Borderlands_Gunsight

by John Shirley

  “Here’s your chance to test it,” Brick said. “ ’Cause that’s the biggest Thresher I’ve ever seen.”

  The Thresher was bursting out of a patch of soft ground beside the rocky lane, dirt and gravel falling from the predator as it reared up to attack them. Its head was roughly shark-shaped, its snout pointed, three yellow eyes on each side of its head; it whipped long tentacles out from its main body, still hidden under the ground.

  Mordecai backed the outrunner up the hill, fast as he could without crashing. “Must’ve come up from the Corrosive Caverns,” he muttered.

  “You running from it?”

  “Nah, this is a temporary strategic retreat.” And a necessary one—Brick was right, the Thresher was big, bigger than any Mordecai had heard of. A true Badass Thresher. “Bloodwing—distract that thing! But stay away from those tentacles!” Bloodwing leapt up from his shoulder and flapped toward the Thresher, screeching to get its attention.

  Mordecai spun the outrunner’s steering wheel, backing into a ninety-degree turn, so that the cannon was angling to the side. He put the engine in idle, jumped out, and ran to the cannon, quickly switching it on and hitting the swivel control so it turned the rest of the way toward the Thresher.

  Bloodwing was diving at its eyes, and dodging its tentacles. But it had lots of tentacles . . .

  The big predator had swum up through the ground like a sea serpent through water, hissing as it loomed over the outrunner. Brick was climbing into the back, to get at the turret, but two of the snakelike tentacles snapped up from their hiding place underground and whipped around him, pulling him off balance, dragging him away from the turret and toward its body. Brick struggled but it had wrapped his arms against his body so tightly he could hardly breathe, let alone break loose.

  In seconds, Mordecai knew, with Brick so constrained, the Thresher would drag him underground and smother him, then consume him. The Thresher was always eating, its metabolism so fast it could digest a big man like Brick and want food again immediately.

  “Get out of the way, Bloodwing!” Mordecai yelled. She came flying back to him.

  Mordecai aimed at the Thresher and fired twice, unloosing two powerful blue-white pulses of raw energy; the blasts struck the tentacles that held Brick, burning through them just a meter from the big Vault Hunter’s head—and burning the whipping gray limbs from the Thresher’s body. The Thresher squealed and wriggled in pain, slapping dirt and rock into the air in its fury.

  Brick rolled clear of the relaxing tentacles and jumped to his feet, turning to take the creature on headfirst.

  “Get back, Brick, you’re in my firing line!” Mordecai yelled.

  Brick glanced toward the cannon—giving Mordecai a chance to fire. Three long energy pulses sizzled out from the cannon, impacting on the Thresher’s eyes. It jerked back from the burning blasts, screeching and shaking in what Mordecai hoped were death throes. Then it sank, swaying, back into the ground—and in moments it was gone from sight, with no evidence it had been there except for the charred tentacles lying like discarded cables on the ground.

  Brick walked grumpily back to the outrunner. He hoped Brick wouldn’t kill him for saving his life.

  “Sorry about having to kill the thing, Brick.” He knew Brick hated to be saved; Brick always insisted he could kill whatever it was himself. “I know you could’ve killed it. I just didn’t want the delay.”

  “Cannon works good,” Brick grouchily allowed as he climbed up into the outrunner.

  They started off, drove around the curve—and Brick nearly fired a rocket launcher at the Claptrap sitting in the outrider by the side of the road.

  “Hold your fire, Brick—I guess,” Mordecai said. “That’s our little pest Extra.”

  “Hi fellas!” the little robot fluted as they drove by.

  Mordecai slowed to a stop after he’d gotten a fair distance from the parked outrider. He turned in his seat. “How long have you been waiting for us on that road?”

  “Oh, seems like days.”

  “You hear any chatter on the ECHO, anywhere about the Crusher?”

  “It started moving about an hour ago!”

  “We gotta hurry, Brick!” He turned to the wheel—then turned back to shout at Extra. “And you—keep your distance!”

  “But—I think I’ve got that bomb under control!”

  “She could’ve tricked you! Just keep your distance! You can follow but not too closely!”

  He turned back to the steering wheel and accelerated, quickly hitting the turbo so they almost rocketed down through the hills to the south, fishtailing at the turns on the winding road.

  Mordecai didn’t want to be late for his appointment with Reamus and the Crusher. One thing about the Crusher—it wouldn’t be tough to locate. The damned thing was hard to miss.

  • • •

  The Crusher trembled and clanked, grinding its way across the tundra. The walls vibrated with the throbbing of its huge engines, as Daphne and Fluron came to a locked door. Fluron set about using the combination to unlock it.

  “This thing is amazing,” Daphne whispered, looking out the porthole at the aft of the Crusher. She could see a vast stretch of gray metal deck, jutting cannons and men driving electric trams carrying big barrels marked with the warning sign for explosive toxin. “Can it really be as big as it looks?”

  “You have no idea,” Fluron whispered. “They worked on it for years, underneath Tumessa. They used enough metal to construct a major city. Come on, we’ve got to hurry . . .”

  He prodded Daphne between her shoulder blades with his machine pistol. “Go on, you!” he said in a gruff voice.

  She suppressed her irritation and, keeping her hands clasped behind her in the unlocked cuffs, strode ahead of him to the stairs. They hurried down the stairs, past a sentry, and went quickly through a door stenciled RAMP 1 VEHICLE STORAGE.

  Down another short flight of metal stairs, and they were in a big hangarlike room crowded with parked outriders. Two men doing maintenance on a technical looked up at them, frowning. They were standing close together by the hood of the vehicle.

  “That vehicle about ready for use?” Fluron asked.

  “Just now finished it up,” said a man in goggles, his lower lip ripped away in some fight. He nodded toward Daphne. “What’s she doing here, Fluron?”

  “Never mind,” Fluron said, trying to sound imperious but sounding nervous. “I’ll be requisitioning that vehicle.”

  “You mean you want it now? But the Crusher is moving! You can’t be driving down a ramp while we’re moving!”

  “It’s been done before,” Fluron said, walking closer and pushing Daphne ahead of him.

  “What you gonna do with her, out there? Execute her? I heard the boss had other plans.”

  “That’s for Reamus to know,” Fluron said. “You just deal with maintenance.”

  At that moment, he reached out, slipped the cuffs from Daphne’s wrists, and placed the gun in her hand.

  “I’m responsible for signing the vehicles out,” said the lipless man. “I got to have written authorization.”

  Daphne smiled at the two men and brought the gun into play. “Good-bye, gentlemen,” she said, firing from five meters away. She raked the machine pistol’s burst across both men’s foreheads, putting three rounds in one skull and four in the other. The men fell over backward, and she walked up to the technical, climbed into the driver’s seat. “Come on, Fluron! Open the ramp, let’s go!” Fluron glanced over his shoulder, then ran to the technical and climbed in. Daphne drove the armored car out of its parking place and turned it into the aisle between outriders, driving it slowly toward the opening enormous steel ramp. She could see the landscape seeming to move away beyond the widening gap as the ramp lowered.

  “Be careful taking us out of here,” Fluron urged, his voice taut with worry.

  She’d have to run the technical out fast, to keep it from overturning when it jumped off that ramp. It was only a few meters down.
She began to accelerate.

  Then a series of booms shook the Crusher. The technical trembled as if terrified.

  And the world turned upside down. It was as if some insane cosmic giant had kicked the whole planet—and the technical was flipped onto his left side, while the other vehicles flew through the air like toys tossed by the giant’s equally crazy child.

  Fluron was screaming.

  Daphne was holding on as the cab of the technical turned over and over, rolling; as outriders fell on the technical, smashing its engine, breaking the windshield so that glass flew like a hysterical flock of translucent rakks. Daphne closed her eyes and narrowly averted being blinded—but she was struck in the side of the head, and pitched headlong into darkness anyway . . .

  • • •

  “Look at that,” Mordecai said, awestruck. He and Brick and Bloodwing watched in fascination—they were parked about fifty meters away from the edge of the brand-new canyon sliced into the tundra and the shuddering mountain of steel falling into it.

  The frozen plain had seemed eternally motionless, forever flat and unchangeable a few seconds before—and the explosions boomed from underneath, the frozen flatlands shook and buckled under the Crusher, the landship seeming like a gargantuan robotic monster sinking into a trap, struggling for purchase as the ground vanished from under it . . .

  And the Crusher pitched onto its left side, and down, falling into the hole—like a mocking reversal of the titanic emergence it had showed them when it had muscled its way up from under Tumessa. It sank, as smoke and fire and dust and shrieks of terror rose from it, as explosions rocked its vast steel flanks and the ground shook under the outrunner.

  There was a final great sound, like two planets crashing together, as it struck the stony floor of the cavern below, a clang reverberating so loud it hurt Mordecai’s ears. The ground rocked again and cracked around the edges of the gargantuan pit. Fissures zigzagged toward them so that Mordecai had to back up the outrunner for fear it might be sucked into the pit along with the Crusher. He pulled up, just outside a growing cloud of debris dust and smoke . . . and stared in amazement at what the Tunnel Rats had wrought.

  “The rat people came through,” Brick remarked, for once showing real wonder. “But where’s the ship going? How far down?”

  “The Crusher’s fallen into Echoing Caverns,” Mordecai said, feeling a mixture of horror and vengeful triumph as he watched the wrecked vessel sink into the tundra. “The Tunnel Rats just weakened the natural supports, down there, then watched for the Crusher to drive overtop it and set off some bombs to do the rest of the job.”

  “Easier now for the Rats to get their dinner,” Brick remarked casually, rubbing his jaw. “Don’t think I’d want to be down there. Rather kill Tunnel Rats up here.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m gonna have to go down there, Brick. And it’s the last place I want to go.”

  She opened her eyes, and saw an inferno of billowing smoke and streaking flame.

  Must be in hell. I guess there’s an angry God somewhere after all.

  But the banging in her head diminished, and her mind sharpened. She found she could move. It hurt some but it wasn’t excruciating. Maybe she wasn’t dead and in Hell after all.

  “Am I dead?” Fluron asked—and fell into a fit of coughing from the smoke and dust.

  “Not yet, you’re not,” Daphne said, coughing herself. She was lying on her left side, against the door of the half-crushed technical. She found a handhold—a bent door frame—and pulled herself to a partial sitting position, hearing glass tinkle away from her. She looked at Fluron, whose hair was flattened by blood flow from a cut in his scalp. He was lying partly on her right hip. The smoke seemed to thicken. They could die in here after all.

  She fumbled in the locker under the seat, her hands closed over the familiar rubbery form of the gas masks, standard “extras” for Bandit technicals. She tugged a couple of them out and, feeling increasingly dizzy, quickly put one on. She took a deep breath and the dizziness passed. She started to put one on Fluron—she saw the big jagged chunk of glass sticking out of his scalp then—she pulled it loose, and he yelped. She could see by the firelight that it hadn’t penetrated his skull. She put the gas mask over his face and adjusted it.

  “Thanks,” he said, sitting up, his voice a dazed squeak.

  “You got any bones broken?”

  “I don’t know . . . Don’t think so . . . maybe the technical saved us . . . the armor . . .”

  There was an outrider lying, badly crumpled, across the front right side of the technical. But when Daphne stood up, she found that the passenger-side window—now overhead—was unblocked. The window was smashed out but she found handholds free of broken glass and pulled herself up, used her elbows, and climbed out.

  One tight spot after another . . . I gotta get off this planet . . . Whole planet is one big tight spot . . .

  She stood on the dented door, looking around. It was as if the big hangarlike room had become an automotive junkyard, every vehicle in it tossed out of place, totaled, smashed against others, some of them piled up, smoking, flickering with streamers of fire. She felt waves of heat roll over her—the flames and smoke were being drawn toward open air, where daylight slanted through the partly open ramp doorway.

  “Come on, Fluron!” She reached down and helped him climb out. “We’re going out through the ramp entrance.”

  She jumped onto the bulkhead—it was now a kind of deck, with the ship turned over—and helped Fluron climb down.

  “Oh, my head is killing me,” he murmured.

  “You’ll be all right.”

  “What happened?”

  “Not sure yet. Some kind of crash. Maybe to our advantage. Maybe not. Let’s go see . . .”

  They picked their way through the wreckage, past burning, flipped vehicles, to the ramp. The doorway was turned sideways, now, to them. She paused at a partly intact outrider, and pulled out a shotgun and a belt of ammo.

  “We better get out of here before things start exploding in that—”

  As if on cue, three explosions shook the room, balls of fire huffed up, and vehicular shrapnel zinged past, clanging as it struck the Crusher’s bulkheads.

  “Come on!” Daphne yelled. They hurried to the door. The ramp was now on their left, a kind of door instead of a ramp, at this point, partly open. They walked past it, out onto naked stone, and into the light filtering down from above. The light wavered in the smoke billowing out from behind them. Voices clamored from the ship’s other decks. Men cursed and yelled in pain and called for help.

  “We’re underground!” Fluron burst out. “Am I dreaming this?”

  “I don’t think so . . . look at the chisel marks, over there—and blast patterns. Someone’s undermined the ground under the Crusher. It’s fallen down into a gigantic artificial sinkhole . . .”

  They were on the floor of a vast cavern. Its galleries stretched off into the darkness. Figures moved out there. Eyes and teeth glinted. A black bolt flashed by Daphne’s head—and exploded behind them.

  “Someone’s shooting at us!” Fluron gasped. “We’ve got to get under cover!”

  “Come on.” Daphne took his wrist and drew him off to the right, where they could crouch under the cover of a tumble of recently crushed rock.

  “Daphne—who shot at us? It was someone out in the cave.”

  “You smell that? Like a barnyard that’s never been cleaned?”

  “Yes! What is it?”

  “That, Fluron, is the smell of Tunnel Rats.”

  • • •

  “I’m gonna have to go down there,” Mordecai said, lying on his belly and peering over the edge of the declivity. “I’ve gotta confirm Reamus’s death. Or . . . if he’s alive, catch him before he gets his act together.”

  Bloodwing gave out an errr! of agreement. She was close beside him, perched on the edge of the huge new hole in the crust of Pandora, looking over into its smoking depths with the focused interest of a carrio
n eater.

  Brick was peering over the edge at his side. “We made this big hole,” Brick said. “Us and the Tunnel Rats.”

  “Yeah,” Mordecai said. “We get to name it. How about—Sudden Canyon?”

  “I was thinking of Brick’s Canyon.”

  “I’m gonna go with Sudden Canyon. Look over there—that’s a way down . . .” He pointed at a place a hundred meters to their right where the edge of the hole had collapsed to make an incline of stone, ice, dirt, and old bones, down to the hull of the Crusher.

  “Something’s coming outta the canyon that way,” Brick observed.

  It was a particularly large SlagSlug, worming its way from the smoking wreckage, up the incline to the tundra.

  “Let’s try out the cannon again on it,” Mordecai said. “Your turn to fire that big beauty.”

  Brick made a murderous grimace that he might’ve intended as a grin. “My turn!”

  Brick got up and ran back to the outrunner, just about forty strides back, quickly unhooked the cannon, and, to Mordecai’s astonishment, pushed the howitzer-like weapon toward the SlagSlug as easily as a man pushing an empty wheelbarrow.

  “Brick? You don’t need to get that close . . . it’ll come to you!” Mordecai shouted.

  And it was coming right at him, hissing, spitting acidic spew that fell well short of him. But with each slithering moment it came closer yet.

  “Dammit, Brick, activate your shield!”

  Brick got to his preferred cannon range, and, almost as an afterthought, activated his shield—just as the creature spat acid at him. The acid gob wobbled through the air and struck him full on . . . but his shield held, and it shed the burning fluid handily.

  Brick fired, shouting, “Come and get some, you slimy slab of slug!”

  It reared up, opening its mouth to spit at him again, its imbecilic quasi-human face distorted with rage. Brick fired three bursts of Eridian energy directly into the SlagSlug’s maw, burning through the roof of its mouth, frying its brain. The mutant writhed like a giant slug in salt, quivered, and died. The body steamed in the cold air as Brick rolled the cannon calmly past it toward the slope of gravel leading into Sudden Canyon.