Borderlands: Unconquered (15 page)

A tentacle twined around his ankle; another poised over him, about to strike. Mordecai fired instinctively, his hands finding a target, and the burst cut the poising
tentacle in half. Ichor flew from its severed ends. The other tentacle began to drag him across the dirt . . . and down.

“Hey! Claptrap! Come on over here, grab my arm!”

“Not me, can’t do it. Dakes wants me to stay here and watch for bad lady people, not get pulled under the dirt where my parts can get grit in ’em! That would be contraindicated!”

“I’ll disassemble you with a rusty wrench, you
little—” He didn’t get any more out; he had to use every ounce of energy to resist the inexorable pull of that tentacle. He aimed with the gun, balancing
it on his knee, his hands shaking, thinking there was a very good chance he was about to blow his own foot off. He had to be precise. The Thresher was pulling harder, and in a moment—

He fired, just one round exactly aimed, barely missing his
own ankle, cutting through the tentacle. It spurted fluid, and he was able to pull his leg back and had just managed to scramble to his feet, when the thing’s head burst up from its burrow, dirt spilling off its sides. The Thresher was big, big enough to swallow him whole. It reared over him, and he knew that swallowing him whole was exactly what it had in mind. Its big head, shaped like some sleek
aerodynamic vehicle, was silvery-gray trimmed in yellow, with a row of ventlike gill structures, behind which were two large green-black eyes on each side, with a third behind and above them. Its head tapered into a serpentine body, knobbed with yellow spikes; rubbery, finned underparts whipped about as it prepared to lunge for him. Its rubbery mouth gaped . . .

There was a message in the green-black
glitter of its eyes:
I hunger . . . I hunger for you!

Mordecai’s mouth was dry, but years on Pandora had formed his reflexes. Another man would have been paralyzed with horror, but Mordecai was already firing. He directed three bursts of the Cobra combat rifle into those big vulnerable eyes.

The Thresher squealed in agony, thrashed,
spurting red and green fluid. Mordecai backpedaled, just out
of the reach of its death throes.

Then it sank, revolving slowly, into the dirt . . . and in a few moments was gone from sight.

“I wonder if you killed it,” the Claptrap chattered. “I wonder, I wonder if you killed, killed, killed it, that could make a good song. I wonder wonder if you—”

Mordecai turned furiously to the Claptrap. “You! You’d better do your job for those people. Because you’re
useless to me. You don’t do your job, and I’ll spend a long, leisurely night taking you apart!”

The Claptrap spun about and jigged away, muttering bitterly to itself.

Mordecai stepped gingerly out onto the dirt, waited, then rushed across it, to the stone on the other side. A few moments more, and he’d reached the egress, the mouth of the cave that led out to the canyon.

He made his way to
the opening, stood there smelling the night air outside—and turned to see two Psychos standing beside a red outrider, guns in hand, talking, about ten paces to his right. They wore Gynella’s livery. There could be a lot more of them around. If he killed these two, he could attract half of Gynella’s army there . . .

They hadn’t seen him yet. But they would. Unless he went back through the cave,
and the mine, to the settlement.

No. Roland would laugh at him if he went back.

Mordecai waited in the shadows, listening.

I
t was the edge of dawn, and Roland had just finished eating a meager breakfast, when the first assault came.

The moon had slipped quietly away, and the sky was going from black silk to gun metal as day stalked them like a creeping skag.

There were fifty miners in the camp, most of them men; there were twelve women and five children. That was the whole settlement. And all the men but the guards
on the watchtowers were gathered around the dying fire in the barrel, eating hot gruel, drinking stimutea, or cleaning their weapons.

Roland was just picking up his combat rifle when he heard a shout from a watchtower: “Some of them are coming closer!”

Dakes shouted orders, and three miners rushed to man the mortars. Quick instructions came on
range and angle, and the middle mortar, set up directly
behind the gate, fired with a throaty cough. The shell rose at a steep angle, reaching its apex and visibly tipping, falling on the other side of the gate. Roland heard a triumphant shout as he headed toward the nearest tower.

“Got two of ’em! But there’s more, some kinda weapon set up!”

Then came an odd sound—a
twang
, a whistling. He figured that was the catapult, heaving boulders. He hoped
they would waste the boulders on the wall. Besides being steel, it was protected by an energy shield—a series of them, really. Not very strong shields—they wouldn’t stand up to a pounding for too long.

Dakes and other miners, including Glory, fired out through the horizontal rifle slits in the walls. The metal barricade clanged and racketed with bullet impacts from the army outside.

Then Roland
heard a cackling shriek from above. He looked up to see a Psycho Midget hurtling through the sky, flying like a creature of mythology, without aircraft, without wings; it had been simply hurled over the wall by a catapult and the little loon was arcing down, now—right at Roland.

The Psycho Midget had lost his “vault mask” in the air, and his deformed face was grinning, all clownlike, protruding
tongue fibrillating with the
rush of air as the mad bandit got closer and closer, yodeling as it came, angling head downward to crash into—

—into the ground just behind Roland as he simply stepped nimbly out of the way.

Roland expected to hear a horrible
splat
, but the Psycho Midget had an energy shield, strong enough to withstand the impact, and the malformed bandit bounced in a flash of sparkling
energy and hit the ground at an angle like a skipping rock, skidding on the glowing purple resistance of the shield, which fluttered out just as the Midget crashed headfirst into the rusty old metal barrel used for a central campfire.

The Psycho Midget’s momentum punched his head and shoulders through the thin corroded metal, and he screamed as his head was thrust into burning coals.

Dakes took
pity on the Psycho and shot him—just as another
twang
and whistle announced another one catapulting into the camp.

Gynella’s men had rethought their catapulting. This time the Psycho Midget came over the wall feetfirst, hurtling down to Roland’s left, the Midget’s field crackling as the little lunatic hit. The shirtless bandit bounced a little, fell flat on his back, spun like an overturned turtle
on its shell, then scrambled to his feet and rushed toward the nearest miner, brandishing a hatchet and shouting,
“It’s time to paint this body with blood!” The stunted Psycho was still wearing its full white and black vault mask, complete with Mohawk-style fin across the cranium and luminous blue eyepieces.

The miner was Glory’s friend, Lucky. He seemed stunned by the shrieking, glowing-eyed,
masked apparition charging him.

Lucky fumbled at his gun and backed away, but the Psycho Midget was closing fast, the blade of the hatchet gleaming.

Roland was already tracking the Psycho Midget with his sights, and he could see the bandit’s shield was weak, flickering out near his head. He fired and sent a burst right through the side of the stunted madman’s skull. The Midget fell dead at Lucky’s
feet.

Lucky stared at the corpse, then gaped up at Roland. He closed his mouth and nodded his thanks, then ran to reinforce the guards at the front wall.

He’s a good kid at heart,
Roland thought.

Another
twang
, another whistle, a burbling shriek as a third Psycho Midget came down, and this time a fourth was flung over the wall, from the back of the settlement—they were coming from two directions,
babbling miniature madmen with axes, hurtling through the air, arms and legs waving, screaming for blood.

A group of miners were arguing about a possible sortie to destroy the catapults, and the fourth
Psycho Midget dropped into their midst, hacking wildly with his hatchet as he came down.

Blood splashed with his arrival; men screamed; bits of skull flew.

Then the survivors, most of the men
in that group, closed around the Psycho Midget and began using their jackhammers on him.

The Midget’s shield didn’t last long. Neither did his mask, his face, or his spine.

Roland saw all this as he ran up the stairs to a watchtower on the northwestern corner of the settlement’s walls. The stairs quaked under him as a round from a rocket launcher struck the front gate. The gate held, the shield
shimmering, sparking, but not giving in entirely. It was a heavy steel gate, and it’d take quite a few rounds to blast it down even without the shield. He got to the watchtower, where he found two bodies. Their heads were shot neatly through.

Recognizing the work of snipers, he ducked quickly down—and not a moment too soon. A bullet meant for his head smacked off the ceiling of the watchtower.
That meant that at least one of the settlement’s external shields had failed.

There was no point in exposing himself with a sniper targeting the watchtower. But how was he going to hit Gynella’s Knife Legion where it most hurt?

Another
twang
, another whistle, another gibbering shriek, and another Psycho Midget came flying
over the wall into the defenders. A man yelped as a well-placed hatchet
clove his head. Guns boomed. The Midget giggled and shouted imprecations. Another man screamed.

Keeping low, Roland looked down the stairway in time to see a mob of miners tear the Psycho Midget to pieces.

He looked away. It’d been a long time—a time in the distant past for him, on another planet—since he’d been in a fight this big, in war-scale combat. Fighting skags and bandits on Pandora
was one thing—getting caught up in the ugliness of war, that was another. Still, Roland was committed—for the moment.

Another
twang
, a whistle, and a defiant screech from a descending Midget.

How many damn Midgets, Roland wondered, did they have for ammunition out there?

It was pretty obvious what he had to do.

He descended the stairs and shouted to Gong when he got to the bottom. “Hey, pal,
can you drive an outrunner?”

Gong looked up from the rifle slit in the wall; his grin revealed his sharpened, fanglike teeth. “Better than you ever did!”

“Okay, you up for a sortie? We’ll make it quick and get back in. Set some guys on the door to let us in and out. I’ll be on the outrunner turret. What do you say?”

“Let’s go!”

Just then, another Psycho Midget came flying over the wall at
the back of the settlement, at a fairly low, oblique angle that took him over most of the settlement, coming down close to the front gate.

“Crap, look at that!” Roland said, as the Midget bounced in his energy field, rolled, then came up on his feet and scurried between the miners who tried to take him down, dodging left and right, heading for the gate. “I was afraid they’d try that. He’s trying
to get to the control box. He’s gonna open the gate!”

Gong ran after the Psycho Midget, Roland at his heels. The Midget was well ahead of them, using a small electronic device in his hand to send activation sparks into the control box for the gate. The gate shuddered and began to move slowly open.

Beyond it came an answering roar of murderous glee from Gynella’s horde.

The riflemen at the slits
fired furiously. But the Psycho soldiers came, a wave of them rolling toward the opening gate.

“The fire!” Dakes shouted.

A miner fired an Eridian rifle through a slit, hitting the swath of ground impregnated with incendiary fluid, igniting it. A wall of blue and yellow fire roared up around the settlement, and
the first phalanx of Psychos was caught in its licking flames. Psycho soldiers screamed
and writhed, running in random directions. But the flames quickly fluttered down, turning to smoke, and more Psycho soldiers came, leaping through.

Then Gong reached the Psycho Midget, grabbed him by the ankles, jerked the little lunatic off his feet, and, the muscles in Gong’s broad shoulders standing out, swung him in a rapid arc, smashing the stunted Psycho’s head open on the metal wall.

Roland was trying to figure out how to operate the box; then he spotted the instrument the Psycho Midget had dropped. He picked it up, activated it, and the box responded—the gate began to close.

It shivered shut . . .

But not before six Psychos, all in vault masks, including a Badass who was on fire from the defensive wall of flame, came roaring in, firing their weapons, swinging glowing axes.
The one-armed Badass swung an enormous energy-charged battle axe with his single, oversized arm—he didn’t seem to notice or care that he was on fire, that his skin was bubbling and charring even as he knocked the brains from an onrushing miner.

Three more defenders went down, spinning into death. Lucky was rushing toward the invaders, shouting defiance.