Borderlands: Unconquered (28 page)

He forced the heavy steel cover to one side, then wriggled out from under the truck, rolled, jumped up to look into the truck cab at the timer. He’d cut it close—only thirty seconds left.

Roland chuckled and ran up the slope toward the others. It was coming on dawn now, the gray light
taking on golden tones.

Behind him, the dump truck started moving, picking up speed—it rammed the three oncoming outriders, crunching them under it, and kept going over the wreckage and the maimed Psycho soldiers.

Roland rushed to the cliff edge, got there in time to look down on a satisfying sight: the dump truck was smashing through more Psycho troops, driving in the circles he’d programmed,
over and over, crunching equipment and bones.

And then some idiot, as he’d hoped, threw a grenade under the truck. The grenade exploded, blowing through the unprotected powerplant—the subsequent explosion was almost blinding. He
walked quickly away, wanting to get gone before the radioactive dust pattered down on the area. It was mostly just a “dirty bomb” effect, but it was nasty—the entire
truck had been turned into one big hand grenade.

Must be one big ugly mess down there.

“Well,” he said, climbing into the outrunner, with Brick at the wheel. “I do warn them, pretty often, and they just don’t listen to me.”

“What warning?” Brick asked, turning the outrunner east.

“Mess with the bull, and you get the horns.”

“D
evastated
, you said?” Gynella asked, walking up to the cliff’s edge. She had come in person to survey the damage. Now she and Smartun stood on the edge of the cliff—her new, hulking bodyguard, the Badass Psycho, Spung, looming behind her. The three of them looked down on the encampment from the spot where the snipers had been posted when the truck had begun smashing its way through the camp.

“As you see,” Smartun said glumly, as they stared down at the wrecked camp, the bodies, the tire tracks thick with blood, and the crater in the midst of it all. “Devastation.” He licked his lips. “We lost about half the division. A great many were maimed—we didn’t have enough Zed to go around. We had to put most of them down.” He sighed. “Fwah volunteered for that, of course.” His
heart banged
as he went on. “I . . . submit myself to your judgment. I ask only the mercy of a . . . a relatively quick death.”

“All in good time,” Gynella said absently, clicking her long nails together. She looked positively inscrutable at that moment, as she gazed down on the scene of devastation. “And you think he set that truck up to explode, on purpose, in that way?

“I suspect it.”

She shook her head
and smiled thinly. “He is quite a tactician. But then, he simply took advantage of one of our consistent weaknesses. We’re poor on defense. You should have had men posted up here, overlooking the camp, watching these plains.”

“I did have outriders patrolling up here. And I called in a platoon to come back this way—they were tracking some rebels anyway, and . . . well, they killed the platoon.
And took the truck from them.”

“But no sentries up here. In the obvious place.”

Smartun swallowed. He hoped she’d kill him herself. That would almost be a pleasure, to be killed by the love of his life, the person who was all meaning in his life. “I did ask someone . . .” He shrugged. He’d asked Skenk to post sentries there but had failed to make certain he’d done so. Skenk had a tendency to
wander off, find some narcojuice, and forget his orders. “I won’t make excuses
by blaming it on someone else. Do as you will. I have failed you.” He knelt before her. “You would honor me if you would execute me yourself. I don’t deserve it, but if I have served you well at all . . . up to now . . . perhaps, then, my . . .” His voice was hoarse. He had let her down. “My General . . . my Goddess
 . . .”

She made an imperious little
hmph
sound. “Enough! Get up. On your feet.”

He stood up, thinking she meant to allow him to be killed standing up. He ducked his head, waiting for the death blow. At least it was by her beautiful hands . . .

She sighed, and when he looked up at her she was rolling her eyes. “As for killing you for your failure, I’ll take the matter into consideration. You
may have a chance to redeem yourself.
If
you can repair this problem with our defenses and bring this man Roland to me. The others—kill them. But Roland I want alive.”

Smartun blinked. “Him?
Alive?
Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’ll give you access to the tools you’ll need. One thing you should know is that I set one of our spies in Fyrestone to see what he could find out about Roland’s activities there.
It seems that before heading out this way Roland made some kind of deal with a former Dahl mining engineer name of Skelton Dabbits. This Dabbits was spending a lot of money on narcojuice, stoned out of his head,
and babbling about how a man could get rich on crystalisks out past the Eridian Promontory, if he only knew just where to go. It could be that’s exactly where Roland and his rebel scum
are headed. So here is what I propose . . .”

•  •  •

They gathered at the Jut, ate a sparse breakfast of canned supplies, and looked out across the desert to the west. Roland was restless—he wanted to send these men back to Jawbone quickly. From there they could make plans to retake Bloodrust Corners—when the right time came to retake it. He hoped they didn’t jump the gun.

He planned to take
his own crew and head south and then west across the canyon. With luck Gynella’s army would now be gathering its remaining strength farther north, thinking to retaliate against a band of organized rebels that didn’t really exist anymore. It ought to be possible to get across the canyon.

“Why don’t you come with us?” Gong suggested, striding up to Roland. “Lucky went to spy on Bloodrust Corners,
a few days before we came out. There’s only a skeleton force there. Maybe forty men. We could take them by surprise.”

Roland shook his head. “Gynella would only send more forces to retake it, and you’d be in the same spot you were in before. No, what needs to happen is to get rid of her . . . and her little mind-control system.”

“What mind-control system?”

“Just something I heard about. But
I’ve gone too far off mission already. If I get a chance . . .” He shrugged. “You need to head back to Jawbone, and we’ll keep Gynella’s attention on us while you do that.”

“You sure got a one-track mind. You could make more money helping us mine glam gems. But—” Gong stuck out his hand. “It’s been interesting. Thanks.” They shook hands, and Gong went to round up the others. “All right, let’s
move out! Gynella’ll send some of those bums out after us right quick! Let’s go!”

Mordecai, Brick, and Daphne strolled over to Roland. Bloodwing flapped down from somewhere above and settled on Mordecai’s shoulder. Roland noticed Mordecai looked freshly shaven, his small beard perfectly clipped. He never missed a chance to spruce up. Roland was a little envious—he was feeling grubby. He’d kind
of have liked to go to New Haven and sit in a hot bath for a few hours himself.

He shook his head.
Getting soft.

“Okay. Let’s head out, south and west. We’re burning daylight, standing around here.”

•  •  •

They found a place, a few kilometers south, where the canyon wall had collapsed in a landslide. It was steep, but Roland drove the outrunner down the
scree, a natural ramp down to the canyon
floor, the outrider coming close behind. To the north, they could make out one of Gynella’s outriders, parked beside Gynella’s banner. Three sentries, rifles in their hands, stood close to the outrider, looking their way. That was the outer southern perimeter of Gynella’s encampment, probably swelling with reinforcements about now.

Good.
Let them see him—that’d turn their attention his way and
away from the Bloodrust men, who were heading east. By the time the Psychos got orders to pursue, he’d have plenty of head start, and he could disappear into the Eridian Promontory, back on mission to hunt down those Eridium-rich crystalisks.

A stream flowed into the canyon across the way, its ravine heading due west. They drove up the shallow stream, the wheels of the two vehicles spraying water
as they went. They passed a small troupe of skags and had to shoot a couple of too-inquisitive rakks swooping near them but encountered no other trouble, not all that day. Late that afternoon they emerged from a gulley, on the north side, that led up to the rolling hills below the promontory; they drove through the hills on an old mining road, seeing no one, nothing but a few scythids. The peacefulness
of the trip seemed unnatural, even eerie, to Roland.

That night they camped in the mouth of a
shallow cave in the side of a boulder-strewn hill, their only companions the bones of men long dead, piled at the back, much marked by the teeth of animals. Sitting by the fire, across from the snoring Brick—Bloodwing had chosen to roost on Brick’s upraised knee, as if it were a bird perch—and waiting
for Daphne and Mordecai to finish their watch outside, Roland wondered who they’d been, what the dead men had hoped to find on this sere, ferocious world. And Roland suspected someone would wonder the same about him, some day, when they found his bones, desiccated in the wastelands of Pandora.

•  •  •

The next morning they drove west through the rugged hills hugging the serrated crags of the
Eridian Promontory.

They came to an old dirt road, half overgrown with shrubbery, crossing their path, and Roland signaled to Mordecai to slow up and draw back.

The outrider and the outrunner slowed and backed up. They stopped, and Mordecai got out and walked over to him, Bloodwing on his shoulder. “What’s up?”

Roland said, “Way down that road, to the right—I saw someone coming around a bend.
Looked like some kind of truck. You guys take the vehicles out of sight behind those rocks there. I’m gonna check it out. Might be useful, at least to
know about. Could be Gynella’s dumbasses looking for us.”

As they moved the vehicles, Roland took his combat rifle and ran up into a crotch between two hills, then headed due west, over the top of a low hill on which grew a thicket of blue and
red cactus-like growths. He slipped between the man-high flora and, hunkering down under cover, looked out over the road. The truck had stopped, just short of the trail Roland had been following in the outrunner; three confused-looking bandits, none of them wearing Gynellan livery, were standing around the hood of the truck’s engine, staring at the smoking grille, arguing about how to fix it.

Chained down onto the long flatbed of the truck was a big shipping container; the metal container had a rust hole in the side, and through the rust hole he could see Eridium crystals. It looked like a whole shipping container of Eridium crystals.

Pretty tempting. If he took out these asshole bandits, there might be enough Eridium in that container to make it unnecessary to go after the crystalisks.
And if he took that truck, he’d have the stuff already loaded, solving the problem that had been nagging at the back of his mind: how to get the Eridium back to Fyrestone. Plus he would be able to look in on the Bloodrust settlers. It bothered him, leaving them to their own devices back there.

It did occur to him that this truck stopping here
was a little too handy, a little too enticing, a little
too coincidental . . .

But what did paranoia get you on this planet? Well, sure, it got you a longer life, maybe—but you lived cowering in a hole. A man had to take some chances.

He glanced up at the sky, looking for one of those camouflaged drones of Gynella’s. He did see a couple of rakks off to the east. But you always saw those somewhere in the Pandoran sky.

He ought to get Brick and the
others over there. But Brick might do something rash and wreck the truck, which might end up with the Eridium blown to flinders. Hell, there were just three bandits down there. Two of them didn’t even have their guns in their hands.

When had he needed help taking down three clueless bandits?

“Fuck it,” he muttered. He slipped down the hillside toward the truck, quietly as he could, using outcroppings
of red stone as cover, keeping his head down. He got near the bottom of the hill, crouched behind an outcropping. He jumped up, looking for a target—the bandits were gone. But he heard a whirring above him, looked up to see a rakk, hovering with rapidly flapping wings. Only it
wasn’t
a rakk; it was a machine camouflaged as a rakk, with a glittering camera eye instead of a mouth, and it was firing
two small missiles at
him from its undercarriage. He turned to run, but the missiles weren’t aimed directly at him. They struck the ground at his feet, stuck there like arrows in the dirt, and spewed a green smoke that swirled chokingly around him.

He tried to hold his breath—a second too late. He’d already inhaled, just once. And once was enough.

•  •  •

Mordecai shook his head. “I don’t like
this. He’s been gone too long by half, man. Something’s off.”

On his shoulder Bloodwing squawked in agreement.