Borderlands: The Fallen

by John Shirley

  The artifact pulsed … and Bizzy turned toward him. The drifter seemed to hesitate, clearly torn, confused.

  But the monitor, spinning toward him, didn’t hesitate. It rushed toward Zac—and just as he thought: It won’t pass out of the debris field …

  … It did. It was capable of improvising.

  Zac turned to run, then heard the humming, the whispering, felt the probe. And something whickered down and snapped around his shoulders, his upper arms, his chest. He felt a paralyzing pain go through him … and then his feet left the ground.

  He was lifted upward, upward … He looked up to see he was close under the monitor, and it was turning. It was carrying him. It carried him past Bizzy and Berl.

  The monitor carried Zac right to the crashed alien spacecraft. And deposited him within it.

  It was hot, in the glaring sunlight, as Marla trudged with Cal up close to a featureless cliff of bluish sandstone. Vance was close behind, his gun not pointing at them—but ready, just in case.

  This whole journey felt so pointless to Marla. The more she thought about it, the more she doubted that Zac was anywhere around here. She doubted he was alive at all. They should be trying to get to a settlement. And suppose Zac was up there? What would happen to him? Vance didn’t like rivals. Chances were, he’d—

  “Watch this, Marla,” Vance said.

  Vance grabbed her son by the collar and the back of his pants, lifted him off his feet, and threw him at a wall of stone.

  She jumped to her feet—she’d been resting on a hump of sand—and then, instead of hitting the rock head-on, Cal vanished into it.

  She swayed, staring. “Cal?”

  After a few seconds he thrust his head into view—it appeared that his head was sticking out of a natural sandstone cliff. No body was visible, just the head.

  “I’m okay, Mom … There’s some kind of hidden place in here …” His head vanished into the wall.

  Vance grinned. Marla didn’t return the smile. She walked over to the wall of stone, put her hand out—and her hand disappeared into it.

  “Some kinda generated illusion thing,” Vance said. “I think it’s used to protect that alien ship. I found it following some tracks here. Was about to go up there—then I thought I’d go and have another look to see if I could get into that tunnel rat colony and look in on you. Only … I had to think it over. Then—there you were, popping up outta the dirt!”

  She glared at him. “You threw my kid at a big rock.”

  “Hey, ease up, pretty lady,” Vance said, flashing his big smile. “I was just funning with you and the kid. I knew it wouldn’t hurt him. It wasn’t a real rock.”

  “Funning? Yeah? Like when you threatened to beat us into pulp and drag us with a rope, was that just funning?”

  “No,” he admitted. “It wasn’t.” He shrugged. “Whatever. Go ahead on in, I’ll be right behind you so don’t try to run off.”

  She shook her head, thinking that Vance wanted complete control, and he wanted to be liked too, even loved, and maybe that wasn’t so unusual—but it was a toxic combination.

  It was not surprising, given his history and what had happened to his family. But she couldn’t trust him again.

  Marla turned to the wall, closed her eyes—and walked through it. She opened her eyes and found herself in a narrow pass through the stone; a sort of crooked natural corridor leading to a pathway climbing steeply toward the cinder cone. It was cooler in here, in the shade.

  Cal was just walking back toward her, down a twisting ramp of stone.

  “Looks like it goes up toward the volcano, Mom. Could be Dad’s up there …”

  “Wouldn’t count on it, kiddo,” Vance said, coming through the wall. “Maybe he is up there—what’s left of him. Or maybe he never got there.”

  Cal nodded. “I know. The chances aren’t good. But … it’s what we have.”

  Marla looked at her son and smiled. Cal sounded like a man now.

  She hoped he’d understand what she was going to do next. “We’re not going up there,” she said. Both Cal and Vance looked at her with surprise. She shook her head. “Cal and I aren’t going. You shouldn’t go either, Vance. There’s death up there.”

  “Mom—Dad could be—”

  “Cal—he’s just as likely to be on his way here. Or somewhere around his crash site. Maybe even back on the Study Station by now. He could be in Fyrestone or New Haven or some other settlement looking for us.”

  “I don’t know what you think you’re pulling,” Vance growled. “But it’s not going to work. We’re all going. The two of you are … useful to me. I’m not leaving you here. You need me to protect you, anyhow.”

  “My son has a concussion and you threw him like a stuffed toy—”

  “Get over it, Marla! He’s all right now, come on, I patched him up, I fed him, I gave you both food. And I’ll tell you something else. That money I took from Grunj—you notice I’m not carrying much with me now? You think it was in the truck? Naw. I hid it somewhere else, before then. I’ll share it with you—when the time comes.”

  “I’m not interested in money. I just want to find out what happened to my husband and get off this planet.”

  “Naw. Not yet you aren’t. You’re coming with me. Make up your mind—you gonna make me use force?”

  Marla hesitated, licking her dry lips. She knew she was taking a big gamble with him. She couldn’t tell Cal about her real fear—that Vance really had connected emotionally with her. That his way of wanting her would be to kill anything that got in the way. That he would, eventually, kill her husband, when they found him. She felt sure of it—if they went up to that crash site and found Zac, one way or another …

  Vance would kill him.

  “I can’t do it,” she said, more gently. “Just let us go, Vance. Just …”

  “There’s something on that path going up the ravine there,” Cal said suddenly. “Something …”

  Vance glanced irritably over at the zigzag path going up to the cinder cone. “I don’t see a damn thing. You trying to keep me distracted, kid? What are you two cooking up?”

  Marla couldn’t see anything up the path either. “What is it, Cal? Where?”

  “See? Sparks … it was there and gone. I thought I saw something crawling down on its stomach.”

  Vance snorted. “I can see what’s up there and—” He broke off, frowning. “Wait. Did you say sparks? Like electricity?”

  “Yeah … around a shape. It’s gone now but … you hear that? Something scraping on the rock?”

  “You two stay exactly where you are,” Vance muttered. He raised his rifle to firing position and stalked slowly toward the twisting pathway of stone and dust …

  Marla peered past him, puzzled, but then she glimpsed an electrical flicker too, just a kind of bluish, sparking glow around a shape crawling close to the ground. It appeared—and vanished, in a split second. It was near the bottom of the path—and it was coming their way.

  Vance moved toward the pathway, and Marla wondered if she should use this chance to grab Cal, drag him out through the entrance, back onto the plain.

  Then Vance fired—his assault rifle clattered, and bullets sprayed up the lowest ramp of the rising pathway. Something squealed angrily—and she saw it clearly then. It was about half the size of a grown man, and its front limbs were shaped like a bat’s wings—but there was only the smallest trace of leathery wings remaining. Making err err err sounds, it dragged itself along the ground with its thin hooked forelimbs the way a bat did, when walking. But its head reminded her of a grasshopper’s, only as large as a child’s; its plated body was more like a scorpion’s, and its long prehensile tail ended in electrically crackling spikes … Then it vanished again.

  “It’s a stalker!” Vance declared. “Only saw one once before. They’ve got some kind of biofield around ’em—they cloak up invisible when they’re going after prey …”

  Prey? She stepped decisively over to Cal, took him by a w
rist, and drew him back toward the entrance. The two of them backed slowly up, afraid to turn around.

  Vance fired again—this time up higher, and another stalker appeared out of nowhere, the bullets momentarily knocking out its invisibility cloak. It gave that angry squeal, and a dark fluid leaked from its midsection. Its tail lashed out angrily … and spikes flew from it, to clatter off the stone wall over Vance’s head. It could whip spikes out of its tail, throw them arrowlike at its target.

  “Down, Cal!” Marla said instinctively.

  She and Cal flattened facedown on the stone floor. She was afraid that if they ran for the entrance they’d be stabbed in the back by spikes. The things were just too close …

  “Shit and hellfire, I didn’t want to use this,” Vance burst out. He was pulling the pin from a protean grenade, tossing it at the spot where he’d last seen the nearer stalker. He dropped down as the grenade exploded—and they saw, then, the outlines of three stalkers revealed by the blast force. An angry squealing, as debris pattered down—and one of the creatures seemed to writhe in the air, its whole body snapping like a whip. The others flickered out of sight—but the nearest stalker was now entirely visible, broken in two, oozing dark fluid from the halves, its severed scorpion-style tail twitching, the head twisting in its death throes.

  Vance got up to a flattened sniper position, positioned his rifle against his shoulder, firing—and the bullets exposed the other two. They were closer, climbing over the ruins of their companion to get at their prey. They weren’t going to back off. One of them whipped its tail toward Vance and this time the spikes flew dartlike through the air, just whistling over Vance’s head, missing by centimeters.

  Marla tugged at Cal’s arm to get his attention, and signed with her hand, This way. She turned and crawled toward the entrance; Cal crawled beside her, the two of them going as fast as they could in this awkward position. She felt like she’d been degraded to a desert creature herself, crawling through dust and rubble.

  Vance fired at the stalkers again, swearing to himself. “Shit goddammit, gotta change clips …”

  As he focused on reloading the gun, Marla got to her knees, signaled to Cal. Let’s go for it. They were only two steps from the entrance. Cal rushed toward it, vanished into the rock; Marla followed, closing her eyes till she got through.

  She was panting, her pulse loud in her ears, as they stumbled out onto the edge of the plain, into the glaring sunlight.

  Maybe now was their chance. She tugged Cal onward, not sure where she was going. They went twenty paces out into the glass plain …

  “Where you think you’re going?” Vance asked, behind them.

  Marla hesitated, then turned to see him stepping out of the cliff entrance, his rifle strapped over a shoulder. He called out, “You stay right there, lady, or you’re getting these instead … My last ones. I’d sure hate to waste ’em on you two …”

  Vance had two more protean grenades ready, one in each hand. He activated the grenades, turned, stepped back a few steps, and threw the explosives through the entrance—just as a repulsive grasshopper-like head thrust out from the entrance near the bottom, squealing, crackling with energy.

  Vance, Marla, and Cal backed hastily up—and the grenades blew. The stalker’s head severed from its body, rolled along the ground. Something thrashing kicked up dust at the entrance—and then a dying stalker crawled through. It made a fitful fling with its tail, and spikes darted at them, to fall short, sticking in the ground at their feet, crackling with electricity. Then it spasmed one last time—and lay still.

  Vance turned and trotted over to them, taking his rifle into his hands.

  “You think … that’s all of them?” Cal asked.

  Vance nodded. “I think so, kid. Nasty motherbuggers …”

  “I need some water, Vance,” Marla said.

  Vance turned her a long, cold look. But he took a small canteen off his belt and handed it to her. She drank, thinking that water was as good as wine when you’d met death, and come out alive.

  She handed the canteen to Cal. “I meant what I said before. We can’t go with—what is it now?”

  Vance was staring past her. She heard it, then: the sound of an engine rumbling. She turned and saw the outriders coming, just forty meters off. Two of them. Marla knew there could be two men in each outrider. And that kind of vehicle, with the skulls wired to the front, wasn’t likely to be driven by anyone friendly …

  “Run!” Vance yelled. “The entrance!”

  Vance, Marla, and Cal turned and ran—and after just ten steps came to a stop, as an outrider pulled up in front of the cliff, blocking their way, raising a plume of dust as it skidded to a stop.

  They turned—and another outrider pulled up to block the route out to the plain. They were boxed in.

  The turrets on the vehicles fired—bullets strafed across the ground on either side of them. They froze, waiting—knowing those had been warning shots, since the outriders could have cut them down with the car-mounted machine guns anytime they wanted.

  Marla impulsively put her arms around Cal.

  The nearer outrider, on the glass plain, suddenly popped its hatch. Two men climbed out, long guns in hand. Marla knew one of them instantly. Mash, the slaver with the misshapen head, was getting out of that one—with a man she didn’t know who wore a black patch over one eye, grubby skag-skin leathers, and triple fins of hair on his head. She thought of him as Patch.

  Marla looked at the other vehicle. She knew both men getting out of it. Dimmle and Grunj—Grunj’s wild beard was matted with dust.

  “Holy goddess on a crutch,” Vance muttered.

  “We’ve tracked you for a long while, Vance,” Dimmle said, smiling unpleasantly, patting the breech of his assault rifle as he walked toward them. “That truck leaves a track. Followed it, found our truck in a hole. Had to torture a tunnel rat to work that out. Found your tracks. And here we are.”

  Zac woke to a flurry of half-remembered impressions.

  The monitor had carried him to the alien crash site—to the wreckage itself. He’d been lowered into a sort of hatch—almost like a blowhole, really, or a mouth … and he’d screamed. The grappling tendrils released him, he fell, and felt himself grasped, tugged down into a tight tunnel of something that looked like transparent plastic to him. It was as if he were being swallowed by a giant see-through esophagus. He’d been tugged deeper; the smells were unknown to his experience. Sparkles came and went in the alien craft; iridescent, translucent bulkheads pulsed softly with energy all around him, making him think of images he’d seen of electricity passing through neurons. Shapes formed in the translucence, shifted, contracted, expanded—but were never clearly defined.

  The humming, the whispering, the probing, the pain in his head going from throbbing to thundering …

  Then he’d lost consciousness. Peace and darkness—no more horror. Thank God for death, he’d thought. His last thought … before waking up. Here.

  Where was here? He seemed to be suspended in a kind of pocket built into the wall of a large, oval, luminescent chamber. The pocket, seamless with the wall, clasped him tightly from the shoulders down.

  Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the glow, the restless, changeable lighting of the room. There were no corners, no sharp edges; the ceiling was curved. There were spiky points, however, on the roughly spherical object projecting up from the middle of the room. It reminded him of the sea urchin shape he’d seen earlier, but writ large, five meters in diameter. The object was not translucent, but pearly, with light flaring restlessly from the tip of one spine to the next, as if thoughts were passing through.

  Was the object a computer of some kind, perhaps the automated mind of the ship? Was he in the control room, the brain of the starship?

  It occurred to him that the ship might have always been an unmanned drone. If true—that was bad. Hard to negotiate with an AI drone.

  Zac tried to speak—and couldn’t. His throat was gummed up. He cleared it
, over and over, and finally spat out some kind of plug. How had he been able to breathe, with that thing in there?

  “Hello?” he said. “Anybody here I can talk to? I mean—you’ve been observing this world for a while, I guess. Maybe had other prisoners. Do you have a sense of our language? Is there a translation program I could use to talk to you?”

  There was no reply. And he felt foolish—you needed a translator to ask for a translator.

  He wasn’t able to move much—just enough so he could press forward, and see he was hung on the wall about two meters off the translucent floor. The floor gave out a light of its own. Craning his head, he saw another of those blowhole shapes in the wall, big as a door in a house, some distance to his left. It was hard to judge distances in here. The edges of the room’s features were so ill-defined …

  “Hello?” Zac called out, again.

  Still no reply. So now what? Would he hang here, stuck in this pocket in the wall, till he starved to death? Would the thing get around to dissecting him—perhaps vivisecting him? Would it take him over in some way—as Bizzy had been taken over?

  He pushed down with his feet, trying to get purchase, hoping to wriggle out.

  The response was instantaneous. The pocket holding him in place tightened painfully around him.

  Zac cried out with fear and anguish, afraid his blood might be squeezed out his mouth, his eyes …

  Then the squeezing relented. A moment later it came in another, incorporeal form. Zac heard the whispering he’d heard before, a whispering without words; he heard and felt the humming. He felt the unseen pressure on his eyes; the rising thrum in his brain.

  And then there came a high-pitched sound that went on for an infinity …

  Zac knew, then, that something had pushed its way into his brain. It was right here with him, all around him. He could smell it and touch it and feel it and taste it.

  He was in the alien ship—and it was in his mind.