Borderlands_Gunsight

by John Shirley

Down, down they went, into darkness, bringing corpses with them, as if escorting them to hell. Mordecai kept the flashlight pointing down the mine, half expecting to see Tunnel Rats rushing up toward him. But the mutants were probably conferencing, somewhere far below, about how to handle the interlopers.

  At last Mordecai, Brick, Bloodwing, and their dead charges got to the vertical shaft. Mordecai flashed the light across it, and wasn’t surprised to see a face blinking back at him. The Tunnel Rats had left someone on watch.

  “Hey, man, how you doing?” Mordecai called in his friendliest voice. “Look! We brought gifts—three of our mutual enemies! We killed ’em for you! Made sure to kill ’em without ruining the meat! They’re nice and fresh! Here!”

  He pulled the body around to the lip of the vertical shaft. Bloodwing hopped off it and went up to his shoulder so Mordecai could kick the corpse over. It tumbled down to the bottom. Brick tossed his own dead men down, like a farmhand tossing bags of seed into a wagon.

  “Good food comin’ down!” Brick shouted.

  “You say they’re fresh?” hissed the rat, across from Mordecai.

  “Yes!”

  “We’ll eat them anyway. I suppose we could put them up for a while, ripen them . . .”

  “Right, well, tell your Chief Engineer I need to talk to him! He’ll be perfectly safe! I can deliver hundreds more!”

  “He’s very busy now! He’s got no time to talk to dinner! We’ve got an engineering emergency! Something meaty old surface crawlers wouldn’t understand!”

  “That’s why I’m here—I can help with that, too! Tell him!”

  “You’re being watched!” the face told him. “Don’t move from there, dinner!”

  “You got it, pal!”

  Mordecai put his arm out near Bloodwing and raised her up close to his face. She bumped her head on his forehead affectionately. “Bloodwing, head on up the tunnel. Watch out to see they don’t sneak up on us that way. I don’t trust these bastards.”

  Bloodwing squawked in consent and flew off up the tunnel.

  Mordecai and Brick each took a seat on the edge of the vertical shaft and composed themselves to wait.

  • • •

  Skerm came in chortling, showing his rotting teeth in a grin.

  “Wanted to see if anyone made use of my prize yet,” he said. “And there she is.”

  “Come here, big guy,” Daphne said. “I like a bald-headed man. They’re sexy. Give me a kiss!”

  He chortled even louder and came close to the table. “You think you’re going to bite me, right? No . . . I’m not getting that close!”

  He leaned near her—but keeping his face back from hers. He wasn’t counting on her jerking her hand free from the loosened strap, grabbing him by the throat. He probably didn’t think a small woman like her would have such a powerful grip—he seemed amazed at it, as she tightened her fingers on his trachea, squeezing with all the strength in her hand. The stench of his mouth washed over her as he gasped and gagged. Skerm smacked at her face with his hands, but the angle was awkward and he barely connected.

  He twisted in her grasp—and then pushed hard, against the side of the table to try to break free. He made a desperate effort and pulled his head suddenly back away from her—but he’d left a big piece of his throat in her hand.

  Skerm stared aghast as blood gushed from the wound; he tried to stanch the scarlet flow with his hands, but the artery was ripped through and it was no use.

  He went to his knees . . . and then keeled over on his side.

  The door opened, and Fluron came in. He stared at Skerm’s twitching body, then gaped at Daphne.

  “You are dangerous!” he blurted. He seemed more impressed than appalled. “Maybe you could be useful to me . . .”

  “But how will I know that this Crusher device will travel in the course you describe, dinner?” asked the Chief Engineer in a rather nasal voice, as saliva dripped from the corners of his mouth.

  The Tunnel Rat leader had his hands on the butts of machine pistols holstered on his hips. He was standing on a platform that had been raised up the vertical shaft. The synthawood platform had been cranked up from below by some mechanism Mordecai couldn’t make out. To either side of the Chief Engineer were wiry bodyguards, hunched over and toothy, the wild hate on their inbred faces as they looked at Mordecai and Brick, making them seem nearly feral. One of the bodyguards carried an old rusty shotgun; the other had a crossbow.

  The Chief Engineer wasn’t quite as degenerate-looking as his fellow Tunnel Rats. The man had an actual chin, unlike most of the others. His teeth were mostly inside his mouth, instead of jutting out; his eyes were not quite so close together, as the eyes of his fellows. And he was clean-shaven, his hair cut short. Like the others in his particular tribe, he had a jet-black suit on, but he also wore a golden gas mask, a sign of his high station, dangling around his neck.

  Mordecai had anticipated the Chief Engineer’s question, and he had the answer ready. “Look at the maps! They’re heading out in a certain direction—and in that direction there’s only one route to Fyrestone: you have to go through Spreadeagle Canyon first! To get there, Chief, they’ll pass right over your colony. Now I’ve lived not far from here for a good long time. It happens I know there are caverns under these tundra. And one of the biggest caverns is right on that route, just before your colony!”

  “Yes, yes, it’s true, dinner, there’s a very large cavern there. Still—your figuring rests on the assumption that that truly is their route.”

  “I’m sure that’s where they’re going. And you know they’re going to damage your colony on the way. That thing has already shaken half the shaft down, on its way from Tumessa to Jasper. Now it’s coming back. It’ll do twice the damage! Besides, you know perfectly well that Handsome Jack hates independence. And who is more independent than Tunnel . . . than your people? They have their own world, their own laws!”

  “True, very true . . . you’re almost crafty for surface crawling meat.”

  “He won’t tolerate it! He’ll use Reamus to come after you, one way or another! This will send a message to Handsome Jack. ‘Leave us alone!’ And there’s something else . . .”

  “Well? Spew this something else, crawler!”

  “I see your men are using some rather improvised weaponry. Crossbows. And those rusty shotguns. You scavenge weapons—but you could get countless weapons off the Crusher! Not to mention the bodies . . .”

  “Oh, do mention bodies.” The Chief Engineer licked his lips. “Yes, do tell me about them.”

  “Well-fed muscular soldiers! Once that thing goes down, you’ll overrun them easily!”

  The Chief Engineer rubbed his chin. “Sounds delicious. I’m sure it wouldn’t be as easy as you suggest. But still . . .”

  “How fast can you Tunnel Rats dig?” Brick asked.

  The Chief Engineer scowled. “We don’t like that expression. Tunnel Rats.”

  “He meant it in the nicest way,” Mordecai said. “How fast can your people dig? Are they as good as I’ve heard?”

  “Phaw! This tribe is the fastest, most efficient of all the engineering people, my dear meat pie of a fellow!”

  “Then—you’ve got two days to prepare. You’ll have to get your workers to go at it night and day, till it’s done! One question more. Since you’re all descended from mining engineers . . .”

  “We still are mining engineers!” the Chief Engineer interrupted sniffily, his head lolling, wobbling to one side, his eyes narrowing.

  “Are you? Then you’ve got explosives?”

  “Naturally. We hoard them. And I expect that they will be the key to this little enterprise.”

  “So we’re agreed?”

  “I shall have to send some scouts to confirm certain parts of your story. But in theory, yes.”

  Mordecai noticed that the Chief Engineer had turned his gaze upon Brick—hungrily. “He certainly has a lot of meat on him,” the Chief Engineer said. “Could he be part of the
deal?”

  Brick tensed, and balled his fists. Mordecai could hear the knuckles cracking. He had better get Brick out of here quickly. “Nah,” Mordecai said hastily. “Brick here is a slim little thing compared to some of the guys on the Crusher, Chief Engineer! I do know how you feel. I was actually looking forward to eating a lot of these guys on the Crusher, after we take it down. Big, delicious hunks of meat.”

  The Chief Engineer nodded sympathetically. “Yes. It must be difficult for you to give all that food up. But you could never eat so many alone. Efficiency calls for many jaws chewing, as we engineers like to say.” He made a sniggering sound that became a hiss.

  “Sure, Chief!” Mordecai said.

  The Chief Engineer nodded. “Yes. A deal is a deal. Trust is the cornerstone of business with din—ah, that is, with our sweet, delicious allies . . .”

  But once more he looked at Brick and licked his lips.

  Mordecai tugged on Brick’s arm, drew him back from the vertical shaft. He didn’t want Brick killing any Tunnel Rats today. “See you later. We’ll be in touch . . .”

  They hurried off up the tunnel toward the surface, Mordecai glancing back from time to time to be sure they weren’t being followed. But the Chief Engineer had already descended on his wooden elevator platform to the reeking depths.

  “Mordecai,” Brick said, scratching his head, as they stepped out of the mine entrance. “Were you really gonna eat those guys on that battleship thing if we didn’t let the Tunnel Rats have ’em?”

  “Naw, of course not, Brick,” Mordecai snorted, as Bloodwing flapped up to her perch on his shoulder. “Unlike my little friend here, I don’t eat human flesh.”

  Brick nodded. “That’s good. Shouldn’t eat human flesh. Except in an emergency. That reminds me, I’m hungry. What’ve we got to eat in the outrunner?”

  • • •

  Fluron had a gun pressed in Daphne’s back. Her arms were cuffed behind her as she walked down the metal corridor. They passed a sentry, who stared at her but kept his post. They turned a corner, and Fluron tapped an unlocking combination to open a door marked “F.”

  “Go on in,” he said, with cold authority, glancing up and down the hall. No one was watching.

  He stepped through after her, closed the door, then set the gun on a table and unlocked her cuffs.

  “I’m taking a terrible chance trusting you,” Fluron said, his tone quite different now as he led her into the main room of his quarters. “I’m risking everything.”

  “My word is good,” she told him.

  “That’s what my research on you suggests. You were always a reliable assassin, once you’d given your word. But still . . .”

  “I need to use your bathroom, and I’ll need food and water. Then we’ll come up with a plan for getting off this boat. Or whatever it is . . .”

  Half an hour later, they were sitting on an anomalously elegant sofa in the otherwise spartan main room of his small, metal-walled suite on the Crusher. Fluron looking into a hand mirror, patting his red and blue flame-shaped coif of hair into shape, and Daphne was looking at the blueprints of the gigantic landship.

  “We’re here?” she asked, pointing at something marked “F suite.”

  Fluron glanced at the blueprint, then looked back at the mirror. “Yes. It hardly amounts to a suite, with just two rooms and a bath, but yes.”

  “And this thing is taking on supplies, checking out the route—you really think I can stay hidden here for a couple of days?”

  “Yes. I wouldn’t try to escape before then. Sentries and scouts all around it—but when the Crusher is moving, most of the men are aboard and occupied with their shipboard jobs. We wait till it’s moving, and most of the attention is directed forward—and we escape out back.”

  “Still going to be a risk. You sure you want to go with me?”

  “Oh yes. He is getting bored with me. And when he’s bored with someone, they don’t live long.”

  “Can you really keep me here without my being found?”

  “Should be possible . . .” He finally put the mirror down. “He doesn’t come here. He calls me to him. No one’s allowed in here but me.”

  “You’ve got to scout things out personally, find the best way off this thing without being spotted. If we could get some transportation. Maybe a technical . . .”

  “Armored vehicles are kept in the aft hold. There’s a ramp that opens from there to the ground.”

  “Then we have to find a way to open that ramp, get out—and escape in the outrider. Can you close the ramp from outside?”

  “Yes—by a signal from the technical.” He licked his lips nervously. “I’ll have to obtain the command code . . .”

  “Then do it. And I’ll get you off this planet.”

  Bigjaws was tearing Daphne’s legs off her dead body, one leg at a time, dipping them in a sauce that brimmed in a large pot, and then sucking the meat off the bone, before tossing them over his shoulder and going on to the arms . . .

  No, no, no, no, no . . . No!

  Daphne was trying to crawl through rubble with a great chunk of masonry crushing her back . . . blood spurted from her mouth. She gurgled, “Mordecai—help me!”

  Mordecai fought his way to consciousness—and snapped to a sitting position on the bed in Roland’s place. Just a dream. He was in Roland’s apartment, in Sanctuary. His head throbbed and his mouth tasted like he’d been chewing on rotten skag meat.

  Shouldn’t have taken that sleeping pill. Though he’d been exhausted, he just hadn’t been able to sleep without it. But it made it a little too hard to wake up from nightmares.

  Bloodwing, poised on a bedpost, yawned and rustled her wings.

  Mordecai looked blearily around the messy bedroom at the stacks of ammo, the boxes of gear and clothing along the walls, and called out, “Yo! Roland! You here?”

  No answer. Mordecai got up and looked around the place. Roland wasn’t home—already gone off on a scouting mission, probably. Just as well. Mordecai wasn’t in the mood to say good-bye to anyone, especially as he doubted he’d ever come back here alive—chances were he’d get killed trying to take Reamus down. And neither he nor Roland had much use for sentimentality.

  Mordecai made himself eat an energy bar, cleaned up as well as he could, and set out to find Brick.

  It didn’t take long. There he was, exactly where he’d left him, more than twenty-four hours before: Moxxi’s Bar.

  But Brick was in a somewhat different condition now—he was slumped over in a booth, snoring. Three young women, all in a state of semi-undress, were slumped against him, mouths open, sawing logs as if singing along in a snoring quartet. The table was covered with bottles, glasses, and other implements of intoxication.

  “He’s going to have a hell of a hangover,” Moxxi said, from the bar.

  Mordecai looked at the bar, surprised to see her there. She was wiping the bar down, smiling distantly. She kept the place operating all the time but last he’d known she’d been at the arena. “You just turn up everywhere,” he said. “Don’t you have any employees?”

  “Yeah. I gave her a couple days off when I came over here. The arena was too hot. Those Reamers, the ones you didn’t kill, were mighty ticked off—they’re still hanging around there. They kinda blamed me for what you did. So I had to slip out and come over here till things cool down. But I’ve got a new arena planned. How about signing on?”

  “Haven’t got time right now. I just came by for Brick.”

  Moxxi chuckled. “I’m just glad he didn’t go into that berserker state of his while he was here.”

  “He doesn’t do that when he’s partying. Which is a good thing. He’d be the only survivor of the party.”

  “Can I get you anything, on the house? Or maybe . . . me?”

  “I’ll take a rain check. I’ve gotta get this guy up and collect my weaponry from Marcus.”

  “All the money you paid Marcus, you must have a big damn gun on order.”

  �
�There anything you don’t know about in this town?”

  “Nope. I could tell you how much you paid down to the change. So you’re off on a mission to rescue that damsel?”

  Mordecai flinched at that. “She’s . . . past rescuing. It’s a mission of revenge. And along the way we’re going to save a lot of settlements down to the south. I hope. Hey, Brick!”

  “Better be careful waking him up . . .”

  Mordecai nodded, and quietly peeled the young women off Brick, sending them tottering yawningly on their way. Then he stepped back from the booth, picked up a half-full glass of some liquid from the table, and tossed it in Brick’s face.

  He had to dive to one side to escape the wreckage as Brick leapt up, snarling, smashing the table to splinters. “Where are they? Who did that? I’ll kill ’em!”

  Bloodwing sniggered from Mordecai’s shoulder.

  “Take it easy, Brick, don’t bust up my place!” Moxxi shouted. “Come on over here, and get a headache-blunter on the house!”

  Brick growled to himself and stomped over to the bar, the floor shaking with each heavily placed boot step.

  • • •

  Bloodwing was still half asleep, on Mordecai’s shoulder, as Mordecai drove the outrunner onto the lane leading out of Sanctuary.

  “You used up half our money on all them new weapons,” Brick grumbled as they passed through the gates and onto the mountain road. The sky was the color of aluminum with cloud cover, and snow flitted down here and there. A brisk wind blew from behind so Mordecai turned the outrunner’s cab heater on.

  “Still gotta lot of cash there, Brick, tucked under the weapons,” Mordecai said, swerving around a boulder. “And now we got some be-yoot-iful armament. Including our own sweet little cannon. Hell, Marcus didn’t want to sell the thing at all—it’s the only one known. Hasn’t even been tested.”

  Brick looked over his shoulder at the small Eridian cannon the outrunner was pulling trailer fashion behind. “Never fired one. Never seen one before.”

  “I’m gonna make Reamus pay,” Mordecai said grimly. “And that energy howitzer is going to make it possible. Even after the Tunnel Rats are done with it, it’ll be hard to get into that damned Crusher . . .”