Borderlands: Unconquered (26 page)

Many battles had been fought in close proximity
to the Jut; many men had died. It was known to be an unhealthy place to linger.
The area around it was littered with human bones, burned-up old wrecks, blast craters, and rusted weapons.

“There’s a story,” Mordecai told Daphne, as they climbed out of their outrider, Bloodwing cawing on his shoulder, “that when people first settled this planet, the Jut was much smaller. Every time someone gets killed near it—anyway, this is the claim—it gets a little bigger. Like something
in there is feeding.”

“What a lotta yokel superstition,” Daphne scoffed. But she looked at the Jut nervously.

“That big guy’s Scobold,” Roland told them as they walked up to the camp. Five outrunners were parked in a row, as a barrier around the cold camp. “He’s your kinda people.”

Scobold was a stout, red-faced old miner who’d killed two Psycho Midgets at once with his bare hands at the battle
of Bloodrust Corners—he’d taken their necks in his two hands as they’d rushed him, and he’d squeezed till they stopped moving. Now he stumped out to meet Dakes. “They’re coming. About a klick east of here. You can just make ’em out in the moonlight from the top of the Jut. They’re coming in a big ol’ dump truck and one outrider. Most of ’em in the back of the truck.”

Brick scratched his jaw.
“A dump truck? Soldiers in back of a dump truck?”

“It’s fitting,” Mordecai said, scratching under Bloodwing’s beak. “They’re trash, more than they’re soldiers.”

The men laughed at that, and Dakes explained, “See, we sabotaged their outriders, many as we could when we lit out from Jawbone. Gave us a good head start. So they scrounged that thing up, we figure, from the old mining site.”

“A dump
truck.” Roland was getting an idea. “That could be valuable. Nuclear-powered, Dakes?”

“Some kinda isotope power, yeah.”

Roland nodded. “We got to try to get that thing intact, Brick.”

“Sure! I’d like to have one of those. I could dump stuff on people.” Brick looked thoughtful. “And dump people on stuff.”

“Okay, I need Brick with me, two volunteers from the Bloodrusters, and Mordecai on the
Jut with the sniper rifle.”

“What about me?” Daphne demanded.

“You? You hang back in front of the Jut. You can be the lure. If they get past us, you can kill ’em all. There’s only ten of ’em.”

•  •  •

Roland was driving the outrunner; Brick was at the turret. Coming at them about a hundred meters out, limned in moonlight and the headlight glare of the truck, was an outrider, with a Psycho
soldier driving and two others clinging to its
hand-hold positions, and the dump truck itself, rumbling along more slowly, a few truck lengths behind.

“That’s a self-directed dump truck!” Roland shouted, yelling over the noise of the outrunner’s engine. He’d noticed there was no driver in the cab of the oncoming six-wheeled truck.

“Always wondered why they got a steering wheel and all that if
it’s self-driving.”

“It’s got a place for a driver so it can be operated manually if need be.”

“I saw ’em using that one at the mine, but I never figured out how you tell it where to go!” Brick said.

“I’ll show you—when we get hold of it! Now get that machine gun rocking! Time is bullets!”

Brick shouted at the enemy, “Brick is here, bitch, and I’m bringin’ the pain!” and he fired the machine
gun, slamming bullets into the two men clinging to the oncoming outrider.

One of the platoon Psychos had a strong shield that held up, but the other one was knocked off the outrider. He was still alive, rolling, his shield sparking, and the dump truck automatically tried to veer around him—but ended up crunching him under its right front wheel.

There was a humming sound, like a supersonic insect
flying past—Roland knew what it was. Another supersonic hum, and Mordecai’s sniper shots,
using the scope’s night-vision setting, took out the driver, two quick shots—one to weaken his shield, the other to penetrate, blowing his brains out the back of his head. Roland had to swerve to avoid the fiery outrider as it spun out of control.

Bullets splashed his outrunner’s shield, then, as platoon
Psycho soldiers in the back of the dump truck fired at him over the front top of the big chunky steel truck’s dump box. An Eridian rifle spat fireballs at the outrunner, and combat rifles chattered. Sparks flew from its chassis, and Roland ducked down in time to miss a spinning fireball that exploded at the base of the turret. Flames singed Brick, but he ignored them, firing steadily at the top of
the dump truck to suppress the enemy’s fire.

Roland accelerated, weaving a little as an evasive maneuver, and then they roared past the dump truck.

“Hold on!” he yelled, turning the outrunner as tightly as he could without flipping it.

Brick had his powerful grip on the machine gun, and he spun it around before Roland got the vehicle turned, strafing the back of the dump truck to keep the seven
men in back from jumping up and firing.

I hope this works,
Roland thought, as he accelerated to pull parallel with the truck, his right front wheel just a hand’s breadth from one of the truck’s
rear wheels. He was thinking there was a factor he hadn’t quite worked into the plan. One problem was that they were getting close to the Jut . . . and the truck was aimed right for it.

“Closer!” Brick
shouted, firing a long burst of rounds into the back of the truck—most of the bullets
spang
ed off the tailgate top.

Roland nudged the accelerator a little, and the outrunner surged, bringing Brick closer to the speeding dump truck.

“Now!” Brick yelled.

Roland, steering with one hand now, already had the grenade ready. He tossed it into the back of the dump truck. A man screamed, grenade fragments
clattered and sparked, as the explosion sent one of the platoon Psychos flying out of the back of the truck, a spinning wheel of blood, gone into the plume of moonlit dust.

Roland accelerated a little more, and Brick made his move, leaping up onto the back of the truck, getting a booted foot into place, his hands clamping the edges, and vaulting into the back, howling as he came to chill the
disoriented survivors of the blast.

Up ahead, the Jut was . . . too close. He was surprised to see Daphne had taken him literally, was standing there with a pistol in each hand, in front of the Jut. Which was closer, closer . . .

“Oh no,” Roland said, realizing there wasn’t
time for Brick to climb up front before the truck crashed head-on into the looming Jut. The driver’s-side window was open,
as if inviting him to risk suicide. Swearing, he switched off the outrunner’s engine—it kept going on momentum, starting to slow as he clambered, struggling with wind pressure, onto the front of the vehicle and leapt onto the side of the truck at the door. The metal frame of the door struck him in the side of the face, but his hands closed over the rim of the window, and, using all his strength
against wind and momentum, he pulled himself through the window. He was halfway in, legs sticking out in the open air. The emergency manual button was right where he’d hoped it would be, on the dash to the right of the steering wheel. He slapped the button, then immediately grabbed the wheel and turned it left—a little too sharply.

The truck spun, its rear end swinging right, and Roland struggled
to keep from falling off. Then the dump truck steadied and started off, past the Jut, crunching over a pile of old bones.

Roland climbed in the rest of the way, got into the driver’s seat, found the brake, and stopped the dump truck.

He glanced over at the Jut, now to their right. They’d missed it by a few meters.

Heart pounding, mouth dry and metallic-tasting, he sat there, breathing hard
for half a
minute. Then he opened the door and climbed out, rubbing the aching bruise on his right cheek.

He saw Brick climb out the back, blood on his fists. Brick walked over to Roland.

“Fun, Roland. That was fun.”

“If you say so.”

Roland reached into the cab and threw the dump switch—the box tilted up on humming hydraulics, the tailgate opened, and the bodies of six assorted dead Psychos
tumbled out into a pile on the ground.

“E
veryone know what they’re supposed to do?” Roland asked.

Everyone nodded. Even Lucky.

It was about an hour before dawn. After a chilly, uncomfortable night without a fire, enduring the smell of rotting bodies carried sharply to them by a wind from the southeast, Roland had brought his sixteen companions to a cut in the canyon wall north of the overlook where they’d first seen the army encampment.

He’d found the old streambed, scouting during the night, following the canyon north. It cut through the wall of the canyon, but the stream was seasonal, and it was dry now. They’d have to watch out for crabworms or scythids in a streambed, but it was a straight line to Gynella’s soldiers. Beyond the streambed, the ground rose and merged with the side of a butte. There was no getting past that
butte to the north—not without going a long way around it. This was as far north as they could go. With luck it would be enough to misdirect the Gynellan commanders.

Roland climbed up into the cab of the truck, getting behind the wheel. Mordecai was waiting in the passenger seat, his hands clasping the barrel of a big Hyperion auto shotgun, its butt propped on the floor between his boots. “Where’s
Bloodwing?”

“I made it stay with Daphne. It wasn’t pleased. But I think it kind of likes her.”

“This whole plan—I must be crazy,” Roland muttered, settling into his seat.

Mordecai nodded gravely. “I was thinking the same thing. About you, I mean, not me. You must be crazy. But fuck it, let’s do this thing.”

“That’s the spirit. Why be safe when you can be crazy? If the sun was up, I’d say we
were burning daylight. So . . .” He slammed the truck’s door shut.

He wanted to strike while it was still dark. There would be sentries and soldiers awake but not many, and after a long night’s watch the defense would be bleary and slow to react.

He called Daphne on the ECHO they’d found on one of the platoon Psychos. She had her own communicator, and they’d agreed on a bandwidth Gynella wasn’t
likely to use. “You guys all deployed up there?”

“We’re in place,” she replied.

“We’re moving out.”

He leaned out the window. “You guys ready?”

Someone knocked on the roof of the truck to signal readiness. They were ready, and they’d gotten eight good weapons from the dead platoon Psychos—the other two weapons had been wrecked by the grenade.

They’d covered the bloody bed of the truck’s box
with sand, but it must still have stunk of death back there. He was glad he didn’t have to belly down on that truck bed like those guys in back.

But if he were back there, it’d be safer than where he was sitting. Since the dump truck had been readied for Pandora, it’d been given bulletproof glass—but no glass is bulletproof if you hit it hard enough.

“Really it should be you with that sniper
rifle up on the rim,” Roland said, starting the truck.

Mordecai shrugged. “Daphne seems to be as good . . . well, nobody’s
as good
, but almost as good as I am with a weapon.”

Roland laughed and put the truck into gear, slammed on the accelerator, and they were rolling. He had the truck on manual and drove it himself—the time would come for the self-drive.

“They’re going to see those headlights,”
Mordecai pointed out.

“I think it’s okay for a while—we’re a
quarter-klick from the canyon. I’ll turn ’em off in a minute, but it’s damn dark down here, I don’t want to drive in a hole.”

Up ahead, something grotesque reared up in the headlights—the clacking pincers of crabworms, three of them, pretty damn big too—but Roland simply put the truck in a higher gear and stamped on the accelerator,
and the truck took care of them, the enormous vehicle smashing over the crabworms, crushing them into pulp.

Another minute, and Roland switched off the headlights. Up ahead he could see the outline of sentries against the firelight beyond them. At this distance he could just make out a couple of weapons, in the sentries’ hands—and was that a rocket launcher? He’d try to nail that guy fast—the
rocket launcher just might be able to stop the dump truck, thick and heavy though its metal chassis was.

Bumping over rocks and lumpy ground, the men in the back of the truck cursing, the dump truck roared toward the enemy lines.

Bullets cracked into the windshield; it chipped, but the armor glass held up, for now.

“Too bad this truck hasn’t got a real shield,” Mordecai muttered, rolling down
his window. He shoved the shotgun muzzle out, checked the load, angled it toward the enemy. He wouldn’t be able to shoot directly ahead, but he could cover their right side pretty well.

Roland heard the familiar deep cough of a rocket launcher, tensed to try to evade the missile, but he saw it rocketing too high, going over the top of the truck. So the launcher had done him a favor—now he had
to reload, as Roland accelerated and ran him down, crushing two other sentries in the process. One of the sentries, a tall Psycho, was flipped up by the impact, back broken, and ended lying across the hood like the wild prey of some sportsman coming back from a hunt.