by John Shirley
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CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Interlude
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Epilogue
Dedicated to the fans of all Borderlands games
PROLOGUE
Marcus Tells a Tale
“Lady, I’ll be getting you to ol’ Fyrestone as quick as I can,” Marcus said, looking in the bus rearview at the woman sitting a few rows behind him. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, pondering the situation. They were sitting on the tarmac of the spaceport, about half an hour before sunset, as he waited for a report on the bandits. There was a Claptrap robot sitting in a rear seat, muttering and clicking to itself; so far, he had no other passengers besides the robot and the lady. “I got an alert about a crew of particularly vicious Psycho bandits,” Marcus went on. “A new bunch, just wandered into the Fyrestone region. Interlopers from the far side of the Arid Lands. We haven’t had a hard bunch like this so close in a while. There’re missions on the board to take ’em out, but no one’s had the nerve yet. I’d do it myself, but I’m getting on in years, and . . .” He tapped his heavy belly. “I don’t move so fast anymore. So I drive the bus, and I sell guns to other people so they can do it.”
“That’s all quite . . . fascinating,” the woman said, with undisguised sarcasm. “But when do we go? It’ll be dark soon. I’d like to get to Fyrestone.”
“Soon as I hear the coast is clear, we go. We’ve got to drive sharp, quick as we can, get through that territory.”
Marcus checked his wrist communicator; there were still no missed calls, no texts, no report on those bandits. Maybe the ECHO link was down. He ran a quick link test on it, tapping the test icon, and . . . yep. It appeared the damn thing was down. Again. Bandits might’ve dismantled the transmission tower for scrap metal.
“I wonder why you don’t have hoppers at the spaceport,” said the woman. “Instead of this bus.”
Her voice was silky, but there was a keen edge of warning in it, whatever she said. Something subtle in her tone conveyed, Don’t mess with me. There was a stillness about her, too, a relaxed readiness, that suggested a professional warrior, someone who could handle herself. And he’d seen her take a high-quality pistol out of her luggage, sticking it in a holster just before she got onto the bus.
Her slim face and magenta hair were partly masked in purple dust goggles and helmet. What he could see of her looked kind of familiar, anyway, but she was sitting in shadow, and he couldn’t view enough to place her. What with the helmet and goggles, worn from the moment she’d stepped off the shuttle from orbit, Marcus figured she didn’t want to be recognized. Which hinted that maybe she wasn’t a complete stranger to the planet Pandora. She was coming from deep space, but he suspected she might also be coming home. Only she didn’t want people to know who was coming home . . .
The spaceport authorities would know whatever name she’d given them, and he had those guys on his payroll. But fake identities were easy to come by. Hell, he sold them himself sometimes.
That thought made Marcus wonder what he could sell to this woman. He could tell by her luggage and that gun, she had money, all right. Likely he could sell her some more weapons. He was going to have to try to draw her out, get a fix on who she was—could be that information itself might be worth money.
“Or is there a hopper that I haven’t seen?” the woman went on, glancing out the window.
“Nah, no hoppers, lady. See, I arranged that . . . I mean, the only hopper service ’tween here and Fyrestone was shot down, right outta the sky. Bones of the riders picked clean. Not safe, those hoppers.”
“So we’re stuck with this old rattletrap bus,” the woman murmured. Louder, she said, “I really have to get to Fyrestone. If you can check to see if you have any balls, we could just go. Any bandits bother us, we can take care of them between the two of us.”
Marcus chuckled, still watching her in the rearview. “You’re a salty one, you are. So you’re a fighter, eh? We’ve had some tough women fighters on this planet—the only kind that survive.”
“One way or another, all women are tough.”
“And of course, General Goddess, that Gynella. Whew, that one!”
“Gynella?” She seemed to perk up at that, looking back at him—at his eyes in the mirror. “How’s that panning out?”
“Oh, well, what’s happened with that—well, that’s a whole story. Be glad to tell you. Got the inside word on it from a lot of sources. I’m working up a history of Pandora, see, and I—”
“Suppose you tell me about it on the way to Fyrestone.”
Marcus sighed, controlling his temper. “Now, look, lady—”
“This bus goin’ anywhere?” asked a gruff male voice.
Marcus assessed the man climbing the steps into the bus. Big galoot with a swag belly, wide shoulders, small piggish eyes, a lantern jaw. But he was young, not long out of his teens. He had a lot of fresh-looking tattoos, and his mercenary costume looked secondhand. Cheap gems glittered in his gold front teeth; he had a rifle in one hand, duffel in the other, brand-new goggles pushed back on his close-shaved head.
Marcus knew the type. Likely a kid who’d failed at everything else—kicked out of some homeworld college, looking for a fresh start where the quick money was. Only most people looking for quick money in the Borderlands of Pandora found quick burials instead.
“Take a seat, kid, if you’re going to Fyrestone,” Marcus growled. “We’re about to leave.”
“Hey, pal, I ain’t a kid, okay? You got that?” The young adventurer, standing in the aisle, put on his best angry-bull look.
Marcus snorted. “Could be you’ll get the chance to prove it, you ride with us. We’re about to run through some nasty bandit territory. And I haven’t got the all-clear.”
The adventurer licked his thin lips. “Yeah, well, if you think it’s . . . you know . . .” Then he noticed the woman, sitting quietly in her seat. His vantage point from the door gave him a good view of the parts of her he was most interested in. She was voluptuous, and her battle-ready clothes were tight-fitting. Real tight-fitting.
The young man stared at her, and his mouth dropped open. “I, uh . . . I can handle bandits. Um, who’s . . . I mean, hi, lady. We going to be traveling together to Fyrestone? My name’s Jakus.” He pronounced it “Jake-us,” with a long a, and he did it emphatically.
“Jakus. Naturally.” They couldn’t see her eyes, but her voice suggested she was rolling them.
“You haven’t told me your name,” Jakus said, trying to charm her with a grin that would have made a skag shudder.
“No,” she said. “I haven’t. Are we le
aving or not, Marcus?”
“Sure, sure, get on the bus if you’re coming, Jack-us.”
“It’s Jake-us.” Frowning, the adventurer got into the seat across the aisle from the woman.
Who is she? Marcus wondered again, as he closed the doors and started up the bullet-scarred old bus. Clearly, he wasn’t going to find that out easily.
She was interested in Gynella’s story, it seemed. And he knew a hell of a lot about it—and about the other side of the equation: Roland, Mordecai, Brick, and Daphne. Yes, that was the way he’d do it. Tell the mystery lady the story, win her trust, then draw her out.
They were soon rumbling along the dusty, pocked highway toward Fyrestone, Marcus glancing nervously at his wrist communicator—still no word on the bandits—and scanning the horizon.
It was typical rugged gray-brown Pandora wasteland terrain, flat for long stretches but gouged with sudden ravines, shadowed by rocky buttes and stony hillocks, which often stood alone, like weathered fortresses in the dusty mist. It was hot out there, the pale blue, cloudless sky looking sun-faded. Desert plants flecked the landscape, casting long shadows as the sun slipped toward the serrated horizon; in the distance he could see small packs of skags wandering near their burrows, forever hungry for prey, and vulturine rakks turned kitelike in the sky. The bus thumped over the remains of some large yellow scythids, their carapaces crushed; he’d smashed them into roadkill on the way to the spaceport.
On some of the higher buttes, in the distance, he could see the tops turning pink and dull scarlet—sunset was coming. It’d be dark soon . . .
When he could, Marcus kept an eye on the two humans in back, tilting the rearview mirror for a better look—the interior mirror wasn’t good for anything but looking at the passengers—and he wasn’t surprised when Jakus set his rifle aside and moved across the aisle to the seat beside the mystery woman. Jakus put his arm across the back of her seat and leaned toward her, trying to look suave.
“So, pretty lady, when we get to Fyrestone, we could have a drink, whatya say? I’m buying, of course, and then maybe we could find us a cozy little—ow!”
She’d shoved her pistol’s muzzle hard against his jaw. “Get back in your seat, or I’m gonna have to splatter your brains on the ceiling. If there are any in there to splatter.”
Jakus gulped and hurried back to his seat.
“Hey, she’s a pistol, ain’t she, kid?” Marcus laughed. “Ha, get it, a—”
“Shut up, you old—! Wait, who’s that on the road up there?”
The kid pointed, and Marcus returned his attention to the road just in time to slam on the brakes. The dust plume following the bus kept going when the bus stopped, shrouding the windows. But he saw them, clear enough, about twenty meters ahead: four Psycho bandits, and towering over them a Bruiser, all of them masked and bare-chested, blocking the road side by side, all with powerful weapons in their hands.
“By the Angel!” Marcus swore.
“They do not look like paying passengers,” the Claptrap robot called tremulously from the back. “I do not advise letting them on board.”
Marcus’s expert eye automatically evaluated the Psychos’ weapons. The Bruiser, on the right, had an Eridian blaster rifle, alien tech that fired energy balls; the other four, right to left, respectively carried a GPR330 Painful Death shotgun, a Dahl Punishing Pounder combat rifle, a Tediore Genocide Guardian, and a Hyperion Sentinel combat rifle. He made the mental catalogue in a few seconds. “Shit! Just the bastards I was planning to not run into.”
“You oughta run into them!” the woman snapped. “Run ’em over, and let’s get on down the road!”
Marcus had been considering doing just that, but her contemptuous tone almost made him put the bus in reverse instead. Then he saw the Bruiser raise his blaster and point it his way—no way he could let that murderous lunatic get a bead on him while he was backing up.
He slammed his boot hard down on the accelerator.
The bus roared forward right at the Psychos, and almost instantly a big piece of his windshield vanished from its frame to his right, the glass and broken louvers coming into the bus in spinning fragments, some of them cutting Marcus’s cheek, nicking an earlobe. Other rounds slammed into the engine, and then the Psychos scattered, all of them getting out of the way in time except for the smallest one in the middle.
The bus’s front wheels crunched over the littlest Psycho, squeezing one long and piteous scream from him.
Psycho roadkill for the trash feeders, Marcus thought, grinning to himself.
Smoke was rising from the engine, and it was making a chucka-chucka sound it had never made before. But they kept moving—
—until the bus shuddered as an Eridian blaster impact struck it, and he heard a back tire blow. The hulking vehicle swerved sickeningly as he struggled with the wheel; then a hummock of shrubs and rock seemed to rush up at him till they came to a jolting stop, Marcus clutching at the wheel to keep from going through the windshield.
Dust and smoke billowed around them, swirled chokingly through the shattered windshield.
Grimacing with pain in his back, Marcus straightened up and looked at the engine lights, then out the windshield.
The engine was dead, steaming, smoking, the front end dented. But the engine didn’t look totaled from there.
He tried restarting. It said chucka-chucka-chuck and nothing else.
He got up, grabbed the weapon he kept racked to the left of the driver’s seat. It was a Vladof ZX10/V3 Detonating Hammer assault shotgun. He’d thought of bringing a rocket launcher along, but they made some of the temporary visitors to Fyrestone nervous. What the hell did they expect? This planet had the rep of being the most dangerous world with breathable atmosphere in the galaxy. He should have brought the big guns—and an extra shield. The only energy shield he had on the bus had burned out on the way to the spaceport. Cheap off-brand gear . . .
Marcus opened the door, glancing over to see if his passengers were dead.
Good, they were shaken but alive. He hated swabbing blood and guts from his bus. But he rarely had to do it. No more than a few times a year.
The Claptrap robot in back was jumping up and down in excitement. “This is not part of the itinerary, hellooooooo!”
The young tattooed adventurer was licking his lips, looking nervously out the dusty windows, peering between the metal louvers. “Where—where are they? You killed one, maybe, but . . .”
“They’re out there, and they’re not far behind,” Marcus said, climbing out of the bus.
“Then you oughta close that door!”
“How am I gonna figure out if we can drive outta here otherwise, ya dumb son of a mama skag?” Marcus called out as he stepped onto the stony ground.
Checking the shotgun’s readiness as he went, Marcus hurried, coughing in the dust and smoke, to the engine. He could see sparks crackling, but it looked more or less intact. Salvageable once he got it to a shop. But he was going to need help getting it there.
Shotgun at the ready, Marcus scanned the area, looking down the highway, which was about ten meters from the back of the bus. He didn’t see the Psychos. He knew damn well they were out there, and they’d be back soon, when they’d worked out their tactics. Smarter than some Psychos—a lot of them would run at you screaming. The Bruiser knew there’d be weapons on the bus, and they’d be coming, soon enough, probably at a flanking angle.
Marcus checked his ECHO communicator. Still no response from Fyrestone. Not that anyone there was reliable at the best of times.
Swearing to himself, Marcus climbed back up onto the bus, closed the door, and sat in the driver’s seat, hurriedly flipping on the bus’s transmitter. It had a little more reach than his ECHO comm. He tapped it and, wincing with pain, leaned over to speak into the grid. “Anybody there? Fyrestone?”
The only response was a crackle from the speakers.
He shifted the bus’s transmitter to aim at T-Bone Junction. Last he’d heard, Scoot
er was working out there. He was the best man on the planet for automotive emergencies. When he was sober.
“Scooter! This is Marcus, you picking up? You out there?”
Another crackle. Then, “Hey, Marcus, you old gut humper!” came Scooter’s voice on the ECHO, thick with an unplaceable bumpkin accent. “You done got your bus in a skizz hole again?”
“Ran into some Psychos. Squished one, but there’s four of ’em left, and I can’t raise anybody from Fyrestone. Link’s down. You’re the only one I can raise!”
“Well, catch a ride, boy!”
“I’m nowhere near none of your ride stations, dammit! We can’t walk to one without getting my passengers killed. Spaceport frowns on that!”
“Well, hellfire in a honey box! I’m a gonna have to get you some help. See what I can scare up. Take me some time, now. You’re gonna have to hunker down and kill you some Psychos and whatnot. And probably some skags, could be some of them fire skags out there between the town and that spaceport. And maybe some tarantellas, then ag’in, now, could be some skrappies, maybe a nice ’n’ smelly rakk or two, not to mention them hungry ol’ crabworms—”
“They’re coming!” the kid shouted, his voice hoarse with fear. “The Psychos! They’re out to the left side of the bus there!”
“Scooter!” Marcus said. “Listen up! You got to send help and a repair crew!”
“Like I said, I’ll do ’er, but it’s going to take a while to get ’em there, pardner. We’ll make it quick as we can, quick as a greased-up—”
A rifle round sped between armor louvers and shattered a side window.
“Scooter! Can you trace my coordinates from this signal?”
“Yep, I got your location, just hold ’em off there, old son—we’ll see what we can do. Won’t be real quick, but if you can hold out, why, I’m gonna charge you a big stack of cash for this’n—”
Marcus switched off the transmitter and ducked down, not a split second too quickly.
The window next to the driver’s seat exploded inward, blasted by an energy ball that singed the top of his head as it went past to detonate on his right. Shrapnel from a shattered window louver zinged past.
