Borderlands: Unconquered (32 page)

Humming a half-remembered song, Roland turned the skimmer, tilted it sharply, and fired three missiles at the reinforced storage shed. His aim was good; the projectiles made impact, and the shed spurted flame. He waited, hearing bullets
clack into the armored underside of the skimmer—then the smoke cleared, and he saw that the storage shed was largely intact. There was a big hole
in it, though. He reduced elevation, spiraling slowly down. About ten meters over the storage shed, he stabilized the skimmer, aimed, and fired the forward machine gun at the drug casks visible through the smoking hole in the storage unit. The bullets pocked the casks. Not much other effect. He looked over the skimmer’s armaments—there was just one more, marked “Flame Charge.”

He switched to
flame charge and fired—and the entire shed rose into the air on a column of fire, spinning, so that Roland had to back quickly away, to avoid flying metal debris. The storage unit had broken open, spilling more than a ton of drug fluid across the ground.

“That works,” he murmured, turning the vehicle around just in time to see a rocket spinning toward him.

He veered sharp left, and the rocket
flew through the spot he’d occupied a split second before. He aimed the flame charge at the Psycho with the launcher. The Psycho turned and ran, but he ran right into the missile. Roland would have missed him if he’d stayed in place.

“Cooperation,” Roland said. “I like it.”

More bullets clanged into the skimmer; he turned a hard right, and the skimmer veered—right
into a rocket that would’ve
missed him completely otherwise.

The irony wasn’t lost on Roland, as the skimmer bucked under him with the rocket’s impact, whipping him in his seat, the vessel wobbling, smoking, but not losing elevation. Not yet. He turned it around, fired three flame-charge projectiles over the top of the headquarters building, at the Psychos rushing onto the parade ground, Gynella’s soldiers reacting to the
general emergency with generalized chaos.

Three fire-charge rounds struck in their midst—men flew spinning through three balls of fire.

There were a lot more of them over there. But more bullets were hitting his skimmer—he didn’t dare go low enough to try to affect them all with the pendant. There were too many of them, too much firepower down there. He punched for horizontal motion and skimmed
out of the range of fire, beyond the edge of the butte, the wind roaring in his ears. He shook his head, checking out the view. It was a long way down from up there. And the skimmer was still smoking, starting to wobble . . . and slowing down.

“Hellfire,” Roland growled. He banked and put the skimmer into a slow downward spiral, fighting for stability. Out of the corner of his eye he saw flames
licking up from under the wings. And the repulsor engines whined, beginning to lose power.

“R
oland used me—and betrayed me!”

Gynella fumed, shaking with fury, as Smartun trotted up beside her.

They stood on the edge of the Devil’s Footstool, looking at the skimmer descending, rather sharply, down toward the rugged plains below.

“I did try to warn you, my General Goddess,” Smartun observed.

She turned with a snarl and viciously backhanded him, knocking him off his feet. He lay on his
back for a stunned moment, tasting blood.

“I . . . I deserved that,” he said, sitting up.

“You deserve
worse
! I gave you a chance, and you let him destroy half a division with a truck and a handful of men! You and the others—I trusted you to keep him contained!” She glared down at him, fingering the meat-cutter knife on her hip.

Smartun decided not to point out that she had
set up the imprisonment
protocol for Roland in the headquarters building; she had trusted Fwah and Spung with the job, not him. She knew how Smartun felt about her, of course—she’d probably feared he might try to kill Roland in his sleep. And she was right about that.

He got to his feet, about to beg her to punish him—and then saw that Roland’s skimmer was going down faster, really out of control now. “Look, my Goddess!
He’s going down!”

She turned and gasped. “No! I didn’t . . .”

That stabbed Smartun through the heart. Even now she didn’t want Roland dead.

Gynella closed her eyes. Tears trickled from the corners. Then she threw back her head and roared with fury, shaking her fists. “Smartun! Take thirty men! Get down the ramp, find the crash site! Make sure he doesn’t go anywhere! I will come . . . and kill
him myself!”

•  •  •

Roland had just managed to get a jolt more of lift out of the repulsors—seconds before the crash. It slowed him enough, gave him a little forward motion, so that the skimmer struck a sand dune diagonally, cutting off the top of the dune, spuming sand, then skidding across the ground—stopping on the edge of a creekbed in a cloud of smoke.

Coughing, he scrambled out and sprinted
away—as the skimmer exploded. A shock wave
caught him, throwing him onto his face. He skidded painfully, coming to a stop against a hummock. “Fuck!”

He coughed, spat out dust and sand, and got to his hands and knees. At least he was alive. But so was Gynella. And he wouldn’t be safe as long as she was walking around.

Roland got to his feet—and found himself face-to-face with a good-sized skag,
opening its tripartite jaws wide to snarl and so it could unreel its long,
long
tongue, which was a kind of lash, almost a club, that could knock a man down, whip around his neck, and drag him close for feeding.

“Forget it, skag!” Roland bellowed, grabbing the tongue as it flashed toward him. He twisted it around his fist and pulled hard.

The skag squealed and tried to wrest free.

He pulled
it to him, hand over hand, his adrenaline high after the fight, the crash, another day of near-death . . .

“I’ve had
enough
! I’m not taking crap from a skag too, dammit!”

Holding the tongue with his right hand, he slammed his left down into its open mouth, down its throat, and grabbed a big handful of entrails. The skag writhed around his arm. Roland wrenched hard, with all his strength, and
ripped out the skag’s lungs.

He threw the spasming animal and its offal
aside and wiped blood off his hands onto its hide, then straightened up to look around.

And saw a line of red outriders coming at him from the base of the Devil’s Footstool about half a kilometer away.

“Son of a
bitch
!”

He was unarmed, and there must be at least four of them coming. One of them would have a cannon turret
too.

He looked at the burning skimmer. If there were any weapons in it, they were frying now. And the smoke from the wreck was marking his position. He checked his pocket—and found he’d lost the pendant in the crash.

He could run, hide, or stand and fight. Or . . .

Roland dug the contact box from his pocket and tapped it. It only went to one place: Feldsrum’s orbiter.

“You there, Feldsrum?
Yo! I destroyed the drug supply. You hearing me up there?”

A crackle, and then the man’s voice. “I hear you. Good job. What about Gynella?”

“I took out a lot of her men, both her bodyguards, but last I knew she was still kicking. I’m going to need help. I’ve got no weapons. They shot down the skimmer . . .”

“Yes, we can see that. We’ve got a good visual fix on you.”

“Then . . . either come
and get me or nail these
guys. They’ll be here in like two minutes. Or less. I’ve got no gun, no knife, no shield. Just get me the weapons or a little breathing room—and I’ll do the job for you!”

“Ahhh, no can do, Roland. We cannot get there soon enough. You see, we’re watching, and . . . they’re already there. Sorry.”

Feldsrum was right. A big outcropping of rock stuck up about thirty meters
east of him—and around it, on both sides, came the outriders. Roland knew they were only the advance guard. Others would be coming, in other kinds of vehicles.

This wasn’t looking good. But if he could get onto one of those outriders . . .

The nearest outrider fired, its machine gun tearing up the ground in a line of little sand geysers, coming right at him. Roland turned, vaulted over the hummock,
threw himself down. The mound of dirt and rock absorbed the gunfire—and then blew up as a cannon shell hit it.

Pieces of dirt and rock rained down on him. Coughing in the dust, he rolled to his left, got his feet under him, and ran for a low boulder between him and one of the oncoming outriders.

The outrider fired a cannon shell at him, and he felt it cut the air close to his right shoulder,
missing him by a centimeter. If it had hit him, he’d be jelly now.

The outrider was roaring past him on the left;
a Psycho Midget on its nearest running board was holding on to a rung, firing a submachine gun at him. But it was awkward to shoot from a bumping, speeding outrider, and the bullets went wide.

Roland leapt, jumping onto the back of the passing outrider, hitting it with tremendous
impact—the outrider hitting him, as it raced along, more than he was hitting it—so that the air was knocked out of him. He scrabbled at the back of the outrider’s seats, got a grip on one, looked up to see a Midget pointing a submachine gun at his head, the Psycho Midget giggling as he prepared to kill him.

Then the outrider hit a rock in the rugged terrain, jolted hard, and Roland was flung
into the air, the bullets cutting past just under him. He fell heavily, tumbling, gasping for breath, ending up on his back in a cloud of dust and exhaust smoke.

Dazed, he lay there coughing, wiping dust from his eyes. He heard the outriders rolling up, one to the left, one to the right, skidding to a stop.

This is it . . .

He sat up, breathing hard, aching, and forced himself to his feet.
He was going to die fighting, standing up, anyway. Might take a few of these bastards with him.

“Hold your fire!” A woman’s voice. Gynella.

The smoke and dust drifted away, and he saw her climbing out of a newly arriving outrider. She wore her finery this time; breastplate, bodice,
metallic microskirt, high boots, red cape. She stalked toward him, that “special meat cutter” in her right hand,
her eyes burning. He could see the romance was over. She had every intention of killing him.

Trying to sweet-talk her would be too much like begging. And he knew it wouldn’t work.

Roland shrugged. Today was a good day to die—as good as any.

Behind her came the compact little guy with the epaulets, Smartun, carrying a large shotgun. This time Smartun looked almost happy.

Gynella raised the
serrated knife, its micro-motion edge blurring.

“First thing I’m going to cut off,” she said, “is your—”

She broke off, staring past him.

Roland turned and saw Brick, standing all alone, on top of a ten-meter-high, pyramid-shaped outcropping of rock. Brick had a rocket launcher in his hands. And he was grinning. “Brick’s here, bitch—bringing the pain!”

And he fired the rocket launcher at Gynella.

Shit,
Roland thought, throwing himself flat and almost getting nailed by the rocket,
would it have killed him to say, “Look out, Roland”?

Gynella and Smartun leapt to the side as the rocket slashed the air overhead and exploded on the outrider to Roland’s left. The fireball singed off his eyebrows and seared the back of his neck.

Roland didn’t wait for the smoke to clear—he jumped to his feet
and ran through the smoke, jumped over the burning scrap metal of the outrider, landed on a dead Psycho, kept going, pounding to the left as fast as he could run, to try to get behind that outcropping.

“Gimme a damn gun!” he yelled at Mordecai, who was waiting on the other side of the outcropping with two guns in his hand. Mordecai had the sniper rifle in one hand, a Hyperion combat rifle in
the other. He tossed the rifle at Roland, who caught it and checked the load. Ready to fire.

“Look what I took off some bandits, about three klicks back,” Mordecai said, and he kicked a box of grenades on the ground between them.

Brick was firing another round at the outriders, but he was being pounded by rifle fire and knocked back off the rock, to fall heavily onto his back. “Ouch!”

His shield
had held up under the gunfire, but it was flickering now. Not much left in it.

Roland had the rifle slung over one shoulder and was filling his hands with grenades as an outrider came roaring up to the outcropping, firing its machine gun. The bullets glanced off a boulder as Roland pitched a grenade with adrenaline-sharpened precision right into the lap of the outrider’s driver. The Psycho yelled
hoarsely—then the grenade blew, and the outrider spun
out, overturned, crushing its outriding Psycho Midgets.

Something fell at Roland’s feet—the driver’s smoking vault mask, blown through the air to him.

Roland put the vault mask on, turned to Mordecai. “Don’t shoot me—it’s me behind this thing!” Mordecai was up on a boulder firing over a shoulder of the outcropping, picking off Psychos with
his sniper rifle.

Roland was tossing grenades over the top of the outcropping. Grenades exploded; Psychos screamed.