Borderlands: Unconquered (29 page)

Brick shrugged. “Maybe had to pee or something.”

“I gotta pee myself,” Daphne muttered.

Mordecai muttered an order to Bloodwing, and the creature lofted into the air, flapping up, circling around, spying out the situation. Mordecai noticed a rakk, gleaming oddly at its snout, flying
overhead, coming from the direction Roland had gone.

“Uh-oh.”

Bloodwing flapped down, alighting, and made the rough, low, warbling distinct sound in his throat that meant
enemies near.

“Angel fire!” Mordecai ran back to the outrider, where Daphne waited. He shouted at Brick at the turret of the outrunner. “Brick—shitheads
are coming! Let’s get under cover till I can locate Roland. I think Gynella’s
set us up for a trap! Go!”

“So let’s hit ’em head-on and kill ’em! I was getting bored anyway!”

Mordecai stared at him. “Brick, the word is
trap
, man! They’ll be prepared for that, dammit! Come on—get in that driver’s seat and follow me. Just trust me!”

Grumbling, Brick climbed into the outrunner driver’s seat as Mordecai jumped in beside Daphne. He started the outrider and did a three-point
turn, headed back east on the trail.

Almost immediately, Mordecai whipped the outrider to the right, between two low hills, driving along the side of the hill with his left wheels higher than his right, afraid they might flip over. Brick came along close behind, still bellowing that they should turn around and fight.

Mordecai heard the deep cough of a rocket launcher and accelerated, risking
losing control at this awkward angle on the hillside, so that the two vehicles—with Brick accelerating to keep up—just barely outran the rocket fired from a hilltop somewhere behind them.

The explosion just behind Brick sent broken rocks pattering down on him, but he got through intact, following Mordecai so close he bumped the outrider a couple of times.

They got through to a little gulley
and bumped
over rocky ground to the west. Mordecai was planning to hide the vehicles and sneak overland to try to help Roland.

He spotted something up ahead—a triangle-shaped opening of a cave, and in front of it were two moderately large skags. To the right of the cave was a large boulder.

The entrance of the cave, which was doing service as a skag den, was just big enough. He hoped Brick was
willing to follow his lead.

He stopped the outrider. Brick rear-ended them, but not badly, just whiplashing the vehicle a little as he skidded to a stop close behind.

Mordecai spoke a command to Bloodwing, which leapt into the air. It rose up, and up, and then headed for the rakk drone, to knock it down.

Mordecai just hoped they could get under cover before the soldiers following them had a
clue what was going on.

He squinted at the sky and saw the fake rakk falling, spiraling down, knocked out of commission by Bloodwing. He whistled for Bloodwing, and as the creature flapped down to the outrunner, Mordecai shouted, “Brick! This way!”

And he drove right into the skag den. Brick drove into the cave behind them, scowling. “Phew! This place smells like old skag droppings. Lots of
them.”

“Mordecai!” Daphne gasped. “What the hell!”

“Get on that turret gun!” he shouted as they came to a stop in the stinking recess.

She climbed quickly up, got on the turret in time to blast a snarling mama skag, charging at them from the back of the cave, and two yipping whelps.

Mordecai climbed out and crawled over the two parked vehicles to join Brick, who was happily smashing the skull
of a large skag at the mouth of the reeking cave. “Brick, that big rock, can you roll it over to block the entrance, shut us up in here?”

“You want to hide in a stinking hidey-hole?”

“Just for a few minutes! It’s tactics, man!”

Brick growled and shook his head, but he went to the boulder, found two hand-holds, and rolled it to the left, the boulder making a grinding sound as it came as if complaining
of being shifted. But it worked—the boulder mostly covered the entrance.

They were left in stinking near-darkness.

Mordecai lay down on his belly and peered out through the small opening left by the boulder covering the entrance. He was just in time to see an outrider drive by—and another. And two more. And then three more. And another two outriders, each with three Psycho soldiers on it. “Oh,
by the Angel’s backside—eight outriders. There’s a big force around here, and they’re looking for us.”

But they’d gone right by. The skag cave had worked—for now. But . . . how was he going to get to Roland?

W
hen Roland woke, his mouth tasted like rot, and his head rang like a cracked bell tumbling down a flight of stairs. He was lying on a metal slope.

He was chained flat on his back, faceup, on the trailer of the flatbed truck. The sky was darkening overhead; a cold, dry wind lashed his face. He had a sense of height, and, wincing with pain, he turned his head and saw they were high over the plains,
going up a narrow road cut into the side of a cliff or maybe some kind of butte. He looked for landmarks in the misty distance, picked out a few, and worked out that he was probably on some access road going up onto the Devil’s Footstool.

He tried his bonds, found there was very little slack, no real leverage possible. He couldn’t break loose, not yet.

He turned his head and saw the rust hole
in the
side of the container—he could see, up close, that the hole had been cut in and the “rust” painted on. And that the Eridium visible in it was just a few crystals. He could see past it from there. The container was empty. A lure in a trap.

He laughed out loud. At himself. “You idiot. You deserve this.”

Really, he’d gotten into this because he wanted to go back and rejoin the Bloodrust
miners. He’d been a fool, gotten himself emotionally caught up in their hopeless cause.

“Idiot,” he said again. He closed his eyes and tried to rest. He had to wait for his chance.

They had taken him nonlethally, planned it that way, and they could have cut his throat while he was unconscious. They didn’t intend to kill him—not yet. And that gave him time. Sure, he was chained down and about
to be surrounded by hundreds of enemies.

But there was always a chance.

•  •  •

If you took armpit squeezings and fermented them, that, Roland figured, would approximate how this guy smelled.

Arms chained behind him, Roland was being shoved by a huge, reeking Badass Psycho whose name, he gathered, was Spung. The Psycho was clomping along behind Roland, giving him an unnecessary shove every
so often, as they crossed the
parade ground between the Psycho soldiers’ barracks and Gynella’s headquarters.

At the door to the headquarters stood two people. One was an unremarkable-looking medium-sized man in Gynellan livery, brown leather, with improvised epaulets on his shoulders made out of tire tread and screws—some kind of army commander. He was one of the few men Roland had seen in Gynella’s
army without a vault mask. Roland guessed the guy wasn’t a Psycho at all.

The other one at the door was a tall, obese, dark-skinned woman in tight-fitting black leather, a shotgun in her hands; on her otherwise bald head were three white Mohawk fins. She wore no vault mask—it wouldn’t have fit over the tusks that curved from her upper jaw down past her chin. She had on flaring red and blue eye
makeup and seemed to have a coating of crystalline dust glued to her heavy lips.

“Smartun, Goddess said bring him from truck, so I bring him from truck,” rumbled Spung.

The small man nodded, looking at Roland with cold hatred. “You take up your post here, Spung. Fwah . . .” He turned to the big woman. “Take him in . . .” He seemed to struggle to finish saying it. Clearly this “Smartun” didn’t
want Roland to go inside at all. “To
her.
”

So that was what that vibe of personal hatred was about. Jealousy.

Fwah opened the door for Roland, winking at
him, and Spung gave him a particularly vicious shove to propel him through it. Roland staggered in, then turned toward the door.

“Spung,” he said. “I can’t promise you’ll be the first one I kill. But you’ll be one of the first. So don’t get
impatient. It’s coming.”

Spung blinked at him in confusion, shrugged, and walked lumberingly away.

Roland turned and saw Gynella herself standing in the open doorway to a room on the left. It must be her. She was a tall, voluptuous, powerful-looking woman with an intense expression and long flaxen hair; she wore a tight suit of armored skag leather. She was so striking he didn’t at first notice
the gangly, hollow-eyed man in a stained lab coat standing behind her.

“Vialle,” Gynella said, “don’t you have some lab work to do?”

Vialle sniffed and slipped past her into the wide hallway. He stopped to stare at Roland. “Gynella, this man . . . if he is not suitable for your purposes, can I have him? He is an interesting specimen. I would like to do a vivisection, perhaps, possibly some creative
splicing.”

“If I can’t use him, you shall have him, Dr. Vialle,” she promised. “Now just . . . go.”

Vialle turned reluctantly away and walked, storklike, to a room marked “VIALLE LAB 1.” He opened the door, stepped through, turned to
close it, and gave Roland one last long, lingering look. “Yes. I think so,” he muttered. “Vivisection. For you. You would find it a very . . . intimate experience.”
And he closed the door.

“Kind of a party animal, isn’t he?” Roland said.

Gynella smiled thinly. “Come into my office.”

“You going to take these chains off me?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

She walked into the office, and he followed her in—and stopped when she put a long slim blade to his neck. “This is what we use as a meat cutter on my home planet. I’m quite skilled with it. It has a very small,
very efficient moving edge on it, like a microscopic chain saw. It’s hard to see it, but it’s there. It’ll cut through flesh and bone easily and quietly . . .” She put her lips to his right ear, keeping the blade on his Adam’s apple. He felt her breath tickling his ear when she said, “Quietly as a whisper.”

He tried not to shiver—and wasn’t entirely successful.

“Over there,” she said, nodding
toward a long chaise longue near a workstation and a portable bar.

He walked over to it. “You want me to sit on this thing? Waste of a comfortable seat, with these chains on me.”

“You keep the chains on for now. It is a sign of our respect for you, if you like—you’re quite a dangerous man.”

He turned and sat awkwardly on the edge of the chaise. “So . . . big evening of executing me planned?”

“After what you did at my little coliseum show, I’m tempted!” she said, chuckling, sheathing her blade. She stepped over to a rifle leaning against a table to her right, keeping her eyes warningly on him the whole time. The only things on the table were two glasses and a pitcher of thick orange fluid—and the contact box that Mince Feldsrum had given him, taken off him while he was unconscious.

She picked the rifle up and pointed it at him. It was a great blunderbuss of an energy rifle—he could tell by the curving, almost organic lines on it that it was Eridian, but it was a weapon he hadn’t seen before. “You have no shield now. This is the most powerful portable weapon we have. There’s only one of these that I know of. It’s an Eridian Remover. If I shoot you with it, it’ll leave a blot
where you were before. We’ll sweep what’s left into a dustpan. Do you believe me, Roland?”

“I do, yeah. You seem sincere. And that weapon looks . . . like it could do it.”

“It could. And I won’t hesitate to prove it if you make one wrong move in here. You’re good, but I could probably kill you without this weapon, even if you had a gun and your hands free. Because I’m better. But I don’t like
to take unnecessary chances. I’d rather not have to kill you at all.”

This surprised him. “Yeah?”

“Yes. You do have qualities I like. Qualities I need. I’ve been watching you for a while. I have people in Fyrestone. I have my drones, and I have files on you. I became especially interested in you when I saw footage of you in action around Bloodrust Corners. And then when you hit our coliseum
 . . . and you made a terrible mess in Goddess Canyon with that truck.”

“Goddess Canyon, that what you’re calling it? Going to name everything on the planet after you?”

“Once it belongs to me, why not? I will, however, name a mountain after my late husband. He was murdered by that horrendous little assassin you have been running around with. Daphne Kuller. Where is she?”

“You don’t know?”

“The cowardly backshooters you ran around with gave us the slip. But we’ll find them.”

“I really don’t know where they are. We were prospecting for Eridium—they probably went on into the mountains to do that. I don’t know.”

“Yes, they probably abandoned you. Because they’re cowards. But you, you’re no coward—you went after the bait alone. Smartun was in charge of that operation. He didn’t think
you’d fall for it, but I see everyone’s weakness. And I see yours.”

“Yeah. I got chains locking my arms behind me.”