Borderlands: Gunsight (6 page)

“Back—
grenaaaade
!” Ripper shouted, and the men scrambled almost atop one another to get back around the corner.

Daphne was jerking the door on the right open as the grenade went off—shrapnel whined off the door as she and Mordecai and Bloodwing ducked through it, then started up a stone stairway.

“Near as I can figure it,” Mordecai panted, taking the steps three at a time, “the Buzzard pad is up this way, this side of the building—so maybe luck’ll be with us.”

They made it two flights up, coming out of the basement level, and then two Marauders pushed through the door at the next level, shouting obscenities and firing sloppily down the stairs. Bullets cracked and whizzed past Mordecai as he pushed Daphne back and rushed at the Marauders, the Cobra blazing, bullets flying.

Bloodwing had flown on ahead of him, was flapping at their eyes, scratching and pecking, confusing them. Mordecai’s burst blew a Marauder’s knee out of his leg; the man went down, tumbling past Mordecai to be dispatched by Daphne. The other one was trying to shoot Bloodwing—he had a shield, but Mordecai was close enough to jam the gun muzzle through the Marauder’s relatively weak force-field. He pulled the trigger, aiming upward under the man’s chin—the Marauder’s face disappeared, along with the top of his head.

Gasping, heart thudding, Mordecai found he was on a landing that opened onto another, narrower stairway. “Come on!”

He ran through the door, Bloodwing flapping up ahead of him, Daphne close behind. There were shouts from below—he thought he heard Ripper’s voice issuing orders.

But the spiral staircase suddenly came to an end at the helipad, where a double-rider Buzzard sat, guarded by only one Marauder.

Bloodwing was tearing at the man’s face, so that the guard staggered backward and fell off the helipad platform, crashing heavily onto the street below.

“Good girl!” Mordecai shouted, running toward the flying machine.

“You talking to me or your real girlfriend with the wings?” Daphne asked as she rushed up to the small helicopter.

“My escape plan,” Mordecai said, ignoring the gibe, “involves you being able to fly this damn thing! Can you do it?” He tossed the Cobra aside—no room for it in the Buzzard.

Daphne was shrugging as she climbed into the chopper. “Um . . .
probably
I can fly it. It’s kind of like a Surikkian Tumble Flyer . . . I’m checked out on those . . . more or less.”

They were both settling into the dual cockpit under the double rotors of the small open-air chopper. The seat belts automatically slithered over them of their own accord and hooked into place. The vehicle had a shield, Mordecai noted, as the force-field came to life, creating a transparent bubble of purplish energy around them. Looked like a weak shield, though. Still, there was a down-angled machine gun mounted between the two bucket seats. He quickly grasped how the machine gun was operated—and by then Daphne had the engine whirring, the rotors spinning, kicking up a column of wind around them. Bloodwing screeched and flew up, to wait for them on high—and as Daphne pulled back on the stick the Buzzard tilted forward . . . then plunged toward the street below.

A rocket shell flashed past them, exploding on the helipad above them as they almost crashed headlong into the street. Guardsmen ran shouting to get out of their way. Bullets and Eridian blasts cut past . . .

“Daphne—?” Mordecai said, between gritted teeth.

Then she got the hang of it, and the Buzzard grabbed the air, got some vertical lift going, and tilted forward, rising, up and up, till Daphne shifted it into horizontal flight and they headed toward the outskirts of the city.

Mordecai shook his head in stunned amazement. Had they really done it? It seemed they had. Luck, and skill, and more luck.

Another rocket flashed past. He watched it go, missing—and then saw it turn in midair, arcing back at them again as the Buzzard rose up and up. It was some kind of heatseeker.

“Mordecai—!”

“I see it, Daph!” He was already clutching the joystick
of the machine gun control, and a set of red-line holo-projected crosshairs danced in his line of sight. He instinctively fixed the crosshairs on the nose of the oncoming rocket and squeezed the trigger, keeping the crosshairs tracking the warhead as it came. The rocket was hit squarely, exploding too far away to wreck them—but close enough that the Buzzard rollicked in the shock wave and flak sparked in the chopper’s weakening shield. More gunfire sang into the shield from below and he saw the energy flickering, threatening to burn out; but now Daphne was lofting them high over Gunsight, and they were angling off to the north, so that the shooters were losing their fix on the Buzzard.

“By Skagzilla’s Arse—we really pulled it off!” Mordecai said.

“We’re not home free yet!” Daphne shouted, over the noise of the engine. Her hair was fluttering about in the wash from the rotors. “And where are we going to go? We can’t go home. He’s going to come after us! That megalomaniacal son of a hive is all about . . . wait. What—?”

The Buzzard was slowing, slowing . . . and stopping in midair.

“We losing power?” Mordecai asked, his mouth going dry.

Looking down he could see the outskirts of Gunsight below. There were gun emplacements turning their way now.

“No, no,” Daphne said. They both looked up at the rotors, saw the blades still whipping around. “It’s just—maybe the directional controls were damaged by incoming . . . uh-oh.”

Now the Buzzard was turning around . . . and heading back the way they’d come. Daphne was struggling with the control stick . . . but it moved in her grip with a life of its own.

“Oh no,” Mordecai muttered.

“It’s being remote-controlled!” she yelled. “They’ve got some kind of lock on it now! It must have a home-base override . . . dammit!”

“We gotta find where the signal’s coming from! If we can break off the antenna, maybe you can get control back!”

But they couldn’t find the control antenna, and in less than a minute they were flying, quite involuntarily, above the main avenue, back over the stronghold’s walls, and down toward the helipad. Mordecai tried aiming the machine gun—but it was locked up. Frozen. Would not turn or fire. The shield flickered and went out.

Mordecai shouted a quick warning to Bloodwing to stay out of reach and then they were landing on the helipad.

Where Commander Ripper waited with Boss Jasper and three other men, all of them grinning.

A few moments later, they’d landed on the helipad. Their seat belts unhooked themselves and retracted. Seeing five powerful weapons pointed at them, Daphne dropped her pistol and put her hands up over her head.

“
Heeeyyy, hi
again, you guys!” she said, cheerfully.

Mordecai glared at her. But then, he figured, what else could she say?

“A
nd now,” Boss Jasper was saying smugly, “we can show you the lady’s
real
accommodations.”

As he spoke, he led them through an armored door into a fairly large circular room at the top of one of the stronghold’s towers.

Both Mordecai and Daphne had their arms tightly shackled behind them.

“You sure that bloody-beaked vulture thing of his isn’t around?” Ripper asked, looking at the other Nomad striding behind Mordecai and Daphne.

The Nomad, his face scarred, one eye missing, grunted assent. “Flew off. Gone.”

They stepped into the big circular room and Jasper turned toward them, waving his arms about him grandly. “You see? I had it waiting for her all along!” he crowed gleefully.

It was ostensibly comfortable in appearance—a large circular room with a circular bed in the center, a pleasant heat emanating from small vents in the curved metal walls. At
intervals, in place of windows, hung a few digital paintings looping through images of the homeworld and other planets. Occasionally they showed Pandora seen from orbit. There was a table and chair, with a lamp on it, beside the bed. A wine pitcher stood on the table, along with wineglasses and cutlery. “Bathroom’s through there,” Jasper said, pointing at the only other door. “Has a shower, the works. Of course, if the floor trigger goes off, why, it goes off there, too, and everything lifts out of the way and . . . well . . . there’s really no escape then. We’ll have to replace the bed and the other little pieces of furniture, if that happens. But as you can see, Mordecai, it’s pretty comfortable. She’ll be well fed, and she won’t be chained up. There are holofilms to watch, books can be ordered on this screen here, and—”

“I wonder if you’d be good enough to back the docent tour up,” Daphne said. “Just to the part about the floor trigger. What’s that about?”

“Oh, that?” Jasper beamed at her, teeth sparkling. He reached into a pocket, took out something that looked like an old-fashioned remote control, but with a few crystalline oddments added. “This, of course, is what I used to direct your stolen Buzzard to bring you back to us. It’s good for lots of things. Look . . .”

He pointed the device at the floor and pressed a button. The floor, till now opaque gray-black, instantly became a thick transparent pane of glass. Through it, they could see another chamber down below.

In the chamber was a monster. About the monster’s bare, deformed feet was a litter of bones and offal, feces and much-gnawed skulls.

Daphne gulped, looking at it, but she quickly regained her
composure. “Ah! Right!
That
must be Bigjaws! Volto . . . the
late
Volto . . . mentioned him to me.”

“Oh yes, that’s dear, dear Bigjaws!” said Jasper proudly. “That’s my little pet!”

Mordecai stared at the creature. Nude except for a filthy loincloth, the mutant was humanoid but about three meters tall—far taller than Mordecai—and proportionately beefy. Symmetry ended at the giant head. Bigjaws’ skull was small—but his jaws were almost as big as his chest. The mutant’s head was, in point of fact, almost entirely made up of its mouth. Mordecai could make out two tiny eyes on the front of the little hump of its skull back of the huge jaws, and slitlike nostrils. Its neck was thick as a tree trunk and heavily veined.

Bigjaws saw them, then—and reached upward, huge hands grasping, opening and closing, claws not quite reaching the transparent ceiling that was also the floor of the circular room. The mutant opened his mouth wide, his maw looking big enough to swallow a small man whole. He had two rows of crooked, spiky yellow teeth on gigantic lipless mandibles, like some ancient saurian’s, and a white, slithery tongue lashed about with a life of its own, licking up at them and splashing drool onto the ceiling; the spit dripped languidly back on the mutant’s head. The creature roared with frustration and the huge jaws snapped; the floor vibrated with its sound.

Bigjaws jumped up, then, on his big legs, snapping at them—and even Jasper stepped back. “Heh! He’s a caution, ain’t he? Started out more or less human. Once he was one o’ them Tunnel Rat humanoids—already a cannibal! I captured him for sport, had him mutated special to put the fear of God
into my men—I make sure they all get to see him gobble up somebody who ticked me off! It’s highly instructive.”

“So, right now he can see us up here,” Mordecai remarked. “But, uh—can he
get
up here?”

“Oh no, not at all!” Jasper chuckled. “Instead—what’s up
here
goes down to
him
. I simply push a combination of three buttons on this controller . . . and the floor will open up. Slides right outta the way! Everything up here, wherever you are, will be dumped down there! Normally it’s not so nicely set up here, in this room, with the bed and all. But seeing as we were having the lady here as our guest, and she may be here for some time . . .”

Mordecai looked at Jasper. “You had this figured the whole time?”

Jasper rubbed his hands together in pleasure. “You bet your skinny ass I did, Mordecai! I needed to know how good you were . . . and I needed to see how motivated you were to get the lady out. I figured you’d go for the Buzzard as the quickest escape. All my Buzzards are subject to remote control, when I need ’em to be. So . . . I sent you to see her, under guard . . . not quite by my best men . . . and you didn’t disappoint me! You rid me of some dead weight—and showed me a little sample of what you were capable of.” His whimsical air departed; Jasper became dead serious. “Then I showed you what
I
was capable of . . . and how there’s really no escape from me. Not unless I choose to let you go.”

Jasper turned to Ripper. “Go ahead, feed the baby.”

Ripper nodded, then spoke into a wrist comm and a steel chute opened in the wall of the room down below. Several still-warm bodies fell out of the chute, flopping limply into
Bigjaws’ chamber. Mordecai recognized them as the bodies of men he and Daphne had killed—including Volto.

Bigjaws trumpeted and rushed toward the heap of corpses. The monster fell to his knees and began to feed, ripping into them like a starving dog tearing into scraps of meat. Mordecai watched as Bigjaws crunched skulls and backbones, the mutant whipping his head back and forth to rip the bodies apart. Blood splashed, some of it reaching the ceiling.