Borderlands: Unconquered
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Authors: John Shirley
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CONTENTS
Dedicated to the fans of all Borderlands games
PROLOGUE
Marcus Tells a Tale
“L
ady, I’ll be getting you to ol’ Fyrestone as quick as I can,” Marcus said, looking in the bus rearview at the woman sitting a few rows behind him. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, pondering the situation. They were sitting on the tarmac of the spaceport, about half an hour before sunset, as he waited for a report on the bandits. There was a Claptrap
robot sitting in a rear seat, muttering and clicking to itself; so far, he had no other passengers besides the robot and the lady. “I got an alert about a crew of particularly vicious Psycho bandits,” Marcus went on. “A new bunch, just wandered into the Fyrestone region. Interlopers from the far side of the Arid Lands. We haven’t had a hard bunch like this so close in a while. There’re missions on
the board to take ’em out, but no one’s had the nerve yet. I’d do it myself, but I’m getting on in years,
and . . .” He tapped his heavy belly. “I don’t move so fast anymore. So I drive the bus, and I sell guns to other people so they can do it.”
“That’s all quite . . .
fascinating,
” the woman said, with undisguised sarcasm. “But when do we
go?
It’ll be dark soon. I’d like to get to Fyrestone.”
“Soon as I hear the coast is clear, we go. We’ve got to drive sharp, quick as we can, get through that territory.”
Marcus checked his wrist communicator; there were still no missed calls, no texts, no report on those bandits. Maybe the ECHO link was down. He ran a quick link test on it, tapping the test icon, and . . . yep. It appeared the damn thing was down. Again. Bandits might’ve dismantled
the transmission tower for scrap metal.
“I wonder why you don’t have hoppers at the spaceport,” said the woman. “Instead of this bus.”
Her voice was silky, but there was a keen edge of warning in it, whatever she said. Something subtle in her tone conveyed,
Don’t mess with me.
There was a stillness about her, too, a relaxed readiness, that suggested a professional warrior, someone who could
handle herself. And he’d seen her take a high-quality pistol out of her luggage, sticking it in a holster just before she got onto the bus.
Her slim face and magenta hair were partly masked in purple dust goggles and helmet. What
he could see of her looked kind of familiar, anyway, but she was sitting in shadow, and he couldn’t view enough to place her. What with the helmet and goggles, worn
from the moment she’d stepped off the shuttle from orbit, Marcus figured she didn’t want to be recognized. Which hinted that maybe she wasn’t a complete stranger to the planet Pandora. She was coming from deep space, but he suspected she might also be coming home. Only she didn’t want people to know
who
was coming home . . .
The spaceport authorities would know whatever name she’d given them,
and he had those guys on his payroll. But fake identities were easy to come by. Hell, he sold them himself sometimes.
That thought made Marcus wonder what he could sell to this woman. He could tell by her luggage and that gun, she had money, all right. Likely he could sell her some more weapons. He was going to have to try to draw her out, get a fix on who she was—could be that information itself
might be worth money.
“Or
is
there a hopper that I haven’t seen?” the woman went on, glancing out the window.
“Nah, no hoppers, lady. See, I arranged that . . . I mean, the only hopper service ’tween here and Fyrestone was shot down, right outta the sky. Bones of the riders picked clean. Not
safe,
those hoppers.”
“So we’re stuck with this old rattletrap bus,” the woman murmured. Louder, she
said, “I really have to get to Fyrestone. If you can check to see if you have any
balls,
we could just go. Any bandits bother us, we can take care of them between the two of us.”
Marcus chuckled, still watching her in the rearview. “You’re a salty one, you are. So you’re a fighter, eh? We’ve had some tough women fighters on this planet—the only kind that survive.”
“One way or another, all women
are tough.”
“And of course, General Goddess, that Gynella. Whew, that one!”
“Gynella?” She seemed to perk up at that, looking back at him—at his eyes in the mirror. “How’s that panning out?”
“Oh, well, what’s happened with that—well, that’s a whole story. Be glad to tell you. Got the inside word on it from a lot of sources. I’m working up a history of Pandora, see, and I—”
“Suppose you tell
me about it on the way to Fyrestone.”
Marcus sighed, controlling his temper. “Now, look, lady—”
“This bus goin’ anywhere?” asked a gruff male voice.
Marcus assessed the man climbing the steps into the bus. Big galoot with a swag belly, wide shoulders, small piggish eyes, a lantern jaw. But he was
young, not long out of his teens. He had a lot of fresh-looking tattoos, and his mercenary costume
looked secondhand. Cheap gems glittered in his gold front teeth; he had a rifle in one hand, duffel in the other, brand-new goggles pushed back on his close-shaved head.
Marcus knew the type. Likely a kid who’d failed at everything else—kicked out of some homeworld college, looking for a fresh start where the quick money was. Only most people looking for quick money in the Borderlands of Pandora
found quick burials instead.
“Take a seat, kid, if you’re going to Fyrestone,” Marcus growled. “We’re about to leave.”
“Hey, pal, I ain’t a kid, okay? You got that?” The young adventurer, standing in the aisle, put on his best angry-bull look.
Marcus snorted. “Could be you’ll get the chance to prove it, you ride with us. We’re about to run through some nasty bandit territory. And I haven’t
got the all-clear.”
The adventurer licked his thin lips. “Yeah, well, if you think it’s . . . you know . . .” Then he noticed the woman, sitting quietly in her seat. His vantage point from the door gave him a good view of the parts of her he was most interested in. She was voluptuous, and her battle-ready clothes were tight-fitting. Real tight-fitting.
The young man stared at her, and his mouth
dropped open. “I, uh . . . I can handle bandits. Um, who’s . . . I mean, hi, lady. We going to be traveling together to Fyrestone? My name’s Jakus.” He pronounced it “Jake-us,” with a long
a,
and he did it emphatically.
“Jakus. Naturally.” They couldn’t see her eyes, but her voice suggested she was rolling them.
“You haven’t told me your name,” Jakus said, trying to charm her with a grin that
would have made a skag shudder.
“No,” she said. “I haven’t. Are we leaving or not, Marcus?”
“Sure, sure, get on the bus if you’re coming, Jack-us.”
“It’s
Jake
-us.” Frowning, the adventurer got into the seat across the aisle from the woman.
Who
is
she?
Marcus wondered again, as he closed the doors and started up the bullet-scarred old bus. Clearly, he wasn’t going to find that out easily.
She was interested in Gynella’s story, it seemed. And he knew a hell of a lot about it—and about the other side of the equation: Roland, Mordecai, Brick, and Daphne. Yes, that was the way he’d do it. Tell the mystery lady the story, win her trust, then draw her out.
They were soon rumbling along the dusty, pocked highway toward Fyrestone, Marcus glancing nervously at his wrist communicator—still
no word on the bandits—and scanning the horizon.
It was typical rugged gray-brown Pandora wasteland terrain, flat for long stretches but gouged with sudden ravines, shadowed by rocky buttes and stony hillocks, which often stood alone, like weathered fortresses in the dusty mist. It was hot out there, the pale blue, cloudless sky looking sun-faded. Desert plants flecked the landscape, casting
long shadows as the sun slipped toward the serrated horizon; in the distance he could see small packs of skags wandering near their burrows, forever hungry for prey, and vulturine rakks turned kitelike in the sky. The bus thumped over the remains of some large yellow scythids, their carapaces crushed; he’d smashed them into roadkill on the way to the spaceport.
On some of the higher buttes, in
the distance, he could see the tops turning pink and dull scarlet—sunset was coming. It’d be dark soon . . .
When he could, Marcus kept an eye on the two humans in back, tilting the rearview mirror for a better look—the interior mirror wasn’t good for anything but looking at the passengers—and he wasn’t surprised when Jakus set his rifle aside and moved across the aisle to the seat beside the
mystery woman. Jakus put his arm across the back of her seat and leaned toward her, trying to look suave.
“So, pretty lady, when we get to Fyrestone, we could have a drink, whatya say? I’m buying, of
course, and then maybe we could find us a cozy little—ow!”
She’d shoved her pistol’s muzzle hard against his jaw. “Get back in your seat, or I’m gonna have to splatter your brains on the ceiling.
If there
are
any in there to splatter.”
Jakus gulped and hurried back to his seat.
“Hey, she’s a pistol, ain’t she, kid?” Marcus laughed. “Ha, get it, a—”
“Shut up, you old—! Wait, who’s that on the road up there?”
The kid pointed, and Marcus returned his attention to the road just in time to slam on the brakes. The dust plume following the bus kept going when the bus stopped, shrouding the
windows. But he saw them, clear enough, about twenty meters ahead: four Psycho bandits, and towering over them a Bruiser, all of them masked and bare-chested, blocking the road side by side, all with powerful weapons in their hands.
“By the Angel!” Marcus swore.
“They do not look like paying passengers,” the Claptrap robot called tremulously from the back. “I do not advise letting them on board.”