Borderlands: Gunsight (13 page)

Bloodwing squawked in assent and flapped up, ascending into the sky and circling overhead.

“I don’t at present belong to anyone,” the Claptrap informed him. It added sadly, “I’m . . . all . . . alone.”

Mordecai snorted. “Claptraps are getting rare. And rare is worth money. You gotta belong to someone.”

“Ah, it’s true—I do
feel
rare,” it told him. “In fact I might be rare. First of all, because not many of us survived the robolution. And not many survived Hyperion’s raiders. Handsome Jack doesn’t seem to like Claptraps, for some reason completely unknown to people of good taste . . .”

“What I’ve heard,” Mordecai said, lowering the rifle, “is that he doesn’t like anything he doesn’t own.”

“Quite likely—he doesn’t own Extra 88878.01.”

“That would be you? I’m not familiar with the Extra designation. Oh wait . . .” He winced. That woman’s voice . . .

“Just call me Extra, please,” the Claptrap said. “No need for the surname.”

“Last time I heard that term,
extra,
applied to robotics,” Mordecai said wearily, “it was used by a Professor Dufty.
Please
tell me she’s not around here anywhere.”

“Yes! I mean, yes, Professor Elenora Dufty, Superior Technician and Robotics Engineer, is the lady in question. And no, she isn’t here. Not precisely. She has shuffled off this mortal shock absorber. Her gears have rusted and her circuits are fried.”

“She was flesh and blood,” Mordecai muttered. “Not a robot. And in that she had some good points. She was quite . . . flexible.”

“Yes? She never told me.”

“Doesn’t matter. I used to work for her and it got a little too cozy, is all. You say she’s dead?”

“She took poison. And it killed her. She did it after the upload . . .”

“Poison. Did she now. Why?”

“Because you didn’t come back!”

Mordecai nodded. “Am I supposed to feel bad about that? She tried to
shoot
me when I was taking a shower once. She also gashed my arm with a piece of broken glass, to ‘punish me for bad thoughts,’ she said. Naturally I didn’t come back.”

“She thought you were going to work for her, forever, and be her mate. So she tells me.”

“So she
tells
you? I thought you said she was dead?” He glanced nervously around, then up at Bloodwing, who was spiraling down to alight on his shoulder.

Bloodwing made a particular short brisk squawk that meant
, I see no one around.

The Claptrap seemed to hesitate before answering Mordecai’s question. Then a woman’s voice came from its speaker grid.
“I cut you, Mordecai, in self-defense, you bastard, you horrible bastard boy,”
said the voice.

It was the voice of Professor Elenora Dufty, Superior Technician and Robotics Engineer.

“Self-defense!” Mordecai blurted. “Bullshit!”

“Self-defense from your malevolent thoughts!” she said, in a serrated, cutting tone.

“God—it
is
her. And she’s still delusional. How am I hearing her, robot? Some kind of . . . transmitter? From somewhere else?” Mordecai once more glanced anxiously around. “You sure she’s not around here? Is she in that mine you came out of?”

“No, no, she’s dead,” the little Claptrap said, in its own voice. It sounded terribly chirpy. “I told you. She took poison.”

“Which was probably to punish me?”

“
Yes,”
said Elenora Dufty’s voice—from the
Claptrap. “
You deserve it.”
The robot added in its own voice, “She’s inside me—she uploaded her personality onto a chip, along with a voice simulator, some other patented mind-mockery, and here we are! But I’m in charge of myself, I assure you. Mostly. She talks whenever she feels like it.”

It sounded less chirpy now.

“Let me guess,” Mordecai said, starting toward the path that led up to the outrunner. “She sent you to find me, and torment me. Make me feel guilty. That it?”

“No, no!” the robot called, trundling after him up the trail. “She sent me to
help
you!”

“Sure she did.”

This was cruelly ironic. He was already suffering for having abandoned a woman who didn’t deserve to be abandoned. Daphne. He’d foolishly let Jasper kidnap her. Now he was to be tormented by the one woman who
did
deserve abandoning.

“No, no,” Extra insisted, “she sent me to help you! I have vital technology! She says it will defeat your enemies!”

“I know Elenora. The woman is punishment-based. She thinks helping me is going to make me feel guilty, that it?”

“It’s a good hypothesis!”

Mordecai noted the ambiguity of that response. But he did need all the help he could get. And Dufty had been a robotics genius. She did have the capability to create something that would help him—even if it was for all the wrong reasons.

Deep down, he knew there was more to this. There would be a trap hidden somewhere in this gift . . .

But he thought he could probably outsmart the old girl. She’d been smarter than he—in certain ways. But nowhere near as crafty. And if the robot could be useful in the short term . . . why not?

They got to the rim overlooking the quarry, and Mordecai took off his backpack, tossed it in the back.

“Are you . . . are you going to drive away?” Extra asked, with real dismay. “And . . . and leave me here?”

“Tell you what, if you can get in the outrunner without my having to lift you, you can go with me. For now.”

“Oh, hurray!” Extra spun around in apparent joy.

“Whoa—hold it. You are not going to be one of those twitchy, hoppy, whirling, singing, dancing, yappy Claptraps, you understand? If you start doing any of that, I’m tossing you over the first cliff I come to!”

“Oh! No, no,
no
! I’m
solemn
! I was always known, in the parts shop, as the Solemn One! I’ll be quiet and good . . . I can’t speak for Professor Dufty. But I’ll be good!”

The robot rolled around to the passenger side of the outrunner, seemed to hunker down, and then it leapt up, coming down in the seat. It bounced once, hitting the seat, turning in midair to face the front.

“Pretty good trick,” Mordecai allowed, climbing in and clipping the Eridian rifle next to the driver’s seat. Bloodwing settled onto his left shoulder, instinctively mistrusting the Claptrap.

“Yes,” said the robot proudly. “She gave me extra mobility so I could find you.”

“I anticipated this moment, you damned fool,”
said the woman’s voice, from within the Claptrap. “
I knew he wouldn’t lift a finger to bring you along . . . He likes to abandon people.”

That shaft went home. Mordecai, however, kept his face blank. Her personality chip was watching him through the robot—and he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction.

“I’m sorry she said that,” Extra said. “I’ll see if I can turn the volume down on her. Sometimes I can.”

“You do that.”

“There’s something else I should probably tell you,” Extra said, as Mordecai drove out onto the faint trail across the steppes.

“Which is?”

“I think some mercenaries are following me.”

“What?
Why are they following you?”

“Oh, to blow me up. They might be working for Handsome Jack. Just thought I’d mention it . . .”

•  •  •

The wine helped. The screens helped.

But still Daphne got claustrophobic, twitchy with confinement, locked in the circular bedroom. She exercised, jogging around the room, jumping up on the bed and continuing her jogging. When she got unbearably restless, she began an elaborate regiment of calisthenics and martial arts practice. Sometimes she danced to music from the screens, singing to herself.

But this was getting very,
very
old.

Sometimes, as now, Daphne lay facedown, with an ear pressed to the floor, just listening. She could hear Bigjaws moving around.
Clump, clump, clump
. And gnashing his jaws, too.
Scrape, scrape, gnash.
He walked in a kind of pattern, she decided. His room was circular but judging by the sound he walked in a square, around it, turning sharply when he got to the curved wall. Then,
Clump, clump, clump.

That might give her a few seconds, once she was dumped down into his reeking den. And then maybe,
maybe,
her Plan Z . . . following on the twenty-five other plans . . . just might work.

She wasn’t quite ready for Plan Z yet. She was still hoping Mordecai might show up.

Mordecai had called on the ECHO that morning—a call cut short after a minute by Jasper. But Mordecai had seemed determined to get her out of here . . .

She’d only wait so long. And how long was that?

Daphne sat up, shrugging. She’d know when it was long enough, and she’d make her move.

She’d rather spend time with Bigjaws, than Boss Jasper.

•  •  •

“So Handsome Jack’s eliminating any Claptrap, any robot, that doesn’t work for him?” Mordecai asked.

“Yes,” said Extra. “That is essentially correct.”

They were driving in a wide circle around Tumessa—Reamus’s compound was just barely visible, off to Mordecai’s left, like a wart on the otherwise flat horizon. It made sense to come at the settlement from the opposite side this time. If coming at it in any way made sense at all. It wouldn’t, in a sane world—but this was Pandora. Around here, Pandora was all cold, flat, and barren tundra; up ahead, in the distance, was an outcropping of rock big enough to hide the outrunner. The rock formation was a series of stacked slabs jutting at a forty-five-degree angle from the tundra, as if shoved crookedly up by some unknown titanic force just under the surface.

“And he’s targeted you in particular—I’m guessing because you’re cutting such a prominent figure on Pandora . . .”

The little robot seemed to ponder, clicking thoughtfully within itself. “Is that sarcasm, of some kind?”

“Yes. It is.”

“Ah! Interesting. If you’re obliquely asking why he’s bothering to send men after one single lone Claptrap, to the point of tracking them—”

“Good reading on my sarcasm. That’s it exactly.”

“—my only answer is, I don’t know, unless, perhaps, it’s because I was Professor Dufty’s creation, and she could have presented problems for him. She refused to work for him. She was convinced he was going to kill her anyway, so . . .”

“So that’s why she killed herself? To frustrate him and punish me? Trying to jab two men at once? That’d be like Elenora.” Mordecai shook his head. “I should never have taken a job with her. I knew she was trouble, first time we met. The way she stared at me. And she never said who I was supposed to protect her from. So it was that lunatic who took over Hyperion. Handsome Jerk.”

“His name’s Jack, actually.”

“I was quoting some graffiti I saw.” He shook his head in disgust. “I really ought to dump you out on the steppes right now. You’re annoying, and you’ve got yet another even more annoying personality in you . . .”

As if to confirm this, the voice of Elenora Dufty spoke up then—like the witch’s voice in a child’s nightmare. “
You try to hurt me, with your dismissiveness,”
Dufty said.
“But you never got away from me, Mordecai. I’ve always been with you! Following you. Whispering to you—and to your darling girl . . .”

“I apologize for her once more,” Extra said. “She calculates what’ll be most disturbing to say and . . .”

“You’re both equally annoying,” Mordecai said. “So shut up.”

He put the vehicle’s ECHO on, just to drown the robot’s voices out, twiddling the control to try to get some kind of signal, maybe some intel. What came on the radio was even more disturbing than Elenora Dufty’s artificial whispering.

“Hey Vault Hunter, Handsome Jack here, president of Hyperion! Let me just tell you how things work . . . Vault Hunter shows up,
Vault Hunter looks for the new vault, Vault Hunter gets killed! By me! You seeing the problem here? You’re still alive! So if you could just do me a favor and off yourself, that’d be great!”

“He says that, every so often, to someone,” Extra remarked. “That’s a favorite of his. Sometimes he adds something about a pumpkin. I’ve been trying to find out what a pumpkin is, without success so far.”

Mordecai switched off the radio. “Rakk shit! No escape! If it’s not you and
her
, it’s—”

He broke off, staring. Up ahead three vehicles were coming at him—a Bandit technical, and two Bandit outriders. They were about a quarter kilometer off but there was no mistaking those threatening silhouettes against the frozen tundra.

“B
loodwing, check ’em out. Let me know if they’re Bandits. If they are, we can avoid ’em. If they’re not . . .”

He was talking to himself now—Bloodwing had already taken to the sky, was mounting ever higher so she could then dive fast, down close to the unidentified vehicles.

Mordecai slowed, almost to a stop. He was outgunned. The technical was twice as big, twice as well armed as his outrunner. And there were two more vehicles, armed with rocket launchers, and shielded. He had his own shield on, but it wasn’t the best.