Borderlands: Gunsight (32 page)

“Come on, Fluron!” She reached down and helped him climb out. “We’re going out through the ramp entrance.”

She jumped onto the bulkhead—it was now a kind of deck, with the ship turned over—and helped Fluron climb down.

“Oh, my head is killing me,” he murmured.

“You’ll be all right.”

“What happened?”

“Not sure yet. Some kind of crash. Maybe to our advantage. Maybe not. Let’s go see . . .”

They picked their way through the wreckage, past burning, flipped vehicles, to the ramp. The doorway was turned sideways, now, to them. She paused at a partly intact outrider, and pulled out a shotgun and a belt of ammo.

“We better get out of here before things start exploding in that—”

As if on cue, three explosions shook the room, balls of fire huffed up, and vehicular shrapnel zinged past, clanging as it struck the Crusher’s bulkheads.

“Come on!” Daphne yelled. They hurried to the door. The ramp was now on their left, a kind of door instead of a ramp, at this point, partly open. They walked past it, out onto naked stone, and into the light filtering down from above. The light wavered in the smoke billowing out from behind them. Voices clamored from the ship’s other decks. Men cursed and yelled in pain and called for help.

“We’re underground!” Fluron burst out. “Am I dreaming this?”

“I don’t think so . . . look at the chisel marks, over there—and blast patterns. Someone’s undermined the ground under the Crusher. It’s fallen down into a gigantic artificial sinkhole . . .”

They were on the floor of a vast cavern. Its galleries
stretched off into the darkness. Figures moved out there. Eyes and teeth glinted. A black bolt flashed by Daphne’s head—and exploded behind them.

“Someone’s shooting at us!” Fluron gasped. “We’ve got to get under cover!”

“Come on.” Daphne took his wrist and drew him off to the right, where they could crouch under the cover of a tumble of recently crushed rock.

“Daphne—who shot at us? It was someone out in the cave.”

“You smell that? Like a barnyard that’s never been cleaned?”

“Yes! What is it?”

“That, Fluron, is the smell of Tunnel Rats.”

•  •  •

“I’m gonna have to go down there,” Mordecai said, lying on his belly and peering over the edge of the declivity. “I’ve gotta confirm Reamus’s death. Or . . . if he’s alive, catch him before he gets his act together.”

Bloodwing gave out an
errr!
of agreement. She was close beside him, perched on the edge of the huge new hole in the crust of Pandora, looking over into its smoking depths with the focused interest of a carrion eater.

Brick was peering over the edge at his side. “We made this big hole,” Brick said. “Us and the Tunnel Rats.”

“Yeah,” Mordecai said. “We get to name it. How about—Sudden Canyon?”

“I was thinking of Brick’s Canyon.”

“I’m gonna go with Sudden Canyon. Look over there—that’s a way down . . .” He pointed at a place a hundred meters to their right where the edge of the hole had collapsed to
make an incline of stone, ice, dirt, and old bones, down to the hull of the Crusher.

“Something’s coming outta the canyon that way,” Brick observed.

It was a particularly large SlagSlug, worming its way from the smoking wreckage, up the incline to the tundra.

“Let’s try out the cannon again on it,” Mordecai said. “Your turn to fire that big beauty.”

Brick made a murderous grimace that he might’ve intended as a grin. “My turn!”

Brick got up and ran back to the outrunner, just about forty strides back, quickly unhooked the cannon, and, to Mordecai’s astonishment, pushed the howitzer-like weapon toward the SlagSlug as easily as a man pushing an empty wheelbarrow.

“Brick? You don’t need to get that close . . . it’ll come to you!” Mordecai shouted.

And it was coming right at him, hissing, spitting acidic spew that fell well short of him. But with each slithering moment it came closer yet.

“Dammit, Brick, activate your shield!”

Brick got to his preferred cannon range, and, almost as an afterthought, activated his shield—just as the creature spat acid at him. The acid gob wobbled through the air and struck him full on . . . but his shield held, and it shed the burning fluid handily.

Brick fired, shouting, “Come and get some, you slimy slab of slug!”

It reared up, opening its mouth to spit at him again, its imbecilic quasi-human face distorted with rage. Brick fired three bursts of Eridian energy directly into the SlagSlug’s
maw, burning through the roof of its mouth, frying its brain. The mutant writhed like a giant slug in salt, quivered, and died. The body steamed in the cold air as Brick rolled the cannon calmly past it toward the slope of gravel leading into Sudden Canyon.

“I love this cannon, Mordecai!” he yelled. “I wanta marry it!”

“Be some funny-looking kids,” Mordecai replied.

He looked into the pit again. Smoke rose and swirled, obscuring his view, but after a few seconds he was able to see that the Crusher had fallen on its port side—to the left—and there were gaping holes in the hull in several places. Even after falling into the great hole, the land vessel was huge, like a steel skyscraper, tipped over into a sinkhole. The superstructure was bent, twisted by collision. Mordecai saw movement in the darkness at the edges of the Sudden Canyon—the Tunnel Rats were already there, closing in around the periphery; they were clambering up rock formations to leap onto the Crusher. Rifle shots banged in the shadowy canyon, muzzle flashes strobe-lighting it up. He could see Reamers moving around down there in the hull’s breaches and on the slanted deck. There seemed to be quite a few survivors. He had a feeling that Reamus was too tough, and too prepared, not to be one of them.

Mordecai turned to Bloodwing and said, “Fly down there, watch for big enemies, anyone making their way up here. And see if you can find Daphne.”

Bloodwing said,
“Errr!”
and dove into the pit, spreading her wings to glide down over the wreckage.

Mordecai stood up and trotted back to the outrunner. On the way he saw an outrider parked an eighth of a kilometer
out; he could just make out the shape of the Claptrap in it. The robot was just sitting out there, watching and waiting. The robot—and, in a way, Elenora Dufty.

At the outrunner Mordecai chose a new rocket launcher he’d bought from Marcus, a backpack full of ammo, a belt of grenades, a gas mask, and the corrosive SMG. He already had a machine pistol holstered on his hip.

Brick had moved the cannon right to the edge of Sudden Canyon and was firing Eridian blasts down into the pit, close to the incline that led to the wreckage, as Mordecai walked up to him. “Brick—you’re not shooting Tunnel Rats, I hope? They’re a weapon we’re using here, eliminating some of the Reamer sons of hives I’d have to kill.”

“Not shooting at them. But I want to.”

“Later, I’ll bet, we’ll have reason to. There’s no way they’re going to honor the treaty long. The rodent-faced sons of bitches are treacherous. If they come at you like they’re on the attack, then fine. Now what I brought that thing here for, mainly, besides frying giant pink worms, is to shoot a hole in the base of the superstructure. Probably Reamus is in there. And I don’t want to go through those gaps down there, where everything’s burning, unless I have to.”

“How’s this?” Brick fired at the superstructure, close to where it met the deck. The blast made a black mark on the metal. Brick kept firing, squinting, his tongue caught between his teeth as he concentrated, nailing the same spot over and over, till the metal turned red hot, then white hot. The cannon itself was overheating, waves of rippling air rising off it.

“Careful, don’t burn up the cannon. It could explode. We don’t know, we’re the first we know of to use the damn thing.”

“You wanna cut through that steel or not?” Brick kept firing and at last the metal buckled and then imploded, the detonation momentarily blowing away the smoke rising from the wreck.

“That’ll do ’er. Now let that thing cool off while I head down there and see if I can get in!”

Brick held his fire as Mordecai readied the rocket launcher and started down the slope. He skidded part of the way, and had to run the last few strides to make a poorer target, when someone shot at him from behind an overturned freight tram on the slanted deck.

The potshots went wide, kicking up dirt to his right, and Mordecai was below the firing line from the deck; then, hurrying along the gravel and dirt verge under the hull, he angled toward the prow. Fallen crusty gray-brown rock, made of a big shattered stalagmite column, was tumbled into a crooked accidental staircase up to the deck. Mordecai ran toward the staircase of fallen rock—and then spun to his right when a black arrow flashed past him from that direction. He glimpsed a Tunnel Rat, face hidden in a gas mask, coming at him with a crossbow in its hands. The arrow struck the hull and exploded, too close to Mordecai for comfort, the shock wave knocking him down. He rolled, letting go of the rocket launcher, and pulled his machine pistol. “We’re supposed to be allies, you damned fool!” Mordecai said.

The Tunnel Rat jeered, “Food cannot be my ally! The Chief Engineer said if we saw you—we could kill you, too! You are a lower creature, a meat creature!”

The Tunnel Rat aimed the crossbow at him—and then
Bloodwing was swooping down, slashing at the Rat’s eyes. In the back of his mind, Mordecai noticed something odd—that Bloodwing wasn’t screeching, as she usually did, to get the target’s attention.

The Tunnel Rat screamed as Bloodwing popped out his eye, and Mordecai shot the mutant in the belly, tearing him up with one long burst. So much for the Tunnel Rat treaty.

The Tunnel Rat fell dying, and Bloodwing flapped over to Mordecai as he stood up, landing on his shoulder.

“How come you’re so quiet? Oh—I see . . .” Bloodwing had something clamped in her beak. Mordecai reached up and tugged a piece of paper from his pet’s beak. “Is that a note? First time you ever brought me one.” He unfolded it, and despite the desperate haste of the lettering, he instantly recognized Daphne’s handwriting:

M—I’m at aft of Crusher, outside pinned down

Where R you?

Daphne

“She’s alive!” Mordecai blurted. “Can you believe that, Bloodwing?” He holstered the pistol and picked up the rocket launcher. “Let’s go find her!”

He heard the crackling whistle of the Eridian cannon as, carried along by a sudden feeling of elation, he jumped up the staircase of fallen stone. He saw burning pulses fired down to hit the gunman on his left, the man crouching behind the overturned tram. The Reamer couldn’t even get off a scream before the pulse blew him into a fountain of boiling blood.

“Damn, Bloodwing, look at that. One shot. Let’s try not to get into Brick’s line of fire when he’s blasting away with that cannon.”

They got to the deck, which was angling down steeply as a playground slide. There was nothing for it but to slide down the deck, and that’s when four of Reamus’s men came into view around the base of the superstructure, walking along the uneven inner railing of the Crusher’s port side. They opened up on him, missing because a sliding man makes a bad target. But Mordecai didn’t miss. He fired one shell into their midst and it blew two of them, shields sparking, off the vessel, blew another apart, and knocked down the fourth.

Mordecai jumped to his feet when he got to the railing, ran along it as if it were a steel mesh sidewalk toward the aft. The survivor of the four Reamers got up just in time to receive the muzzle of the rocket launcher in his chops as Mordecai swung it like a club. He felt the crunch of the man’s skull collapsing and ran past him, firing another shell toward two more Reamers at the back of the superstructure, blowing them off the deck.

“Gotta be careful, I don’t wanta hit Daphne by accident, Bloodwing,” Mordecai said.

He came to a place where the sloping deck was torn up, the slanting plane of steel on his left interrupted by a twisted flower-petal shape of jagged metal around the blast zone. Flame-ammo rounds fired up at him from below deck and burned past Mordecai’s deck. He fired three shells down into the hole, the explosions lighting up the men below as they were flung against the bulkheads.

Then he had passed the rupture in the deck and found himself at the aft of the Crusher.

There was no sign of Daphne.

M
ordecai strapped the rocket launcher over his back, bringing the SMG into play, then looked again over the aft rail of the tilted land vessel. Still no sign of Daphne. Several freshly dead Tunnel Rats were sprawled on the stone floor below. He saw no one alive.

“Hey, dumbass, are you blind or what?”

Mordecai turned sharply to his right, raising the submachine gun—but holding his fire. That’d been Daphne’s voice, and she had sounded surprisingly unfriendly. “Daphne?”

A gust of subterranean breeze cleared smoke away, and there she was, hunkered with some guy wearing a gas mask, behind a pile of rocks. Daphne’s gas mask was pushed back on her head. She looked bruised, disheveled, angry, and tired. “You going to rescue me or not?” she called. Was she joking? But she wasn’t smiling.