Borderlands: Unconquered (21 page)

Mordecai’s hand hovered near the pistol on his hip. He had equipped himself with a Dahl Anaconda revolver early that morning, bought from a Jawbone Ridge weapons dealer. But he didn’t touch the gun yet. He simply kept his hand near the butt of the pistol, watched Gumble,
and waited.

The big man in the red helmet let his fingers slide over the butt of his Hyperion Lightning Nemesis . . .

And then Gumble snatched it up—

Mordecai was already leveling his revolver. He fired two neat shots, so fast they almost blended together.

Gumble’s eyes vanished, replaced with bloody pits. The bullets went right through his eyes and into his brain. He swayed. And fell backward
 . . .

 . . . into the open grave.

Roland nodded. He’d never doubted the outcome. He knelt by the grave, reached down, fished in Gumble’s pockets, found the key to the
outrunner. Then he stood up and kicked a little dirt over Gumble. “Well, that’s buried enough. What the hell, the trash feeders have to eat too.”

He looked at Mordecai, who was replacing his gun in its holster and walking toward
the outrunner. “Nice shooting, Mordecai. I didn’t know you could fast-draw.”

“Neither did I.”

•  •  •

The day was wearing away, Daphne saw. Soon the moon would rise. The lights would flare up around the coliseum. The show would begin.

Brick was awake and alert. They’d given him some Dr. Zed, and some food. Not enough to get him back to full strength but enough to make for a good show.

She
waved to Brick, who was standing in another cage, about ten meters to the right of hers. He glanced at her and winked. “Wait’ll I get my hands on ’em!” he called. His fingers were clutching at the metal link, and he fell to examining it. She supposed he was thinking about tearing through that fence. But she knew what it was—molecularly reinforced steel. You couldn’t break through it without a nuclear
flamecutter.

Brick tried anyway, squeezing the metal links with his powerful fingers. To her surprise she saw it bend—but it held, and when he released it, it snapped into place, just as it had been before.

Brick shook his head. He wasn’t going to have the initiative.

“Another couple hours,” came the rawboned voice to Daphne’s left.

She looked, knowing who she’d see: Broomy, leering at her
with yellow, snagged teeth.

“What do you want, you pathetic old cow?” Daphne asked mildly.

Broomy laughed. “Keep it up, girlie! We’ll see how brave you talk when they start in on you. Do you know what they’re going to do? After Brick is killed by the Goliath, why, they’re gonna chain you down on that Brick’s dead body! And they’re gonna let the Goliath rip into you and pull you apart and—”

“I’ve already had the preview on that, thanks. Charming stuff.”

“Soon, girlie!
Soon!
When the moon rises, the fight commences!”

“Suppose Brick wins?”

“Against a Goliath? It’ll never happen! But if it did, why—” She laughed. “They’ll kill him with four or five rocket launchers! And they’ll chain you down on what’s left of him and then—”

“Right. You already mentioned that. Have
I
mentioned, by
the way, that I’ll kill you . . . before the moon sets?”

“Ho ho ho! Keep telling yourself that, little girlie!”

And Broomy walked away, laughing.

•  •  •

The outrunner was bumping and grinding through the raw countryside in the dusk. There was a thin trail, winding along between outcroppings. They were following the southern edge of the Salt Flats, heading west.

Roland came upon a sudden
small gulley where they glimpsed a big, armored badmutha skag they wanted no part of. He accelerated around the gulley away from the skag and its whelps as fast as Gumble’s beat-up old outrunner would go.

He looked over his shoulder at Mordecai, who was standing at the machine-gun turret. Mordecai swung the turret around to watch their backs and sent a judicious burst of machine-gun rounds into
the badmutha skag just then leaping up to pursue them. It was a big, bristly creature, like an oversized armored wolf with trisected jaws. The burst didn’t take the badmutha out but discouraged it, along with their outdistancing it with the outrunner, and the skag turned away.

Roland looked back at the faint trail up ahead just in time to avoid smashing headlong into an outcropping of stone.

“Hey, Roland!” Mordecai shouted, over the engine noise. “We on track to get to the Eridian Promontory?”

“Yeah, if we don’t have to detour too far around that bunch of Psychos playing soldier!”

“We need to get there, harvest some crystalisks, load up on Eridium, and get the hell to Fyrestone!”

Roland chuckled. He knew it wouldn’t be that easy. And suppose they found a lot of Eridium? How would
they move it? Not in this outrunner. They’d need to hijack a truck somewhere.

“Roland?”

“What?”

“You notice anything tracking us, in the sky?”

“More of those fake trash feeders?”

“Naw—looked like some kind of flying craft, maybe an orbiter!”

Roland hit the brakes, and they squealed to a stop. Dust swirled around them. Mordecai coughed.

Roland turned to him. “When were you gonna tell me
this?”

“I wasn’t exactly sure of what I saw,” Mordecai said, shrugging, glancing at the sky. “There was some cloud cover, and it just dipped down and seemed like it was pacing us, and then it was gone. But we were hitting a lotta bumps, and I was trying to hold on, and . . . I couldn’t be sure.”

“When was this?”

“It was—” Mordecai stared and pointed at the sky up ahead. “Right now.”

Roland
looked the way Mordecai was pointing and saw a three-strutted orbiter, like a salt shaker
on a tripod, burning its way down, down, retros slowing the vessel as it approached the desert sands about fifty paces ahead.

“Roland, could it be Gynella? She’s from off-planet—maybe she brought that with her.”

“I don’t think so. Markings on it . . . Dahl Corporation!”

They could see the Dahl insignia
clearly now, as the vapor cleared away around the orbiter. And they saw a hatch open, in the side of the gray metal cylindrical vessel, and a ramp lowering from the open hatch . . .

They didn’t have to wait long. Three men came out. Two of them were heavily armed, probably protecting the smaller one in the spray-on suit. An exec type. He waved at them, real friendly.

“We oughta either kill ’em
or steer clear of them,” Mordecai said.

Roland nodded. “Yeah, we should just back off and go around.” But instinct changed his mind for him. “No. We need information. We’ll get it from this slick son of a skag—a guy like that likes to talk. They’re here for a reason . . . Just keep steady on that machine gun, Mordecai. But don’t get jumpy.”

He accelerated the outrunner slowly, eased it toward
the orbiter, and stopped a few steps from the ramp. He left the outrunner in idle, grabbed his new Hyperion assault rifle as he climbed out. Roland was careful not to seem as if he was going
to shoot at anyone right away, holding the gun casually—but also in plain sight to let them know he was not going to go down easily.

He walked toward the man in the suit, a black-haired man with a sculpted
beard, piercing dark eyes, flashing white teeth when he smiled. Behind him were two red-armored Dahl specialists, highly trained killers who’d almost forgotten they’d once been human. Both men were cyborgian, their eyes replaced by whirring scopes that focused on Roland, with precise digital irising.

Each specialist carried a big, smoothly contoured weapon Roland didn’t recognize—some new Dahl
armament, maybe a form of Eridian rifle.

Roland didn’t want to find out what those rifles could do unless he had to.

“I believe you’d be the one they call Roland,” said the dark-eyed man unctuously.

“You
believe
that’s who I am?” Roland asked. “Or you know?”

The man chuckled. “Very astute. Yes, I know who you both are. We’ve been observing Gynella’s army, from suborbit. And you. We did a facial-recognition
scan, ran it through our files. We noticed your work at that settlement. You were effective, you and your friend. Gynella’s quite surprisingly elusive. I’m interested in people who cause her difficulty. That would be you.”

“And you are?”

“My name’s Mince Feldsrum. Dahl security specialist, assigned to Homeworld Security.”

Roland shrugged. “What do you want with us?”

“May I ask what, ah, goal
you have set for yourself, at the moment? Are you planning to join Gynella? Maybe kill her?”

“Neither one. First one, I can’t imagine it. Second one, too much trouble. Way off mission.”

“Ah-ha! And what is your mission?”

“That’s our business. We’re . . . prospecting. A long ways . . .” Roland pointed past them. “In that direction.”

“Suppose I offered you more money than you’d make on your
mission. I’ll double it. Good cash to kill Gynella for me. To take her on directly—with our help.”

“Why? What do you care what she does here?”

“She’s stolen something from us. Haven’t you wondered how she controls her men? Considering that they’re all Psychos.”

“I’ve wondered.”

“She took a mind-control drug from us. And my company is not yet aware I let it get it taken. I can’t summon our
full firepower without letting them know what it’s for. It’s all rather embarrassing. But you seem capable of doing the job. I could help you, provide you with a fast flyer; you could
take them from the air. Kill her, and Dr. Vialle. Kill as many of her followers as you can—destroying her supply of the drug in the process.”

“Why don’t you do it, with your two boyfriends there?” Mordecai asked,
from the outrunner, pointing at the specialists.

Something dangerous flickered in Feldsrum’s eyes. But he made a careless, dismissive gesture and said, “Gynella is well defended. And it would take too much explaining, in all the wrong places, if I had to go after her directly. Let’s leave it at that. Do you want the job or not?”

Roland turned to look at Mordecai, who shook his head, once. Roland
turned back to Feldsrum. “Nope. You’re hiding things from Dahl—so I figure you’d kill us after we got the job done, to make sure we don’t talk about it. And anyhow, I don’t like to go off mission.”

Feldsrum sighed. Then he unclipped a small silvery metal box from his belt and tossed it to Roland, who caught it neatly in his left hand. “If you change your mind, call me on that.”

He turned and
walked between his guardians and up the ramp. The specialists backed up, keeping their electronically enhanced eyes on Roland—then they turned and followed Feldsrum into the spacecraft. The ramp withdrew into the vessel, and its hatch clanked shut.

Roland climbed back into the outrunner and
backed it up, just in time to avoid the burning backwash of the orbiter’s energy pulsers.

He and Mordecai
watched the vessel lift into the sky.

Mordecai sighed. “You get any of that useful information you were hoping for?”

“Maybe. I got a line on how Gynella controls her men. Could be useful, down the line.”

“I got mixed feelings about the offer. Might’ve been faster to take the job, collect the paycheck, than to do what we were going to. But on the other hand . . .”

Roland nodded. “On the other
hand they’d probably have killed us to keep us quiet, later on, first time we turned our backs.”

“I was thinking that too. Well, let’s hit the road.”

They resumed their journey. The evening crept toward them across the plains. The sky shifted from dark blue to the color of lead.

After another half-hour they drove up onto a bluff and saw lights up ahead, shining from below—the ground rose to
a cliff edge overlooking a valley. Roland pulled up, and they stared at the lights, coming on, in the coliseum down below.

“Looks like somebody’s got a show planned,” Roland said softly.

B
rick was standing up now but chained to a block of stone flush with the ground, in the center of the coliseum’s field. Unbreakable shackles were locked around his neck, wrists, and ankles. He glared at gathering Psychos, in the seats overlooking the gladiatorial arena, and every so often he shook his chains and bellowed at them in defiance. “You wanna take me on? Come on, let’s dance!”

The crowd
of Psychos responded with jeers and catcalls.

Brick pulled at the chains, trying to rip them from the stone they were pinned to, all the time howling at the audience: “Come on down here, chickenshits! You’re looking at my fists? Then take off the chains and get a better look! Whatcha waitin’ for!”

Gazing at Brick, Daphne was feeling increasingly
desperate, like an animal trapped in a cage—and
maybe that’s what she was. She turned away from the darkening field, the glare of the lights, the roar of the crowd—a crowd of Psychos, bandits, thugs lining up on the risers to watch the coming fight between Brick and the Goliath.

Each step clanking with her shackles, she walked over to the locked gate at the rear of the cage. That was the only weak point of this little prison. That gate. There
was a lock on it—but locks could be broken.