Borderlands: The Fallen (10 page)

Roland tossed a stick on the fire. It flared up a little, adding yellow highlights to his face, and to the goggles on his head. “Kid—you lie down, get some rest. We’ll check out your story tomorrow. But chances are, I’m gonna take you to Fyrestone. Little settlement a ways from here. I’ve gotta pick up a Scorpio Turret there anyhow. And send a message to McNee’s woman …” He shook his head sadly. “Anyhow, it’ll take a while, getting there. I’m gonna give you my shield, help protect you on the trip.”

“A shield? You don’t have to do that.”

“I know. I’m a damn fool like that, sometimes. But McNee …” He tossed another stick on the fire and scowled. “Never mind. You’ll wear the shield. ’Cause there’s no way we won’t run into trouble. Death comes regular as milestones out here. It’s gonna be us, or them. I’d rather it was them.”

“Who? The bandits?”

“Could be. Or spiderants, rakks, skags—ones you ran
into were the small, easy variety. Rumors have a
drifter
out in this desert somewhere’s. Haven’t seen it myself. Weird critters. Then there’s Crannigan, and his bunch of killers. I’m trying to avoid that rat-bastard till I get the timing right. But you can’t really avoid a fight on this planet, kid. Not for long. We got to be ready for it. And on the way to Fyrestone, we’re gonna make a little stop.”

“What for?”

“Gonna swipe some weapons from a bunch of bandits, is what. I just found out today exactly where they’re holed up. We might even get you a weapon. But you’re gonna have to do your part, kid. Now get some rest.”

Cal sighed, and stretched out by the fire, exhausted. He was going to have to trust Roland. No choice.

He closed his eyes, and wondered, before dropping into a deep black abyss of sleep, whether his mom and dad were alive.

Dad had come down first—he should be alive, if he took a DropCraft … shouldn’t he?

Z
ac froze, hardly daring to breathe, when someone shoved a cold shotgun muzzle against the back of his neck.

“That’s right,” Berl said, jabbing him with the shotgun muzzle. “Don’t you move, not a muscle.”

Zac was on his knees, blinking in the morning light, his hands in an old backpack. “Take it easy, Berl, I was just looking for a bite to eat. I woke up so damn hungry … and I can’t seem to choke down any of that rotting skag meat …”

Berl grunted and removed the gun muzzle. “It ain’t rotten yet. Skag meat
always
smells like that. Who said you could muck around in my goods?”

Zac turned slowly around, sat on the dirt, giving Berl his best look of injured innocence. “I thought we were partners, Berl.”

“Partners? Who said anything about partners?”

“Well you saved my life, you trusted me to stay in your camp …”

“Don’t mean you can rob me! Next you’ll be trying to find my stash of shock crystals!”

“I don’t even know what those are.”

“I sells ’em to settlement folks—sell ’em through them little Claptrap robots of theirs—and them New Haven types, they use the crystals to customize their fightin’ for electricity. Some will pay big money for it—so keep your damn hands off!”

What did he spend the money
on
? Zac wondered, looking around the shabby camp. Probably saved it up in some account somewhere. “Berl, I was just hoping for some old can of beans not too far past its eat-by date.”

Berl glared at him—then grunted, and pointed at a grungy cardboard box nearby. “There—packaged food. Scrounged it from a dead man’s camp. Might be edible. I’m gonna check on … my goods. And I do mean
my
goods.”

Berl shuffled off and Zac busied himself inspecting the contents of the cardboard box. Some of it was just edible. There was a package of something more or less like dried green beans, and another that
might
be synthetic chicken meat.

Zac ate hungrily, and waited to see if he’d get sick. It occurred to him he might perish right here, on this spot, writhing in the gray-blue dirt of this alien world—dead from food poisoning. That would be an ignominious death, but maybe it was what he deserved. He’d thrown away the last of his family’s money on Rans’s crackpot scheme. The whole plan seemed to have brought down the
lightning on them—and in fact, on the
Homeworld Bound
, from what Berl was saying.

Zac had an intuition—or was it just denial?—that his family had escaped the ship. But had everyone aboard gotten out? Was he indirectly responsible for killing the crew of that vessel?

And—why had the flying security bot sabotaged his DropCraft? Who’d sent it? What exactly
had
happened to the
Homeworld Bound
?

Be good to talk to Rans. Talk to him or, better yet, shake the truth out of him. Guesswork suggested that Rans had told someone else about the crashed vessel—someone who didn’t want Zac finding it. Or maybe any craft scheduled to go to those coordinates would be attacked.

And what had Zac done? Just sent the landing coordinates to his wife, that’s all. Meaning that whoever targeted Zac—also targeted
her
. And Cal.

Yeah. He deserved food poisoning.

But it didn’t come. Just a little nausea. And with it, the thought that even if his wife was alive—she might never forgive him. He’d felt her drawing quietly away from him, long before all this had happened. He’d been reckless, irresponsible more than once. She wasn’t sure about the emigration to Xanthus. Now this …

Zac got up, and stretched, thinking he should check on Berl. He had to come to some kind of understanding with the old man, try to win his trust.

Blinking in the slanting beams of the rising sun, Zac looked around at the rusty sheet metal mess of Berl’s camp. Spears of light pierced the rust holes in the walls of corrugated metal. He caught a movement from the corner of his
eye, turned to see Bizzy rearing up in the distance, about forty meters away, looking down from its perch on its stiltlike legs, at something else. Probably listening to Berl.

He remembered the alien artifact the old man wore around his neck. Could be, in his fit of paranoia, Berl was off checking more than just his shock crystals. Maybe he had more alien artifacts over there.

Maybe that old man
did
know where the crashed ship was—the very thing that Zac had come here for.

Zac shook his head. He shouldn’t get distracted trying to find that damned ship. Not without the DropCraft to get back in. He should try to find his family.
A hunnerd klicks to the west.

A hundred kilometers to the west, something had fallen from the sky. Maybe just burning debris. Or maybe a lifeboat. Not that far from where he’d come down. Was it his wife, his son?

He should go there and see. If he could even get there alive. He shouldn’t look for that crashed spacecraft …

But suppose he found it? He’d make a fortune. Then Marla would
have
to forgive him.

Anyway, it couldn’t hurt just to find out if the ship was nearby.

He hurried down the slope, crossed laterally on a sandy shelf of rock, heading toward Bizzy.

Rounding a great wedge of blue stone he spotted Bizzy first, the drifter with its back to him. It was poised on its four teetering legs high over the old man, who was crouched in the mouth of a cave about thirty meters away. The old man was looking at something that glinted in the sun. The shock crystals?

Zac crept closer, in the shelter of intervening boulders, feeling guilty—the old man had saved his life and now Zac was skulking about, spying on him. But he kept slipping closer, on tiptoes, until he was crouched behind a jut of rock just a few meters from the cave mouth. He could see Berl, between Bizzy’s long, pipelike legs. The old hermit was crouching over a small pit dug in the soil under the cave mouth, lifting something into view. Not a crystal.

It was an artifact—and not Eridian. Zac had seen plenty of Eridian extraterrestrial artifacts in holograms.

This was something very different from the Eridian style. It was translucent, glimmering with inner power—a restless shape he’d never seen before, a spiral that
changed
shape, twisting like a snake as Berl switched it from hand to hand. It seemed almost alive.

Berl held it up to the sun—in his open palm—and it spun about, seemed to point itself, off across the desert.

Berl gazed that way himself. “Don’t wanta go back to that ship, less’n I have to, Bizzy,” Berl said. “But I might just have to …”

Zac drew back and slipped away, keeping the rocks between him and Berl, returning to the camp. The whole time, he kept hearing Berl’s words echoing in his mind:
Don’t wanta go back to that ship …

Berl knew where the crashed ship was, and where a fortune in alien artifacts could be found. And the son of a bitch was keeping it all to himself.

Marla woke up, sitting bolt upright, staring around blearily in the unfamiliar surroundings. She hadn’t expected to sleep—and certainly not without being attacked. But
that’s the way it had been. Had they drugged her? It didn’t feel that way. She’d simply been exhausted. She was in a snug cabin of wood and metal, undecorated, with a white-painted metal door.

It was a houseboat, judging from the view out the window. A small swell from the breeze rocked it in the water.

Through the window she could see the pier, and bright sunlight on metal shacks, rusting junk piles scavenged from ships, small wooden shelters, walkways, rope bridges. Here and there was a tree, but she could see that it was faked up, somehow. Part of the island’s camouflage.

She got up, slipped her shoes on, and tried the door to the passage—and no surprises there. It was locked.

She went back to the window. Suppose she got it open, squeezed out, swam away. To where?

The lock turned and she spun on her heel. Vance was grinning at her from the door. “Right this way. I’ll show you where you can wash up, and we’ll get some food. Then we’ll talk about what’s on this uni of yours.”

He stepped into the narrow hall and she reluctantly followed. He gestured with a pistol—she walked ahead of him to a bathroom, of sorts. A spigot jutted high in the wall over a hole in the floor, a cake of soap that looked like it had never been used, a scrap of towel.

“Clean up in there,” he said. “Water ain’t potable but it’s filtered enough to wash in. No window. Lock the door. But don’t take your sweet time. Grunj wants a good look at you. He’s come back early.”

As it happened, Grunj didn’t wait long to take a look at her. She was just toweling off after taking a shower when the door unlocked, and he entered, spinning a key ring
on his finger, staring frankly at her naked body. A stocky, barrel-chested man, whose face was hard to see—it seemed mostly beard at first. The immediate effect was of someone who had an inverted, elaborately coiffed wig slipped over the lower part of his face. Grunj’s great brown beard was curled and braided into an elaborate pelt sculpture. It grew up onto his cheekbones, nearly to his eye sockets; the hair on his head was cut into curlicues that rose like exotic plants from his scalp, long as a man’s forearm. He had tiny brown eyes, and from his projecting ears dangled scrounged oddments of glass and copper. His stubby nose was beringed in gold. He wore a shiny brown leather coat that hung to his knees, large black boots, military green trousers, and a red silk shirt that strained with his bulging belly. The smell coming thickly off him suggested he rarely bathed. If ever.

Grunj chuckled, looking her over, rubbing his thick-fingered, hairy hands. “You’ll do fine,” he rumbled, as she tried to cover her nakedness. “I’ll get a brimmin’ bucket o’ bucks for you, missy ho.”

“Don’t call me—”

Casually as a man smacking at a mosquito, he backhanded her, so that she stumbled backward and struck the wall, stunned. He turned and spoke to someone in the passage. “Missy ho has to be brushed up pretty, and then we’ll take her to the slavers. Maybe in a day or two, after I’ve had my rest.”

As she cringed into a corner of the shower, she heard Vance’s voice from the hall. “If’n you say so. But suppose
I
want to bid for her?”

“I don’t want none of you men buying her. If she’s
’round here long, she’ll cause trouble.” All the time Grunj was still ogling her, though it seemed the look a man would give a horse he had bought, more than lust. “Already had some men kill each other over a bet. Don’t have time to recruit men all the damn day. Hard to get. Going to have to hang another for insubordination. Waste of manpower. Just do what I said about missy ho, there.”

“Sure thing, Grunj,” Vance said. “How about a drink?”

“Naw, I’ve got a new guest in my cabin, I’m gonna go check on the dwarfish little bugger …”

Grunj lumbered off, closing the door behind him, and Marla quickly got dressed. Her clothes were self-cleaning, once taken off, and they were reasonably fresh now. What had he meant by ‘dwarfish little bugger’? Could he have been referring to a child? He didn’t have Cal in his cabin, did he?

She was just pulling on her shoes when the door opened—she drew back, but relaxed a little when she saw it was Vance.

He looked at her ruefully. “Enjoy meeting Grunj, did you? Decided he wanted to see everything there was to see, and quick.”