Borderlands: Unconquered (7 page)

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Broomy’s face was nastily crisscrossed by crusting red slashes, the consequence of her encounter with Bloodwing. Still, Cess didn’t think her face was much worse than it had been before—but she wasn’t going to make that remark in front of Broomy.

They were climbing into Cess’s outrider
parked near the Steel Incisor, Broomy taking shotgun, sucking down Dr. Zed and painkillers, and snarling to herself, “Find ’em, make ’em pay. Find ’em, make ’em pay. Strangle that buzzard thing. Strangle it slow.
Real slow!
Maybe take one of ’em slave. Chain him up. Make him do what I want. The little one’d be easier. Mordecai. The big one, we shoot him dead. That’s the plan. Yeah, that’s the
plan . . .”

“How we going to
find
them, Broomy?” Cess asked worriedly, starting the outrider and heading west. “Could take a long time, and we’re supposed to get back to the Footstool. General Goddess—”

“Why, them tracks is clear. They headed off in the direction we got to go anyway. Westerly. We won’t follow ’em direct—we’ll take the trail up the ridge and over, then cut west, head ’em off,
catch ’em unawares. We’ll ambush ’em. We’ll make ’em pay.”

T
he geological formation that had lent its name to the half-dead settlement of Jawbone Ridge extended to the southwest some distance past the town, stabbing mile after mile into the wasteland. Roland and Mordecai drove along below the ridge, following it southwest. It wasn’t yet midday, and they were still in the ridge’s shadow.

A couple of large skags loomed up, their trisected jaws opening, tongues
whirling. Roland sideswiped them just hard enough to break their necks and drove through the low depression of the skag den. The rest of the pack snarled in frustration as they left them behind.

Bloodwing straightened up, opening its wings as if thinking of taking to the air.

“Forget it, buddy!” Mordecai told the creature. “You’re not going back there to feed on that skag
roadkill. I need you
here! We’ll find you some food up ahead.”

Grumbling to itself without words, squawking deep in its gullet, Bloodwing settled back into place.

“We got any food, Roland?” Mordecai asked, speaking loudly over the rumble of the engine and the hiss of the wind.

“Sure, I got a crate of canned food back there. Help yourself. Some of it’s self-heating.”

“When we stop. I could use a break.”

“Yeah,
okay, girls gotta have a pee stop.”

“Fuck you, Roland.” But Mordecai was smiling.

They stopped to pee and stretch their legs; they consumed a can of glutinously indeterminate food, and then Roland said, “We’re burning daylight.”

They headed ever westward, following the ridge as if the formation were a bony finger pointing their way.

It was getting dusky, the shadows from the shrubs and outcroppings
lengthening, when they stopped on a low hilltop to make camp. “Really could go on a couple more hours,” Roland remarked, pulling up, “but I want to go over Broomy’s minicom, see what we can find out. If we could completely avoid the asshole army of General Goddess, that’d work for me big-time.”

“Yeah, I’ll take on an army if I have to.” He grimaced, climbing out of the outrunner, stretching.
“But I haven’t got the ammo to kill ’em all.”

Roland chuckled, arching his back to crick it straight after the hours of bouncing over the rough landscape. “You could take down an army if you had enough ammo, that what you’re saying?”

“Well, sure, if I had the distance on them. I can pick ’em off, five or ten at once, move back, pick off a few more. I’m the best sniper on this planet. One shot,
one kill.”

Roland shook his head skeptically. “One shot, one kill is something you don’t see often around here. Something about the radiation on this planet seems to make ’em resistant to a quick kill. Come on, let’s make camp. I’m hungry.”

They ate more canned food, and Mordecai shot a scythid for Bloodwing’s dinner.

Then they did an inventory of their weaponry, poking through the back of
the outrunner as Bloodwing, still perched on Mordecai’s seatback, hunched over them with its head cocked, seeming to take inventory with them. Roland had his Scorpio turret but with limited ammo, and there was the outrunner’s gun, which fired only small cannon shells, and he had precious few of those left. He had a Vladof Hammer, an orange-colored shotgun with a nine-shot magazine, deadly at close
range. He had two crates of ammo for it. “I got twelve grenades . . . my sidearm, lotta ammo for that . . . I got this Eridian rifle, but it’s been acting up. Not really reliable. I got the turret. You got your Cobra burstfire.”

“We’re kinda underweaponed, man. Not even a rocket launcher. I got badly depleted last mission. We should maybe take a side trip to a settlement, load up on some goods.
I haven’t got much money, but . . .”

“You know what, I can scrounge weapons almost as easily as I can buy them, Mordecai. Easier a lotta times. Of course, that usually means killing some Psychos and takin’ their hardware, but I expect to do that anyway. We’ll weapon up, don’t you worry about it. Come on, let’s look at my scan map—and Broomy’s minicom.”

He unrolled the scan map he’d bought from
Skelton Dabbits. “You see that mark? See the readings? That marks the biggest den of crystalisks known on this planet.”

“Long way to go. And a lot of hassle in between.”

“Let’s see just how much.” Roland pulled out Broomy’s minicom and activated it. “Now how do I get into this thing . . .”

It was Mordecai who figured out Broomy’s password. He’d seen the tattoo on her:
Fuckemorkillem.
Lucky
guess.

Some of the photos they found on the device made Roland’s stomach churn. “Ugh—get outta that folder!”

They found what they wanted under
tactics
: a holographic image projected into the air from the
minicom, displaying a map of the Salt Flats. It appeared in glowing yellow 3-D, with red and green lines for topographic and other markers.

Mordecai pointed at the Devil’s Footstool on the
map. “There, the Devil’s Footstool! She’s got it marked ‘GG HQ.’ That must be where they’re centered.”

“Squares with a rumor I heard. Those
X
’s—troop encampments?”

“Looks like every other klick across the Salt Flats, a lot of other places too. They’ve got it sewn up!”

“Well, maybe we can slip through.” Roland shook his head. “But I figure they’ll have people posted on high points looking for
intruders in captured territory.”

“Maybe we can go back to New Haven, see if we can get a hopper—or, if you can pay for it, even a trip to orbit. We can drop down behind their lines.”

“Nah. She’s shooting down anything that flies over. No one’ll go there. And I can’t afford the other method. Besides, I doubt we could get permission for an orbit drop back there. They don’t care if we get killed,
but loss of their shuttles or even pods . . . no way.”

“So we got to go overland. We’ll have to shoot our way through. Or find an easier mission.”

Roland looked at him with his eyebrows raised. “That what you want to do? Wimp out?”

Mordecai grinned at him. “Are you kidding? This’ll be the ultimate test of my sharpshooting, man. No way I’m missing this mission. I just wanted to give
you
the
chance to blow it off.”

“Very thoughtful. I’m after crystalisks and Eridium. So we head southwest.”

They didn’t see the varkids till sunset was melting into the night, and Roland was hunkering to build a campfire, thinking he should set up the Scorpio turret. There was still enough light for Mordecai to notice the ground trembling at the far edge of the hilltop.

“What the hell,” Mordecai said,
staring at the tremulous sand. He pointed. “Over there! We got spiderants coming up?”

Roland dropped the wood he was stacking and grabbed his Vladof Hammer, which was never out of reach when he was away from a settlement.

The two of them stalked slowly toward the place where Mordecai had spotted the sand movement, Mordecai with his Cobra burstfire in his hands.

They didn’t have to discuss it
any further, not then; Roland and Mordecai both knew the kind of things they were looking for. They were both men with long experience on Pandora. This kind of action was second nature now. They moved laterally apart from each other, as if by signal but simply by instinct, yet still angling toward the target . . .

Which boiled up out of the sand with startling suddenness—and it was something
Roland hadn’t seen before. “That’s no spiderant! What the hell is that?”

“It’s a varkid!” Mordecai shouted, popping his gunstock to his shoulder and sighting in.

Roland was aiming too, as his mind came to grips with the varkid—a giant insectile red and black creature about the size of a skag, it seemed almost all jagged chiton, enormous barbed jaws, six clawed feet, no visible vulnerable parts.
It was one of the most armored creatures he’d ever seen. And like pretty much any creature of Pandora, it was vicious and aggressive. It came at them, quick and scuttling, clacking its jaws open and shut hungrily. Those jaws were big enough to sever a man’s head from his neck with one snip.

Roland only had time to fire from the hip, almost point-blank—a moment after Mordecai fired, hitting the
cluster of three eyes behind its jaw parts. There was barely any head to aim at. Roland’s shotgun spread caught the creature in its thorax, the blast knocking off chunks of its craggy natural armor plates.

The varkid squealed and retreated, shaking its foreparts in pain, just as Roland was taking aim again—and he assumed the thing was going to back off.

He was wrong. It leapt into the air, coming
down on Mordecai before he could get a bead to fire again—Mordecai was too meticulous a gunman to fire point-blank as a reflex. It knocked Mordecai onto his back, so that he dropped the burstfire rifle. He fell heavily, and the varkid was poised on his chest, snapping at his face with its barbed mandibles. Mordecai shouted in wordless horror.

Roland couldn’t fire for fear of hitting Mordecai.
He rushed toward the varkid, hoping to kick it off Mordecai, but Bloodwing got there first, the leather-winged raptor swooping down, screeching in fury. It struck the creature glancingly, before flapping up for another run, knocking the varkid to the side enough that Mordecai was able to tip the giant insect off him. It scrambled to get back onto its six legs, oozing green and red fluid from its
damaged eye cluster.

Mordecai rolled over, grabbing his rifle as he rolled, coming up aiming, firing at the varkid, striking it just behind its heaviest armor sheath, where there was another cluster of sensors, just before the razor-sharp stinger on its hind parts.

The creature shrieked and flipped backward, then seemed to dive straight down into the sand. It was burrowing to escape, Roland
assumed, firing at it—but most of his shot missed, as it vanished into the grit.

“Now what’s it up to?” Mordecai muttered, checking his rifle. “Knocking my damn rifle out of my hands—did not expect it to—what the hell is that thing?”

They were both staring at it. It was as if a plant had been filmed and the film was running in fast action, the plant sprouting miraculously from the ground. Only
it wasn’t a plant. Its texture was grotesquely fleshy; it was like a bloated blossom of larval flesh.

“Uh-oh,” Mordecai said. “A pod!”

“A what?” Roland said, aiming the shotgun.

“Just shoot it!”

They fired, and the fleshy excrescence blew apart, but more varkids were tunneling up, two small varkids that seemed to expand, to puff and crinkle up with armor that sprouted even as the things leapt
at them. They were still metamorphosing as they came.

Roland wasn’t going to give the things a chance to do any more growing. He rushed to meet one as it came at him in midair, shoved the shotgun into its maw, jamming his barrel between those seeking mandibles, and pulled the trigger.

It blew up from inside, a split-second disassembling in midair. Wiping bug ichor off his face, Roland turned
at a warning screech from Bloodwing. It was clawing and pecking at a varkid that was bigger than a man, the chitonous horror gripping
Mordecai in an obscene clasp of all of its six legs. Only the barrel of Mordecai’s rifle, vertical and between him and the creature’s jaws, saved him from getting his head bitten off. He fell back, and Bloodwing flapped up to get another attack angle.

Roland ran
to the melee, just in time to see the varkid flip about, changing position to drag Mordecai into a newly forming pit in the sand. It had hold of his collar and was dragging him down underground with it; it vanished into the sand, still gripping Mordecai, who shouted till his mouth was stuffed with dirt as his head was pulled underground, then his shoulders, his chest . . . And Bloodwing flapped
and dipped and spiraled, shrieking in frustration.

Roland dropped his shotgun and grabbed Mordecai by the ankles and set his feet, pulling, backpedaling slowly, using all his strength, gritting his teeth so hard it felt as if they might crack.

Then there was a squelching sound and a release of pressure, as Roland went over backward, still gripping Mordecai’s ankles.