Borderlands: The Fallen

by John Shirley

  He eased through the twisty stone passageway, keeping the engine as quiet as possible. He listened for the screech of rakks, the burbling snarf of sniffling skags, the mad giggling of Psychos. But he heard only the wind keening through the narrow stone pass.

  Then it widened, and a rolling plain opened ahead of them. Broken gray clouds admitted shafts of sunlight and mists swirled. He made out a group of skags far to the north—spots moving restlessly out there, near a stone burrow, still a good quarter kilometer off. Skags were relentless killers.

  “Keep your eyes peeled, McNee,” Roland growled.

  “Peeled my eyes years ago and left ’em that way.”

  They drove over a rise, and on the low ground beyond a tumble of skeletal parts lay an old encampment. Human skeletons, mostly. Some from creatures he didn’t recognize. Broken weapons rusted amid the bones. He drove around the bones, up onto gradually rising ground—then slowed up, seeing figures silhouetted against the sky on the next crest of stone. The strangers were about forty meters away, at least nine armed men standing side by side on the crest.

  As Roland got closer he saw them more clearly: scarred, tattooed men, broad chests crisscrossed with bandoliers, their eyes opaqued by dusty goggles. Ex-military, he figured—he recognized the tattoo of the Crimson Lances on a forearm of the big one to the right. He didn’t know the guy—though Roland had been with the Lances himself, back in the day. He’d rated Soldier, and fought his way through three campaigns on three planets, till he got to Pandora—and resigned in disgust with the corruption of …

  … Of the tenth man, stepping into view on the crest. Crannigan.

  Roland stopped the outrunner, angled up the slope toward the armed strangers. He let the vehicle idle, pondering his next move. “Them the bandits you were talking about?” McNee asked, his voice low. “I thought we were supposed to see them first?”

  “This bunch ain’t bandits,” Roland whispered. “Look like mercenaries to me. Some of them are Crimson Lance. Or were. That big, broken-nosed, bald-headed thug in the middle—that’s Scrap Crannigan. Used to work with him. He’s a real backstabber.”

  “What, a backstabber on this planet? You’re kiddin’.”

  “Stuff the sarcasm and keep quiet—lemme just see if I can get the prick to tell me what they’re up to before they open fire.”

  Heavy-caliber weapons were already trained on the outrunner. Roland’s expert eye picked out a Pearl Havoc combat rifle, two Cobras, a Stomper, a bunch of Atlas pistols, and a Helix rocket launcher. Crannigan himself toted an Eridian rifle—alien technology, recognizable by those curves in the rifle’s organic lines, as if the weapon had grown like a plant instead of being manufactured.

  Lots of ordnance on that crest. This could get ugly fast.

  Very slowly, Roland raised his two hands over his head—not in surrender, which wasn’t much use in Pandora anyway—but in a greeting that old Crimson Lance vets knew, hands open—then fisted—then open again. Parley.

  Crannigan nodded, then took a few strides closer, down the slope, before stopping and calling out, “That’s Roland isn’t it?”

  “That’s who it is, Scrap!” Roland said, lowering his hands.

  “You back with the Lances?”

  “Not me. Don’t look like you are either.”

  “Working for Atlas,” Crannigan said. “New division. Acquisitions Department. You heard?”

  “No, haven’t heard of it. What are you ‘acquiring’ for Acquisitions?”

  “That’s our business! Course, it could be yours, if you’re looking for work! You could hire on with us. Don’t know about the little gnome you’ve got there.”

  “What did he call me?!” McNee fumed.

  “Quiet!” Roland whispered. “If he didn’t know me, we’d both be dead already! Just don’t make any quick moves—but if they open fire, you hammer them hard with that turret!”

  “You interested or not?” Crannigan bellowed. “Big pay!”

  “I’ll think on it!” Roland called. “Where do I find you after I decide?”

  Crannigan shook his head. “Uh-uh. It’s now or never, pal. Sign up with us—or …”

  Roland gauged the shooting angle. Awkward. The shotgun wouldn’t be much use from here. But he had a good Atlas Raptor pistol on his hip. He might be able to pull the Raptor and nail Crannigan in the forehead before the merc used the Eridian rifle—but the others would open up. Maybe McNee’d be able to machine-gun a few of them while the outrunner slammed right through the middle of them, run a couple of the bastards over. But that Helix rocket launcher with its multiplying blasts would probably bring the outrunner down.

  Crannigan grinned—a nasty sight, showing green, crooked teeth. “I can see you trying to figure the odds, Roland!” He shook his head. “You’ll never make it alive! Better choose joining up instead! Tell you what—shoot your little pal there to show your commitment! Then I’ll cue you in on the mission …”

  McNee snorted. “As if he’d …” He peered around his gun at Roland. “You wouldn’t, would you?”

  “Shut up and let me think,” Roland muttered. After a moment he called out, “Crannigan! Lemme point something out—if this comes to gunfire, you’ll be the first to go down. So I’ll tell you what: I’m gonna put this in reverse, and back out of here, and think on your offer! And you can avoid a firefight.”

  “Oh—I don’t have to get in a firefight!” Crannigan said, his corroded grin widening. “They’ll take care of you for us!” He pointed past the outrunner.

  Roland turned to see a sight that was bizarre even for Pandora—he’d heard of these creatures, but never seen them before.

  “Primal Beasts!” McNee burst out, whistling.

  There were three of the hulking semihuman creatures—and riding on each Primal was a Psycho Midget. The little jockey-like lunatic mutants, wearing goggles and finned helmets, sat in small saddles on the upper backs of the Primals. The Midgets were hooting and giggling and shrieking with murderous delight as they approached, flourishing their throwing hatchets.

  The Primals were six-limbed creatures native to Pandora, reminding Roland of the enormous jungle anthropoids of the homeworld, in rough outline, but larger, far more savage, and each with four large forelimbs that sometimes acted as additional legs … and sometimes, when the creatures reared on their hind legs, became arms. Their clawed forelimbs had opposable thumbs; there was armor across their sides, catching the sunlight as the creatures splashed through puddles in the lowland. Metal embossments on their head indicated mind control devices.

  Psycho Midgets were puzzling little muties. Encounter a screeching, sprinting Psycho Midget in the field and the little SOB seemed completely insane—muscular, rabid, unable to focus on anything but killing. Hard to imagine one working on electronic devices—but they seemed to have periods of relative rationality, and in those they’d mastered the Primal Beasts, using them as mounts and living catapults. The catapult analogy came to mind as swiftly as the boulder that was now hurtling through the air toward the outrunner, thrown by one of the rearing Primals.

  Half a ton of boulder was flying directly at him.

  Roland put the outrunner in gear, floored it, spinning the steering wheel, and the boulder smashed into the slope close behind them, spraying sand. The turret gun rattled as, cussing a blue streak, McNee brought it around to fire at the Primals and the Psycho Midgets riding them.

  The repetitive high-pitched zing-BOOM of Crannigan’s Eridian rifle projected a bubble of destructive energy in front of the outrunner. Roland veered hard left to keep from giving Crannigan a clean shot at him. He glanced over his shoulder—saw the mercenaries withdrawing over the crest, Crannigan sending him a final mocking salute.

  “Bastard!” Roland muttered. “Mess with the bull and you get the horns! And you’ll get mine, Crannigan, right through your gut!” But how was he going to get at Crannigan any time soon? He might cut right, over the crest—draw the Psycho Midgets and the Primals that way and
just maybe they’d attack the mercenaries.

  An explosion to his right bucked the outrunner up on two wheels, almost overturning it. Twisting the wheel, he just managed to bring the vehicle down safely with a jarring crash. He looked over his shoulder at the Primals—saw one of them was throwing some kind of stubby metallic cylinder at them. He’d seen those explosive barrels before. Bad news.

  “Where the hell they get that blasting barrel?” McNee yelled. “It’s like the damn thing pulled it out of its ass!”

  “Strapped low on their backs! Come on, McNee, time is bullets! Spray ’em and slay ’em!”

  McNee let go another strafe with the outrunner turret as Roland tried an evasive maneuver, swerving left, right, and left again.

  Another barrel came arcing through the air, thrown by the enormous Primal—a two-hundred-kilo object flung the way a man would throw a football—and it exploded just behind the racing outrunner. Roland’s shield protected him, though it flashed with shrapnel impacts.

  Roland heard a yell of pain, twisted in his seat to see McNee slumped over the turret gun, his head a mass of bloody shreds. Shrapnel had blown the top of McNee’s skull off.

  Should have got that shield fixed, McNee.

  Seething inside, Roland turned away and jerked the outrunner to the right. Revenge would have to wait.

  He blamed Crannigan for this—Crannigan had hemmed them in so the Primals would go after them.

  But there was no hope of leading the Primals back toward Crannigan’s mercs now. The Psycho Midgets had fixated on the outrunner—they hated outrunners, as settlers had used them to run the little killers down whenever they got a chance.

  Roland veered hard left, sharply as he could without overturning the outrunner—just managing to avoid a flying boulder, he zagged right again, coming up on a low, rocky hilltop. He accelerated, jumped the hilltop, coming down on the other side with a jolt, holding on with all his strength. The outrunner almost flipped over again—then clunked back down on its wheels.

  He spun the vehicle in a doughnut, brought it around facing the hilltop, came to a full stop, and clambered hastily up in the back.

  At some point, McNee’s body had fallen out. All that remained of him in the outrunner was blood, and brain matter, bits of bone near the turret.

  Roland caught a movement at the corner of his eyes—he looked around, caught a glimpse of someone down the slope on his side of the hill, half-hidden behind an outcropping of rock. Someone watching and waiting. He knew the type—a big bulky figure in helmet, long coat, and slitted goggles. A Nomad. Another threat.

  One thing at a time. The Primals were coming.

  Roland ground his teeth, gripped the turret gun handles, and then the first Primal was there, poised on the hilltop not more than fifteen meters away, a shrieking Psycho Midget riding on its back. The Primal scooped up a fifty-kilo boulder with the ease of a kid grabbing a snowball, and threw it underhand. Roland ignored the stone missile—taking the chance it’d miss—and fired a burst at the Psycho Midget. The Primal was too heavily armored to bring down at this angle. Its rider was just barely visible from here, hunched down on the Primal’s back, getting ready to launch one of those vicious little hatchets.

  Roland got lucky twice: the boulder missed him and one of his turret rounds caught the Psycho in the forehead. The mad Midget jerked in the saddle, shrieking in despair. The Primal, psychically linked to its rider, went bounding off in maddened confusion, tearing at its own head with a forearm talon.

  But the other two were coming. Roland doubted he could get them both.

  An idea suddenly came to him. He vaulted back into the driver’s seat, put the outrunner in gear, spun it around, and started down the hill, close to the outcropping where the Nomad was still watching.

  He didn’t head straight for the Nomad, but drove right by him.

  The mad giggling of Psycho Midgets came from close behind as he passed the Nomad—then came a snarling roar, the thumping of feet. Bellows of rage, a spate of cursing.

  He smiled. He knew his outlanders.

  Nomads hated Psycho Midgets. Hated them. Never missed a chance to kill them. One of their favorite methods was binding them and holding them up as living shields to catch gunfire meant for the Nomad.

  He heard a grenade blast, another, a burst of gunfire, and lunatic giggling that became shouts of pain.

  The Nomad had gone for the targets, engaging both Psycho Midgets and their mounts. That’d keep them all busy for a while.

  Roland gunned the outrunner, circling off to the right, heading back to try to intersect Crannigan.

  He bounded the vehicle over ridges, low hills, around boulders—finally pulled up, seeing a flying vessel of some kind—hard to make out what exactly—taking off in the distance.

  Chances were, Crannigan was in that orbital shuttle, heading off to conference with his handlers at the Atlas Corporation.

  Okay. He’d catch up with Crannigan eventually. All he had to do was wait, and patrol the area. And meanwhile look for those bandits. That cache of salable goods.

  He went back to the lowlands, looking for McNee’s body.

  There it was, about fifty meters off. It was already being torn apart by scavenging skags.

  Roland pulled the outrunner up, and stared, thinking that McNee deserved better.

  But that’s what happened on Pandora. You made a friend—they got killed. Should’ve learned that lesson a long time ago.

  Stay solitary as long as you stayed on this planet.

  Because Pandora wasn’t just a world. It was a planet-sized homicidal maniac.

  Pandora glowed like a dying ember in the big rectangular viewport of the Homeworld Bound. Zac Finn stood in the ship’s lounge with his arm around his wife’s shoulders, the two of them looking at the viewport. Their son, Cal, his face in VR blinders, was playing mindtouch on a sofa nearby, the boy’s fingers and shoulders twitching as he played. The artificial gravity was on, the ship at 80 percent gravity, still lighter than the homeworld, so Zac felt mildly buoyant.

  A drunk, pudgy, middle-aged man with a bubbly green cocktail in his hand stepped wobblingly up, nodded at the viewport. “Lookitthat. Another goddamn planet. Sick of all these planet stops. Shoulda taken th’ express ship. Tryin’ a get to Xanthus.” The drunk turned to Zac, pointed at him with the hand holding his drink, so he spilled some on the lounge carpet. He didn’t seem to notice. “Where you folks headed?”

  “Heading to Xanthus, too,” Zac said shortly, not wanting to encourage the guy. “Settlers.”

  But Zac hoped he wouldn’t have to be a hardscrabble settler on Xanthus, if things worked out here on Pandora. With luck, he could leave here with some real money, buy an estate on Xanthus for his family, and they’d all live there comfortably. He glanced at his wife, Marla, a compact, shapely woman in a traveler’s clingsuit; she had copper-colored hair and bright green eyes. She seemed only mildly interested in Pandora, the third planet the Homeworld Bound had stopped at, on this zigzag trip across the galaxy, and he felt a twinge of guilt.

  She didn’t know he was going down there. Pandora had a reputation—a bad one. If Zac told her what he was planning she might take Cal and go back to the homeworld …

  Zac glanced at the time under the viewport. 24:00—Rans would be arriving any minute.

  There—was that a transport, that silvery oblong emerging from the upper atmosphere?

  “Looks like the passengers from Pandora are coming,” said Marla. “Maybe we’ll be able to get out of orbit and on to Xanthus soon.”

  “Yeah. Keep an eye on Cal, huh? I’m going to go and … check with the bursar.”

  “Cal?” She shook her head, her green eyes flashing as she looked at her son. “He’s been locked in that thing for hours. He’s thirteen, he ought to show more interest in the real world. It’s no way for a kid to grow up.”

  “Oh, he’s not there all day. Just … part of it. Anyway, it’s just a phase, hon. Wait’ll he discovers girls. He’ll
take more interest in the real world.”

  “They mostly discover VR girls. It’s a surprise people still manage to reproduce.”

  “Me and you had no trouble,” he whispered, kissing her on the cheek. He turned and hurried off to the deck lift. But he wasn’t going to the bursar.

  Cal Finn was flying a bodysuit through a lightning storm, evading the blasts of enemy fighters, and calculating his counterattack—when someone knocked on the sky. Thunk thunk thunk.

  It sounded like a door being hammered on in the distance. The hammering sound came right through the roar of his repulsors, the crack of lightning and the whining of machine gun rounds. Knock knock knock … KNOCK.

  “Cal!”

  “Awright awright!” Hissing to himself he pulled the VR helmet off, blinking in the transition to the peaceful lounge of the Homeworld Bound. There was something intimidating about the way the big golden-red planet hung there, filling the viewport. But his mom, hands on her hips, stepped into his line of sight, silhouetting herself against Pandora.

  “Cal—you need to put that thing away.”

  “Why? It’s just another orbit. We’re going back into subspace, right? This trip is taking, like, forever—”

  “No we’ll be here awhile—they’re delivering supplies down to Pandora.”

  “I thought there was no one on Pandora but a bunch of criminals and crazies.”

  “That’s not true. Exactly. There are settlers. Towns. In fact—we said we were going to learn about the planets we saw on the trip …”

  He rolled his eyes. “Seeing it from orbit isn’t really seeing it.”

  “… So we’re going to learn about this one.” She sat down next to him, took a uniceiver from her shoulder bag, and began tapping at the uni’s screen for the Identify application. The universal receiver was also a powerful computer. She held the uni up so it looked at the planet hanging in space.