by John Shirley
• • •
“I think maybe I can fix this,” Brick said, looking at the engine. “Maybe he didn’t know how to wreck it good. Or maybe he wasn’t trying.”
At Daphne’s urging, Brick had pushed the outrunner into the center of the hilltop camp, near the dead campfire left by Roland and Mordecai. That way the outrunner was out of sight of potential enemies on the lowlands below. And this being Pandora, pretty much anyone down there was a potential enemy.
Daphne leaned on a bumper and looked at the engine. “Mordecai wasn’t trying to cripple us for good. Just slow us down.”
“How do you know?” Brick asked, removing his studded gauntlets so he could reach more deeply into the engine.
“Oh, Mordecai wouldn’t do that to me.” She looked out over the desert. She could just see the dust of Roland’s outrunner in the distance. “Mordecai’s kind of cute in a way. I wonder if I could get him to shave off that beard.”
“Kind of cute? That one? Ha! I could crush him with one hand!”
“And that contradicts kind of cute, how? Anyway, he’s a damned good shot.” She heard a rumble of engines from the north side of the hill. “What’s that?”
Gruff voices followed the engine noise, accompanied by the sound of metal clanking.
“What’s what?” Brick asked distractedly, reattaching a wire.
“I just remembered something—” She picked up her rifle, an Atlas Pearl Havoc, and checked the load. “Cess was saying something about how the General Goddess’s second division is divided into Knife Legion and Hatchet Legion. And Knife Legion was headed off to the southwest, to prep for some assault on a settlement. But Hatchet Legion . . .”
Brick looked up from the engine. “They’re here? Time for me to bust heads!” He pulled his gauntlets back on. “I’m ready to bust heads. I’m hot to trot for punch time!”
“Maybe you’ll get your chance, Brick,” she said in a low voice. “But I’d rather give that fight a miss right now. Stay low, let me see if—”
But it was too late. She fell silent as Psycho soldiers bearing the skull-like G rose up over the rim of the hilltop—on all sides. They scrambled into view almost simultaneously, stepping onto the rim with a clop of many boots, as if choreographed. They grinned at her, and hooted, and pointed their rifles and shotguns . . . and seemed to wait for permission to start killing.
Daphne swallowed, looking around. So many of them, so well armed, and they were all around. There really was no way out.
She’d fought for her life a dozen times, across the galaxy. She’d killed numerous men, all of them scumbags . . . and then she’d gone to the scumbags who’d hired her, to get her pay. She’d survived the torpedoing of her spacecraft in orbit around Vargas Two, a bullet that’d just missed her heart on Grimm’s World, a cloud of deadly toxins on the Choking Moons, and having to fight her way past two eight-legged, tusked guard mastiffs twice the size of a full-grown skag on Cerberus III. All that—only to die here, it seemed, on this hellhole of a planet.
Brick saw it differently. He was delighted with the arrival of an army of enemies. “Now this is odds I like!” He cracked his fists together, backing toward the rear of the outrunner, probably planning to get to the turret gun.
Then Daphne saw Broomy, climbing up to the hilltop and into view, her scarred face creased with a grin. “I found the Goddess’s army!” Broomy crowed, with a sweep of her hand, “and I brung it back with me just fer you!”
“If you’re looking for Roland, he’s not here!” Daphne yelled. “Neither is Mordecai! You can find their outrunner tracks on the other side of the hill! Your fight is with them, Broomy, not with us! We got no grudge against the General!”
Broomy laughed, and the others laughed with her, a psychotic chorus. The smell of their mouths, rank and rotten, rolled over Daphne with their laughter.
Broomy pointed at her. “You know how many of our people that Brick there killed?”
Brick hooted at that. “I know! Ask me. Thirty-seven!”
“And you,” Broomy went on, glowering at Daphne. “The General knew you was with him, but she wanted to recruit you anyhow. She gave you a chance! And what’d you do? You walked away! Well, you lost your chance!!”
Doesn’t much matter if I die here, Daphne decided. Everybody’s got to die somewhere. It’s probably never going to be where you want it to be.
She raised her combat rifle, very slowly . . .
“Who gets to git some offa that little woman first there?” asked a bare-chested Psycho in a plastic industrial mask, tittering after he asked it. His chest showed Gynella’s insignia—but in scars.
“Not you!” Daphne told him, and she shot him in the head—twice. He fell back stone dead, his shield flickering.
“Cheap shield,” one of the Psychos observed, looking at the body.
“Get her!” Broomy howled.
Guns were trained on Daphne; the Psycho soldiers started toward her and Brick.
“Don’t kill her yet!” a Psycho howled gleefully, stepping down from the rim onto the hilltop. “I likes the bodies warm!”
But before the others could fire at Daphne, Brick vaulted into the outrunner; he scooped up a rocket launcher and was working the outrunner’s machine-gun turret with one hand while firing the rocket launcher—tucked against his side—with the other.
“Yeah, bringing the pain!” Brick shouted as he fired.
Broomy dived out of the way just as a rocket shell blasted a chunk of rock near her, the blast flinging three Psychos into the air.
“Show me some blood!” Brick cackled.
Four more Psycho soldiers were shot off the hilltop, ripped in a strafe of his concentrated machine-gun fire. “Damn, I’m good!” he yelled.
Daphne had turned, was firing methodically at the Psycho soldiers ranged behind Brick, to protect his back, blowing away the top of one Psycho’s skull, knocking another backward off his perch on a boulder—but the soldiers were firing too, and she was hit. She staggered and danced with the impacts of their bullets on her energy shield.
Another burst of gunfire knocked the rifle from her hand, and Daphne spun with the force of the burst and went down. Her shield was struck again and again. It weakened until a bullet penetrated the energy shield and hit her grazingly in the shoulder, and then she was hit by three electrically charged shots fired by a Bruiser. The rounds caused her to arch her back and convulse with shock—
And she lost consciousness.
• • •
Brick blasted half a dozen more Psycho soldiers off the hill with his rocket launcher, till he ran out of shells and tossed it aside, emptying the machine gun with his other hand.
Then the Psychos rushed him, firing, bullets rebounding from his shield. But the shield wouldn’t last long with this barrage, he knew.
Brick let the feeling rise up in him.
Normally, he tried to keep that feeling down—it was dangerous. Sometimes he killed the wrong people when it took him over.
But today—right now—it was time to go . . . berserk.
That special something he called the berserk feeling took him over the top at times like this.
He passed into that state, and he began to kill. A crimson light suffused his senses, and he roared wordlessly—“Yarrrrrrghhhh!”—and leapt off the outrunner into a throng of his enemies, scattering them like a runaway train hitting a herd of animals.
The Psycho soldiers were flung backward from him, their blood splashing, bones flying, teeth spinning away, as he jackhammered into them with his fists, faster and faster, right left, right left, right left, faster than the eye could follow.
A Bruiser rushed at him, and Brick smashed his fist right through the man’s breastbone, yanked out the still-beating heart, and stuffed it down the dying man’s throat, all in less than a second. Fist still bloody, he turned to strike another Psycho before the ripped-open Bruiser had quite fallen dead. Brick smashed every bone in his next target’s head: jaw, cheekbones, cranium
flew to flinders all in one blow.
Bullets cracked into his shield, and it began to give out. He felt the protection slipping away from him, but he didn’t care; he was mad with bloodlust as he gripped a Psycho by the neck with his right hand, another by the face with his left. With his right hand he squeezed hard, crazy hard, and caused the man’s blood to explode out of his eye sockets, making his eyeballs fly out with it; with his left, Brick dug his middle and index fingers squishily deep into the other Psycho’s eye sockets, got a grip, and ripped the front of the man’s skull off.
Those two Psycho soldiers fell, and he smashed two more with fists slammed left-right to their sternums, then turned to another—
Who was pointing a very large-caliber weapon at his head? It was a Tediore Avenger, aimed at him from about a meter away.
Brick roared defiance, his bellowing kill rage echoing across the Borderlands as he prepared to rush the Tediore—and then his enemy fired.
The bullet struck Brick glancingly in the side of his head, gouging but not penetrating—still he kept moving, grabbing the Tediore’s barrel. And he used the weapon as a club to brain the gunman, and then the bloodied rifle slipped from his fingers.
Brick swayed . . .
And stared wildly around him . . .
And fell onto his back, toppling down like an ancient tree chainsawed at the base and crashing to the ground. The impact of the bullet had finally penetrated his thick skull enough to knock him cold—and now darkness closed over him.
• • •
It was a hot, dusty day on the parade ground, and Smartun was tired of supervising the marching drill. The soldiers, so called, were barely capable of keeping order, as they tramped in ragged lines back and forth, and he had to break up fights every ten minutes. The army typically lost a man every couple of days to a casual murder in the barracks. Smartun tried to avoid deaths on the parade ground when he could. But these knuckleheads seemed untrainable sometimes.
It didn’t matter. Gynella wanted them trained anyway. And Smartun wanted whatever Gynella wanted.
Still, he was relieved when she sauntered up to him and made a peremptory wave of her hand that allowed him to dismiss the soldiers.
“Take it easy in the barracks!” he called after them. “And don’t kill each other! It’s against the rules!”
Grumbling, and with many hungry, backward looks at Gynella, they filed off to the barracks.
“My General?” he asked, turning to her, inclining his head respectfully. “Something’s up, no?”
“Something’s up, yes. I have the Second Division down on the southwestern frontier of the Salt Flats. There’s a ripe settlement down there we want to overrun; we want to loot it and enslave it. Place called Bloodrust Corners.” Almost as a vagrant afterthought, she added, “And of course, be sure to kill anyone who resists.”
He nodded. Of course.
“But,” she went on, “someone there has had the clever idea of setting up a big, high metal wall, guard towers, and other barriers around the settlement. They knew we were coming, and . . . well, there are moats of fire, there are kill-mechs, a lot of nasty things.”
“Kill-mechs at a settlement? Where’d they get those?”
“It appears that they were a mining settlement. The kill-mechs double as mining robots, with drills and the like. They may have been retrofitted for the extra duty . . . there’s someone clever there. But I won’t be stopped, Smartun. I need that territory—it’s all part of the plan!”
He nodded. He’d seen her charts, knew she had a strategy for taking over the planet by taking over key territories, especially those heavy with resources that could be embargoed till she was accepted as ruler of the planet.
She shaded her eyes and looked out across the Salt Flats, below the Devil’s Footstool. “I want you to go there, Smartun, take half the First Division, reinforce the Second, and deal with these problems. I need someone cleverer than they’ve got with the Knife Legion, and I’m hoping you’re the man. I’ve got to stay here for now and make sure we’re ready for the Dahl operatives. But I will come out and inspect the battlefield, and soon. I’ll be looking to see what progress you’ve made.”
He bowed deeply this time. “I will not disappoint you. I would rather die, my General.”
She smiled thinly. “That’s the spirit.”
He watched her, lovingly and achingly, as she walked back to her headquarters.
Roland was thirstier than a miner on payday.
They were trying to keep from drinking too much of their water. But it was hard to conserve in this baking heat.
“Suppose we break out of here before they find us,” Mordecai mused, as he trimmed his beard. “Where do we go? They’ll pursue, and they’ve got long-range weapons . . .”
Bloodwing, sitting on its perch in the outrunner, squawked as if concurring with its master’s view of the situation.
They were parked in the shade of the western canyon wall, as far as possible from Gynella’s army. Roland was sitting on the ground, his back to the outrunner’s warm metal. Mordecai was sitting on a rock nearby, looking in a little hand mirror as they talked and trimming his beard with the tiniest pair of scissors Roland had ever seen.
“I don’t see how they haven’t found us yet,” Roland said.
“They’re kind of oriented to the southwest—they’re looking mostly out that way, focusing on that settlement over there. Pretty well-reinforced place called Bloodrust Corners. I was there overnight once.”
“Must be pretty damned well defended if Gynella’s bunch is waiting this long.”
“Yeah. They got some kill-mechs, a wall shield, some other stuff. They thought it through. See, it’s a co-op mine, run by the settlers, not a corporation effort. The miners do the work, share the profits. Kind of a new deal on this planet. There’s a guy there named Dakes, same color as you are. He’s got the place organized for good defense.”
“Huh. They got a ECHO antenna there?”
“Yeah. Kind of short-range, I’d guess.”
“We won’t need much range,” Roland said, standing and dusting himself off. “I’m gonna get close, and you’re gonna talk to them on the ECHO.”
“Get close? How? There’s an army between us and them!”
“So? You wanna die here of thirst? Or wait till they notice us and start firing shells in here?”
Mordecai sighed. “What the hell. Let’s do this. I didn’t figure to live forever, anyway.”
“Okay. You’re driving, I’m on the turret.”
“Nah, man,” Mordecai said. “You’re a better target standing up there than me. Turn me sideways, I almost disappear. And I’m a better shot than you, Roland, face it.”
“So you say, Mordecai. Now’s your chance to prove it. There are only twelve explosive shells left in that thing. Put that beauty on single shot, and fire it carefully. Now, let’s take us a real long drink of water. We’re gonna need it.”
Two minutes later, they were tooling up the slope, headed right for the rear lines of Gynella’s Knife Legion, Second Division.
When they got to the top of the slope, Roland slammed the accelerator and yelled, “Fire at will, man! But pick those targets!”
• • •
The army had pitched camp about a quarter-klick from the outer front gates of Bloodrust Corners, and they were lolling about, drinking, floundering in wrestling bouts, when the yawning sentries noticed the outrunner roaring up on them from the badlands. Roland was driving, Mordecai standing behind him at the big gun turret. Bloodwing was clinging to Mordecai’s shoulder, its head ducked, its red eyes glaring a challenge at the enemy.
They got closer, closer yet, and now the sentries were taking aim at them, and Roland wondered when Mordecai was going to get around to firing the turret gun.
Bullets cracked overhead and zinged off the armored front of the outrunner. Roland hunched down far as he could and still drive.
“Mordecai? You still back there?”
&
nbsp; “You said to pick my targets. Let me concentrate!”
The enemy lines were forming up now, about fifty meters off. Forty. Thirty . . .
“Mordecai?”
A bullet cracked into the outrunner’s roll bar.
A Psycho was stepping out with a big rocket launcher on his shoulder and a grin on his face.
“Oh, Mordecai?”
Mordecai fired a shell—whoomf!—and it went directly into the rocket launcher’s muzzle, down the tube, and struck the rocket inside, which was just then coming up the barrel.
The rocket launcher exploded in a ball of fire, taking the weapon, the Psycho, and four other soldiers standing on either side of him with it.
“Good shot!” Roland admitted.
Especially good, he thought, since the outrunner was bumping along on the uneven ground, bouncing on its shocks, and sometimes jumping hummocks.
Roland steered for the gap in the lines that Mordecai had made with that shot.
Mordecai fired again, three times more in quick succession, taking out a sniper, a Psycho with a submachine gun in each hand, and four men reaching into a box of grenades. He hit the box, and they all blew up with it.
Then the outrunner was careening right through the enemy lines, men running to get out of their way, some of them firing after them. Roland drove right over one of General Goddess’s standards, her sign on a dyed cloth hoisted on a wooden pole, the pole snapping and flipping past him.
Mordecai shouted an order at Bloodwing, something Roland couldn’t clearly hear, and the creature was suddenly flapping and soaring, then diving at the face of a man swinging a tripod machine gun toward the outrunner. The man screamed as Bloodwing, hovering in front of his face, scratched both his eyes out with a practiced double motion, one eye with each set of talons.
Roland dodged the vehicle past a rocket launcher, so that the rocket missed and killed two Psychos; Mordecai blew up that launcher too as they were passing it.
Up ahead he saw a cluster of three Psychos with combat rifles trying to get a bead on him. Roland’s only weapon at the moment was the outrunner itself, and he knew better than to slam it into those beefcakes head on. That’d probably wreck him. Instead he acted as if he was veering completely around them, ducked under a spray of bullets, and then cut sharply back toward them, hitting the group glancingly. Bing bang boom, he hit the three in sequence, and he could hear bones popping with each impact.
