Borderlands: The Fallen

by John Shirley

  “That way? Yeah right. That’s a hangout for spiderants and skags. You’d have been eaten alive.”

  “I almost was! I tricked the spiderants and the skags into fighting so I could get away! Got one bunch to follow me to another.”

  “Did you now.” The big man put a hand over his mouth to cover a smile. “Pretty smart. Or lucky. Did the same thing myself not long ago with some Psycho Midgets and a Nomad.” He frowned. “What’s that noise? That your stomach?”

  “Probably,” Cal admitted.

  “So you were after food, huh? Why didn’t you ask for it?”

  “I uh … didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “More likely you thought I was a bandit. Might mean you are pretty smart at that. I’m not a bandit—but that’s mostly the kinda people you find out here. A few mercenaries, armed scavengers like me, take the occasional job. There’s a fair number of murderin’ lunatics too. The bandits, now, they belong to outfits, gangs, and they got certain styles about ’em—take fanatical pride in their crazy classifications. Bruisers, Badasses, what have you. You’ll learn to recognize ’em.”

  This encouraged Cal. It didn’t sound like he was about to be killed. “My name’s Cal—Cal Finn. You hear of anyone else with that last name around? Other people coming down from orbit, out here?”

  “Cal, huh? You can call me Roland. Naw, I haven’t heard of anyone else lately. I did see an explosion in the sky, if that’s what it was. Meteors—debris coming down. You get separated from your folks?”

  Cal nodded. “My dad came down ahead of us. In a DropCraft. My mom was in another lifeboat. We got separated …”

  Roland nodded. “Well kid, if I hear about ’em, I’ll tell you. But I wouldn’t want to give you false hope. They made it down alive, chances are …” He shrugged. “This is a mighty rough old planet. You know? My own partner got himself killed recently. And he was tough. McNee—the damn fool …” He turned around, hunkered, rooted through a box. Cal thought of taking the chance to run. But he was too tired, too hungry, and he was afraid to leave the firelight. Anyway, maybe it was true—maybe the guy wasn’t a bandit.

  On the other hand, he could be a psycho-killer, just playing cat and mouse. Planning to murder Cal later and do something horrible with his body. With the reputation this planet had—you never knew.

  Roland turned around, tossed Cal a package. “Eat that. When you expose the stuff inside to air, it’ll suck up some moisture. Turn into something like bread and ham. Synthetic protein mostly, and vitamins, but it’ll do you good …”

  Hands shaking, Cal tore the package open, and immediately the little rectangle, no bigger than a candy bar, expanded to the size of a poorboy sandwich in his hands. “Never saw one of these. Camp food, huh?”

  “Beats skag meat. But you can eat most of the local four-legged critters in a pinch. Chow down, I’ll get you some water.”

  Cal chowed down, and though the food varied from tasteless to mildly disgusting, he felt better right away. He hadn’t realized how shaky, how empty, how scared he’d been, till he was able to sit by a fire and eat something.

  Roland sat near him, watching, elbows on his knees, clasped hands covering his mouth. Roland didn’t like to show when he was smiling, but Cal could tell he was.

  “You some kind of professional soldier?” Cal asked, when he’d eaten.

  Roland passed him a canteen. “Yeah, I guess. I hire out to people when I feel like it. Take a mission here or there. Scavenge what I can. Used to work for one of the corporation armies. For Atlas—Crimson Lances.” He shook his head. “Don’t care for that anymore. They’re not much better than the bandits.”

  Cal drank deeply from the canteen, amazed at how much flavor there was to water when you were really thirsty. “Wow. I needed that.”

  “You think your people are looking for you?”

  “If they’re alive—they’re looking for me. That’s why you gotta get me to civilization—if you want the reward.” Cal assumed there was a reward for finding him. There should be. How could there not be?

  “A reward? For a scrawny little kid like you?”

  “Hey, I’m not scrawny! Anyhow, even if I were—what’s that got to do with it?”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Living here, we value people for how they can survive. Scrawny doesn’t usually live long—though those crazy Psycho Midgets can surprise you. They don’t give up easy …”

  “But I am a survivor!” Cal insisted. Now that he was no longer scared of Roland, he didn’t like getting ribbed by him. “I beat those skags and spiderants today!”

  Roland tossed a stick on the fire. It flared up a little, adding yellow highlights to his face, and to the goggles on his head. “Kid—you lie down, get some rest. We’ll check out your story tomorrow. But chances are, I’m gonna take you to Fyrestone. Little settlement a ways from here. I’ve gotta pick up a Scorpio Turret there anyhow. And send a message to McNee’s woman …” He shook his head sadly. “Anyhow, it’ll take a while, getting there. I’m gonna give you my shield, help protect you on the trip.”

  “A shield? You don’t have to do that.”

  “I know. I’m a damn fool like that, sometimes. But McNee …” He tossed another stick on the fire and scowled. “Never mind. You’ll wear the shield. ’Cause there’s no way we won’t run into trouble. Death comes regular as milestones out here. It’s gonna be us, or them. I’d rather it was them.”

  “Who? The bandits?”

  “Could be. Or spiderants, rakks, skags—ones you ran into were the small, easy variety. Rumors have a drifter out in this desert somewhere’s. Haven’t seen it myself. Weird critters. Then there’s Crannigan, and his bunch of killers. I’m trying to avoid that rat-bastard till I get the timing right. But you can’t really avoid a fight on this planet, kid. Not for long. We got to be ready for it. And on the way to Fyrestone, we’re gonna make a little stop.”

  “What for?”

  “Gonna swipe some weapons from a bunch of bandits, is what. I just found out today exactly where they’re holed up. We might even get you a weapon. But you’re gonna have to do your part, kid. Now get some rest.”

  Cal sighed, and stretched out by the fire, exhausted. He was going to have to trust Roland. No choice.

  He closed his eyes, and wondered, before dropping into a deep black abyss of sleep, whether his mom and dad were alive.

  Dad had come down first—he should be alive, if he took a DropCraft … shouldn’t he?

  Zac froze, hardly daring to breathe, when someone shoved a cold shotgun muzzle against the back of his neck.

  “That’s right,” Berl said, jabbing him with the shotgun muzzle. “Don’t you move, not a muscle.”

  Zac was on his knees, blinking in the morning light, his hands in an old backpack. “Take it easy, Berl, I was just looking for a bite to eat. I woke up so damn hungry … and I can’t seem to choke down any of that rotting skag meat …”

  Berl grunted and removed the gun muzzle. “It ain’t rotten yet. Skag meat always smells like that. Who said you could muck around in my goods?”

  Zac turned slowly around, sat on the dirt, giving Berl his best look of injured innocence. “I thought we were partners, Berl.”

  “Partners? Who said anything about partners?”

  “Well you saved my life, you trusted me to stay in your camp …”

  “Don’t mean you can rob me! Next you’ll be trying to find my stash of shock crystals!”

  “I don’t even know what those are.”

  “I sells ’em to settlement folks—sell ’em through them little Claptrap robots of theirs—and them New Haven types, they use the crystals to customize their fightin’ for electricity. Some will pay big money for it—so keep your damn hands off!”

  What did he spend the money on? Zac wondered, looking around the shabby camp. Probably saved it up in some account somewhere. “Berl, I was just hoping for some old can of beans not too far past its eat-by date.”

  Berl glared
at him—then grunted, and pointed at a grungy cardboard box nearby. “There—packaged food. Scrounged it from a dead man’s camp. Might be edible. I’m gonna check on … my goods. And I do mean my goods.”

  Berl shuffled off and Zac busied himself inspecting the contents of the cardboard box. Some of it was just edible. There was a package of something more or less like dried green beans, and another that might be synthetic chicken meat.

  Zac ate hungrily, and waited to see if he’d get sick. It occurred to him he might perish right here, on this spot, writhing in the gray-blue dirt of this alien world—dead from food poisoning. That would be an ignominious death, but maybe it was what he deserved. He’d thrown away the last of his family’s money on Rans’s crackpot scheme. The whole plan seemed to have brought down the lightning on them—and in fact, on the Homeworld Bound, from what Berl was saying.

  Zac had an intuition—or was it just denial?—that his family had escaped the ship. But had everyone aboard gotten out? Was he indirectly responsible for killing the crew of that vessel?

  And—why had the flying security bot sabotaged his DropCraft? Who’d sent it? What exactly had happened to the Homeworld Bound?

  Be good to talk to Rans. Talk to him or, better yet, shake the truth out of him. Guesswork suggested that Rans had told someone else about the crashed vessel—someone who didn’t want Zac finding it. Or maybe any craft scheduled to go to those coordinates would be attacked.

  And what had Zac done? Just sent the landing coordinates to his wife, that’s all. Meaning that whoever targeted Zac—also targeted her. And Cal.

  Yeah. He deserved food poisoning.

  But it didn’t come. Just a little nausea. And with it, the thought that even if his wife was alive—she might never forgive him. He’d felt her drawing quietly away from him, long before all this had happened. He’d been reckless, irresponsible more than once. She wasn’t sure about the emigration to Xanthus. Now this …

  Zac got up, and stretched, thinking he should check on Berl. He had to come to some kind of understanding with the old man, try to win his trust.

  Blinking in the slanting beams of the rising sun, Zac looked around at the rusty sheet metal mess of Berl’s camp. Spears of light pierced the rust holes in the walls of corrugated metal. He caught a movement from the corner of his eye, turned to see Bizzy rearing up in the distance, about forty meters away, looking down from its perch on its stiltlike legs, at something else. Probably listening to Berl.

  He remembered the alien artifact the old man wore around his neck. Could be, in his fit of paranoia, Berl was off checking more than just his shock crystals. Maybe he had more alien artifacts over there.

  Maybe that old man did know where the crashed ship was—the very thing that Zac had come here for.

  Zac shook his head. He shouldn’t get distracted trying to find that damned ship. Not without the DropCraft to get back in. He should try to find his family. A hunnerd klicks to the west.

  A hundred kilometers to the west, something had fallen from the sky. Maybe just burning debris. Or maybe a lifeboat. Not that far from where he’d come down. Was it his wife, his son?

  He should go there and see. If he could even get there alive. He shouldn’t look for that crashed spacecraft …

  But suppose he found it? He’d make a fortune. Then Marla would have to forgive him.

  Anyway, it couldn’t hurt just to find out if the ship was nearby.

  He hurried down the slope, crossed laterally on a sandy shelf of rock, heading toward Bizzy.

  Rounding a great wedge of blue stone he spotted Bizzy first, the drifter with its back to him. It was poised on its four teetering legs high over the old man, who was crouched in the mouth of a cave about thirty meters away. The old man was looking at something that glinted in the sun. The shock crystals?

  Zac crept closer, in the shelter of intervening boulders, feeling guilty—the old man had saved his life and now Zac was skulking about, spying on him. But he kept slipping closer, on tiptoes, until he was crouched behind a jut of rock just a few meters from the cave mouth. He could see Berl, between Bizzy’s long, pipelike legs. The old hermit was crouching over a small pit dug in the soil under the cave mouth, lifting something into view. Not a crystal.

  It was an artifact—and not Eridian. Zac had seen plenty of Eridian extraterrestrial artifacts in holograms.

  This was something very different from the Eridian style. It was translucent, glimmering with inner power—a restless shape he’d never seen before, a spiral that changed shape, twisting like a snake as Berl switched it from hand to hand. It seemed almost alive.

  Berl held it up to the sun—in his open palm—and it spun about, seemed to point itself, off across the desert.

  Berl gazed that way himself. “Don’t wanta go back to that ship, less’n I have to, Bizzy,” Berl said. “But I might just have to …”

  Zac drew back and slipped away, keeping the rocks between him and Berl, returning to the camp. The whole time, he kept hearing Berl’s words echoing in his mind: Don’t wanta go back to that ship …

  Berl knew where the crashed ship was, and where a fortune in alien artifacts could be found. And the son of a bitch was keeping it all to himself.

  Marla woke up, sitting bolt upright, staring around blearily in the unfamiliar surroundings. She hadn’t expected to sleep—and certainly not without being attacked. But that’s the way it had been. Had they drugged her? It didn’t feel that way. She’d simply been exhausted. She was in a snug cabin of wood and metal, undecorated, with a white-painted metal door.

  It was a houseboat, judging from the view out the window. A small swell from the breeze rocked it in the water.

  Through the window she could see the pier, and bright sunlight on metal shacks, rusting junk piles scavenged from ships, small wooden shelters, walkways, rope bridges. Here and there was a tree, but she could see that it was faked up, somehow. Part of the island’s camouflage.

  She got up, slipped her shoes on, and tried the door to the passage—and no surprises there. It was locked.

  She went back to the window. Suppose she got it open, squeezed out, swam away. To where?

  The lock turned and she spun on her heel. Vance was grinning at her from the door. “Right this way. I’ll show you where you can wash up, and we’ll get some food. Then we’ll talk about what’s on this uni of yours.”

  He stepped into the narrow hall and she reluctantly followed. He gestured with a pistol—she walked ahead of him to a bathroom, of sorts. A spigot jutted high in the wall over a hole in the floor, a cake of soap that looked like it had never been used, a scrap of towel.

  “Clean up in there,” he said. “Water ain’t potable but it’s filtered enough to wash in. No window. Lock the door. But don’t take your sweet time. Grunj wants a good look at you. He’s come back early.”

  As it happened, Grunj didn’t wait long to take a look at her. She was just toweling off after taking a shower when the door unlocked, and he entered, spinning a key ring on his finger, staring frankly at her naked body. A stocky, barrel-chested man, whose face was hard to see—it seemed mostly beard at first. The immediate effect was of someone who had an inverted, elaborately coiffed wig slipped over the lower part of his face. Grunj’s great brown beard was curled and braided into an elaborate pelt sculpture. It grew up onto his cheekbones, nearly to his eye sockets; the hair on his head was cut into curlicues that rose like exotic plants from his scalp, long as a man’s forearm. He had tiny brown eyes, and from his projecting ears dangled scrounged oddments of glass and copper. His stubby nose was beringed in gold. He wore a shiny brown leather coat that hung to his knees, large black boots, military green trousers, and a red silk shirt that strained with his bulging belly. The smell coming thickly off him suggested he rarely bathed. If ever.

  Grunj chuckled, looking her over, rubbing his thick-fingered, hairy hands. “You’ll do fine,” he rumbled, as she tried to cover her nakedness. “I’ll get a brimmin’ bucket o’ bucks
for you, missy ho.”

  “Don’t call me—”

  Casually as a man smacking at a mosquito, he backhanded her, so that she stumbled backward and struck the wall, stunned. He turned and spoke to someone in the passage. “Missy ho has to be brushed up pretty, and then we’ll take her to the slavers. Maybe in a day or two, after I’ve had my rest.”

  As she cringed into a corner of the shower, she heard Vance’s voice from the hall. “If’n you say so. But suppose I want to bid for her?”

  “I don’t want none of you men buying her. If she’s ’round here long, she’ll cause trouble.” All the time Grunj was still ogling her, though it seemed the look a man would give a horse he had bought, more than lust. “Already had some men kill each other over a bet. Don’t have time to recruit men all the damn day. Hard to get. Going to have to hang another for insubordination. Waste of manpower. Just do what I said about missy ho, there.”

  “Sure thing, Grunj,” Vance said. “How about a drink?”

  “Naw, I’ve got a new guest in my cabin, I’m gonna go check on the dwarfish little bugger …”

  Grunj lumbered off, closing the door behind him, and Marla quickly got dressed. Her clothes were self-cleaning, once taken off, and they were reasonably fresh now. What had he meant by ‘dwarfish little bugger’? Could he have been referring to a child? He didn’t have Cal in his cabin, did he?

  She was just pulling on her shoes when the door opened—she drew back, but relaxed a little when she saw it was Vance.

  He looked at her ruefully. “Enjoy meeting Grunj, did you? Decided he wanted to see everything there was to see, and quick.”

  “He mentioned someone small, a ‘guest’ in his cabin … it’s not a boy, is it? I mean … an offworld boy …”

  “Naw. Grunj, he sometimes will buy a boy from a slaver. Keeps ’em awhile, sells ’em, or feeds ’em to Skraggy if they piss him off.”

  “Who’s Skraggy?”

  “Skraggy the skag. Keeps it in his place onshore. Biggest skag this side of Skagzilla. Bred it himself, someway. I mean—bred it with other skags … but then, anything’s possible with him.” Vance grinned, glancing down the hall to see if anyone was listening. He lowered his voice. “He’s developed a taste for Psycho Midgets lately. He gags ’em, ties ’em up, plays with ’em for a while, then feeds ’em to Skraggy. One of them midgets—that’s the ‘guest’ he’s talkin’ about.” He drew her uni from his pocket. “Now you tell me about this—these coordinates on here… . not more than ninety-five clicks from the place we found you. I could get there in a day or two, depending. Says ‘crashed ship’ and there’s the coordinates. Now Missy … Marla … what’s all this about a crashed ship?”