Borderlands: The Fallen (17 page)

The circumstances seemed to call those ancient instincts
up within her. To make her want to follow him, forever, making a fire, arranging a bed for them, watching out for enemies as he slept … bearing his children …

She shuddered. This was insane. But the feeling was strong.

Then Vance came back into the shack, carrying a bloody carcass slung over his shoulder.

She stood up—and he dropped the dead animal at her feet. Then he took a long, serrated combat knife from a belt sheath, and threw it so it stuck in the carcass. “Marla, you got to clean that, and prepare it, ’cause we’re short on food. I had to trade some food for information. I found out where the truck is I want. The one they brought you in on. Same bunch. If you don’t like those fuckers, we can kill ’em. Might have to anyway. Meanwhile, we got to have food. Skag meat’s not bad if you hang it a couple hours, and salt it. See there, in the corner of the shack? That’s a drain. There’s a hook over it. Bag of salt on the shelf. You drag it to the drain, gut that skag, and I’ll hang it, then we’ll let it bleed out, and we’ll cut meat and salt it. May as well keep busy. We’re gonna be here till after dark …” He yawned, and wiped skag blood off his arms with a scrap of cloth. “I’m gonna get some more rest … you just about wore me out last night …”

He walked past Marla, leaving her in a welter of emotion. Vance was back. That was good. Only …
only …
because he would protect her till she could get back to her family. It wasn’t the bonding thing.

But he wanted her to gut this hideous, large, smelly animal. It looked about the size of a large wild boar, with three oddly splayed jaws, spines along its back, reptilian
skin. A horrible reek rose from it, like the repellent smell that garter snakes put out to drive away predators.

Contemplating the dead skag, and the idea of gutting it, her stomach tried to retreat into her bowels.

Still, Vance had gone out and killed the thing, at a risk to his own life. He was going to be protecting her—though she’d have to do some fighting herself—and she had to show him that she was useful. Suppose he decided that sex didn’t make her useful enough?

Marla sighed, and plucked out the knife. Grimacing and gagging, she began to carve at the creature’s belly.

The hard part was getting the knife into the skin. Once it was in, halfway down the blade—especially in the softer part near its groin—she found she could saw her way up to the ribs. Its general anatomy was not so different from a boar; the skeleton seemed roughly similar. Her hands ached by the time she got the belly split open. She made a cross cut, to open the belly up more …

Mottled purple and green, the skag’s guts slopped out, with a smell that doubled the repulsive reek of the creature’s exterior. Marla’s gagging redoubled too, especially when she had to reach into its still-warm, gooily wet interior to cut the guts loose, but she kept from vomiting until, in cutting the thing’s stomach off, something popped out …

A human hand, bitten off at the wrist.

She rushed to the drain in the corner of the shack, and vomited.

Still bent over, hands on her knees, she turned her head to see if Vance was sneering at her—but he was snoring instead, lying on his back on the raggedy bed, asleep, mouth open. In his right hand was a gun, held across his chest. His finger was on the trigger as he slept. Was the gun a
message that he couldn’t trust her, clasped there to warn her off—or was it there to protect them?

Marla straightened up, shook her head, and laughed softly to herself, not sure what she was laughing at, and returned to the skag carcass. Looking at the bitten-off hand, the thought passed through her mind that it could be Zac’s hand, or even Cal’s. But as she looked at it, despite the fact that the skin was half-digested away, she could see it was far bigger than their hands. Some bandit, wandered too far from his buddies, knocked over on his back, had tried to hold the slavering skag’s jaws back—and lost his hand for his trouble. To start with. She didn’t look into the stomach to see what else was there.

She found an old sack to put the guts and the hand in, using the knife blade to shove them into it. She carried the sack to the door, opened it slowly, and looked through. A sunny morning. A blessedly clean wind in her face. In the distance, down a series of stony slopes, she could see the ocean. Something flew through the sky over the sea—a rakk?

She saw no other movement but the slow nudging of clouds.

She dragged the sack of offal out in the open, tossed it behind a boulder. She hoped the smell wouldn’t attract scavengers, but there was no way she was going to share a shack with a pile of rotting skag guts. After a moment’s thought, she used her hands to cover it with sand.

She lingered outside, standing by the doorway, taking deep breaths of air. Then she went back inside, closing the door behind her.

“Vance?” she called. “Wake up! You going to help me hang up this skag carcass, or what?”

•   •   •

“Roland … ,” Cal whispered.

“Yeah kid?” Roland was barely audible, both of them trying not to be heard by the others. Roland was cleaning sand from the engine of his outrunner, Cal bending over it beside him, pretending to help. He glanced over at the mercs.

The mercs, twenty meters away, were mostly still gathered around the smoky campfire, grousing as they drank their morning coffee, some of them casting disapproving glances at Roland. Crannigan was up on the dune’s crest, talking to the sentry he was posting. Another was trudging sleepily down to get some rest.

Cal lowered his voice a notch more. “You think Crannigan buys the thing we told him about, uh, you’re gonna get money for me and only you can speak the language and … all that crap?”

“I think he half-believes it,” Roland whispered back. “But pretending he believes it—that’s just cover. More likely he’s decided he needs me—he’s expecting trouble these thugs can’t handle. I guess he knows me well enough to figure, if I say I’ll stand by him in a fight … I will.”

“You will? A guy like that?”

“Sure—long as I need him too. He’s on his way to where we’re going. Could be he’s doing the same thing we are—checking out the place your dad came down. Ol’ Scrap’s being mighty close-mouthed about it all. We’ll see. And once I don’t need him—I’ll tell him so. And I’ll tell him to his face. Then all bets are off. Him and me, we’ll go toe to toe. I’ll give him a little something special from my old pal McNee.”

“Crannigan and his men are going the same way we are?”

“That’s the way I heard it.”

“They work for Atlas?”

“They’re subcontractors, you might say. Atlas has its own men—Crimson Lances. But when they’re trying to keep something real quiet, they’ll use mercenaries. Guys who soldier for pay. Usually means they got some real dirty work to do …”

“Hey …” Cal lifted his head, listening. An anomalous keening, humming sound vibrated from above.

He peered up at the sky, half-expecting a swooping predator. But instead he saw a square of silver, growing bigger, bigger, as he came down toward them. “Something’s flying down to us! A transport!”

Roland stepped back and they both craned their heads to look. Within a minute, a silvery vehicle, about the size of a four-bedroom two-story house, was slowing to hover over them. About forty meters up, it was shaped like a step pyramid of silvery metal and glass, point upward, with oval pulsers at its four lower corners. Cal guessed it was an orbital landing craft, probably from a starship. He’d seen this model in pictures, but never in person.

It slowed, hovered, then eased over to the nearest hilltop, opposite the big dune, and settled down, extending struts to straighten it, hissing steam, its shimmering repulsion fields raising a cloud of blue dust. Along the lower tier of the metal step pyramid was the corporate logo, red against silver:

T
HE
A
TLAS
C
ORPORATION
: OTG V
ESSEL
452

A port opened, and a ramp extended. Down the ramp came four men. Two of them were bodyguards in heavy
armor—one silver, the other blue—their faces unseen behind opaque plasteel helmets, sleek Atlas rifles in their hands, heavy boots clanking on the ramp. They kept watch over a scruffy red-faced older man with lank hair, who limped as he walked, and a polished-looking young man in a clingsuit stenciled with a coat and tie; an executive, Cal supposed. The exec wore light blue sunglasses, a friendly, soft smile on his affable face.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Roland muttered. “That limping old duffer there is Rans Veritas. I know him from New Haven, and Fyrestone. Sneaky old hustler mostly. The guy with him—don’t know him. Got to be an Atlas exec. Come on, let’s see if they’ll let us listen in …”

They walked casually toward the shuttle. “Who’re the guys in the armor?” Cal asked, in an undertone.

“Canned soldiers, we call ’em. Probably Atlas elite. Usually more cold-blooded than a viper.”

Scrap Crannigan hurried up the slope to meet the men standing at the bottom of the ramp. Roland, Cal, and the mercs stood in a quiet group near the vessel, listening.

“Scrap, how are you?” called the slick guy in the blue sunglasses. “Rans here says he can take you to the site. You’ll go with him, cross-country from here.”

“That right, Gorman?” Crannigan seemed to be holding himself back as he spoke to the exec. He looked at Gorman with a dull, sullen hatred. “Why don’t you just take us up in that thing and set us down near it?”

“We haven’t got the exact coordinates. We had it down to a few hundred square klicks …”

“I know. And we’ve looked nearly every square centimeter …”

“And,” Gorman went on patiently, “Rans here says if we get too close to the ET site from the air, it’ll shoot us down. Uses some kind of beam we can’t shield against. We tried a drone, and we lost it. Never found out what happened to it. But it seems if you approach it from the ground …” He shrugged. “It’s possible.”

“Yeah? How long you had this information?”

“Not long. Rans here—he was trying to do an end run around us. Gave the info to an old associate of his. The guy crash landed between here and the site. Might be alive.”

Cal thought excitedly:
He’s talking like Dad is alive
…

“When we took Rans into … protective custody,” Gorman went on, “he offered to show us in person. This is as close as we can get from the air. We need you to get in there, run interference. Take down that thing’s defenses.”

“I saw a starship break up in orbit …”

Gorman nodded. “The
Homeworld Bound
. Signal from down here took over their security. We think it was the alien ship protecting itself.”

Roland snorted. “Liar,” he muttered.

“You still have those outriders we gave you?” Gorman asked.

Crannigan shrugged. “Still got two of ’em. Lost the others when we got nailed by some Primals. They were after”—he glanced over at Roland—“somebody else. They lost some pals, came after us instead. Kinda caught us by surprise.”

Roland smiled.

“We can give you a couple of sandtrackers,” Gorman said. “I’ll have my men offload them. It’s all we brought but it should get you to the vicinity. Check out that
DropCraft—we don’t want anybody else messing with the site, if you get my meaning.”

Crannigan nodded. “I got that message already. We’re heading there today. Let me tell you something, Gorman—there better be a payday at the end of this. You bastards have been holding stuff back.”

“Mr. Crannigan, I’m afraid I just don’t like your attitude. Remember that you work for us. You’re on salary—and you get the bonus we talked about if you succeed. Have no fear—it’ll make you a very rich man indeed.”

“Uh-huh. I could use some more men. How about these metal monsters of yours?”

“The bodyguards remain with me.” His affable expression became coldly ironic. “But you can have Rans Veritas. Maybe he’s good in a fight. Anyway—he’s your guide. It’s not just a question of location, as it turns out. It appears you’ve got to know just the right way to get into the alien ship. That’s where Mr. Veritas here comes in.”

He turned to go.

“What about those sandtrackers?” Crannigan demanded.

The exec replied as he walked up the ramp, not even turning around. “I’ll see they’re sent out.”

The bodyguards clanked up after him, one following close behind him, the other walking backward, keeping a wary eye on Crannigan.

The ramp withdrew into the ship, the port closed. The onlookers stood back as the shuttle took off.

Rans Veritas stayed behind. And he was staring, with a sort of dull hostility, right at Cal.

Z
ac was pretty sure something was stalking him. Trouble was, it was underground.

Spiderants, maybe. Or some of the other creatures Berl had told him about. Larva crab worms.

He was heading southwest down a mostly dried-out riverbed, stopping only once to refill his canteen from one of the few patches of water left. And every so often the ground trembled under his feet.

Now he felt the vibration underfoot again and looking behind him he saw the sand hump up in spots, as if something large was coming close to the surface. Something that was tracking him.