardly seemed to work against the rage of the wind. That she could hear the screams of others meant that they were screaming a lot louder than the wind - which seemed to be a very perilous sign.
Lara pushed herself into the gale, trying to pull her collar up around her face. She could feel the scratches and cuts appear on her skin. Every now and then, a larger-than-normal grit of sand or a small stone glanced off her chin or the soft skin below her eyes and left its mark in searing, hot blood.
She had to find the others; she had to check they were all okay. Then she would have to find Barta - if she hadn't already pulled the rest of the villagers under her wing, as it were – then Barta would find a way to make everything okay. And Lara would help.
But just as the plan solidified in Lara's mind, giving her a tingle of comfort in this horrendous situation, something struck her from behind.
It hit the small of her back, just below her shoulder blades, and pushed her down with a force strong enough to see Lara slam to the ground with a thud. She let out a groan, but immediately rolled to the side. Just as she did, something slammed down right where she had fallen. It landed with enough speed and force to be audible over the roar of the wind, and to blow chunks of earth and stone onto Lara's prone form.
It also growled, which was very telling, indeed. It wasn't a tree branch that had struck Lara or some improperly tied down cargo. It was something that growled.
Lara rolled again to the side, then finally pushed herself up onto her feet.
In a land where there were beasts that traders referred to as monsters, growling things were not good things.
Lara pressed her hands into the dirt and pushed herself up. She loosened the straps on her backpack as soon as she did; she knew what would come next.
The thing behind her erupted into a vicious, arcing cry. Then there was a scrabbling of claws on dirt and a barely audible swoosh.
Lara unclipped her arm straps and let her backpack fall just as the thing latched onto it. In a short, sharp moment that she would likely remember for years to come, she felt the hot breath break against her neck, smell the fetid aroma of rotting-meat, and felt the impossible strength settle behind her. But as soon as she let her backpack fall, the thing fell with it. It had, quite simply, managed to catch the wrong prey.
Lara flung herself forward. Hoping the monster would take at least several seconds to realise the thing it was ripping into contained less meat than your average human. She let her arms pump by her sides and seemed to no longer care that she was sucking sand into her lungs with every gulp of air.
But some part of her brain - that part that always sat just outside of her experience and made useful if not petulant comments like 'this is dangerous, turn back', or 'stop crying, this isn't all that bad' - knew that her little ploy would not buy her the time she needed. Her situation was impossible. She was running from a toothed, fanged, hideously strong monster in a sand storm. She had no weapons and no way to orient towards cover or safety.
That left one thing: the summoning, if she could do it. But desperation - the true, aching, shifting desperation that claws its way through you as it climbs your spine and sinks itself right into the back part of your brain - always had a way of doing what it had to. Barta had said that many times. Desperation, to Lara's mentor, was the last-ditched effort of the body to keep itself alive. It was like what happened when pilots set their navigation to auto and let the ship itself navigate its own way through trouble. The ship, just like the pilot, didn't want to crash, and usually found a way to keep in one piece. And just like the ship, Lara's pulsing, rippling, aching body really, really didn't want to be eaten by a monster.
Just as she heard the roar behind her as the monster figured out a backpack wasn't nearly as fun to eat as a human, Lara realised what she had to do. She had to try.
So Lara pushed her hands forward, letting her fingers spread wide as if she were preparing to catch a thrown ball. Then she pushed her thoughts to the side of her mind, as best she could considering her current thoughts were of the very impressive I-don't-want-to-die variety. Finally, she pushed her mind forward just like you push a cart or a door.
Energy erupted over her skin, the light of it seeming alien as Lara watched it through the night-vision of her goggles. But she didn't watch it for long; instead, she concentrated on summoning - on calling a form from wherever it rested. Something to help her. Anything.
Summoning was a gift. That's what she'd been told since she'd been old enough to appreciate the fact that the mumbles that came out of people's mouths were meant to mean something. And what made gifts special was who you gave them too. Give the right gift to the right person and they'll use it to its utmost. Give the wrong gift to the wrong person and they will squander it and throw it away.
Lara felt the familiar shiver race across the middle of her back as the Summoned appeared. Whilst in the canyon it had been a bird of unimaginable colour with wings wide and powerful enough to fly her to safety, now it was something else entirely. It was a creature; an entity that stood at least eight-foot-tall and seemed to glow yellow like the heart of the flame as it licks over the first log thrown on the fire. The light emanated out of grooves in the entity's skin - like chasms in the earth revealing the molten reality within. It had a head like a bull and a body like a person. But its fists – or whatever terminated at the ends of its hands – seemed simply to be great hammers.
The monster behind Lara made another leap for her. But as it did, the entity swept forward with a roar. Bringing its hammer-like hands up, it slammed them into the side of the creature's great girth, pushing it easily from its path and away from Lara.
Lara, for her part, simply tumbled to the ground: breathless, frigid, and astoundingly afraid. But deep within she felt that flicker of comfort - the incredible and undeniable knowledge that the Summoned was here to protect her.
The Summoned did not round on the monster and use its hammer fists to pummel the creature to death. No. No summoned ever acted like that. They would push monsters back, even fight them until the creatures realised they had no hope and turned tail and ran; but no Summoned would fight to kill. According to Barta, that was because all the physical races of the galaxy already fulfilled that ignominious task. People - being of flesh - they knew how to fight and then keep fighting once the need for protection was over. They knew how to turn the fear of survival into the aggression of hatred and then on to the fire of destruction.
But the Summoned were different. They played by different rules.
And right now Lara didn't care that her Summoned wasn't about to club the monster senseless. All she cared about was being safe; a simple, basic, an undeniable truth that she would trade anything and everything for.
Eventually the monster, possibly upon realising the importance of the fact an eight-foot-tall fire-skinned creature with hammers for hands now stood between it and its meal, skulked off into the darkness. With a keening howl, Lara heard its claws scuttle against the stone as it sped off into the night.
For a moment, Lara just sat frigid and still on the ground as the sand still cut into her cheeks and hands. She almost wanted to pull her goggles from her eyes so she could see better, a contradictory thought considering without them she wouldn't be able to see at all. But in times of life-threatening danger, and especially when said danger is just passing, the mind wants to do strange things. It wants to laugh out loud, it wants to get up and dance inappropriately, it wants to take off its goggles; in short, it wants to do dumb things just to prove that yes, it is still alive.