Borderlands: Unconquered (10 page)

“Ha!” he crowed, stepping up to the next tree. “You wanna take me on, tree?” He laughed. “It’s punch time!” And he smashed the second tree. “Now for you—this
is easy!”
Crash,
the third growth was shattered.

Then he and Daphne turned, startled, at the sound of Roland gunning the outrunner. He drove it straight toward Brick’s outrunner, jumped the ramplike rimrock, and came down on the other side, slamming on the brakes.

Mordecai came running up to the outrunner from behind, laughing nervously, Bloodwing cawing on his shoulder. “Oh man, Roland, I don’t
know about this!”

But he jumped into the outrunner, and they were off downhill.

“You fix his outrunner?” Roland asked.

“I unfixed it, if that’s what you mean. I saw your signal and pulled out a few wires. They won’t be driving that thing for an hour or so. But Roland—” He glanced over his shoulder. “I’m not sure it’s so smart to piss those two off this way.”

Roland looked back to see Daphne
and Brick staring after them, two outraged silhouettes against the sky.

“You win, Brick!” Roland shouted back at them as he gunned the outrunner away. “You get the campsite! The whole damn thing! Enjoy it! See you later, big guy!”

He could see Daphne run to the outrunner. She’d soon find out that it was sabotaged.

“Look out!” Mordecai yelled.

Roland returned his attention to the terrain in
front and veered hard to the right, just managing not to slam into a boulder twice the size of the outrunner.

“Whew!”

Then he heard a whistling sound, glanced over his shoulder in time to see a small but solid-looking boulder spinning through the air to make impact with the back of the outrunner in an explosion of rock chips. The vehicle took the impact, jerking forward, fishtailing, but continuing
to drive.

“Shit!” Roland said. “That Brick’s got an arm! You see if he did any damage?”

Mordecai looked and groaned. “Oh man. We’re so underweaponed already. You really should’ve loaded up in Fyrestone. Looks like he bent the muzzle on your Scorpio, man.”

Roland swore long and colorfully.

“See, Roland, if we’d just made nice with them—”

“You mean you wanna make nice with Daphne. ‘Oh Daphne,
my darling!’”

“Roland—come on, seriously—that woman is tough! She’d be a great partner!”

“She’d probably cut your throat first time you slept with her. She’s Kuller the Killer, man. I’m sure of it. She’s got enemies across half the galaxy. We don’t need that. ’Cause her enemies would become our enemies. You can’t see her straight because you’re sweet on her!”

“Well,
so what
I’m sweet on her.
She’s a babe!” He glared at Roland, as they jounced down to the flatland at the edge of the Salt Flats, and then frowned as Bloodwing seemed to caw laughter at him.

A bullet from behind cracked by overhead, just missing Mordecai. Almost certainly fired by Daphne.

“That babe of yours almost blew your head off!”

“See?” Mordecai said admiringly. “So sweet! She coulda killed me, but she missed
on purpose!”

On purpose?
Roland wasn’t so sure.

He floored the accelerator and quickly got the outrunner out of gunshot range. Daphne sent no more high-caliber love notes.

They continued on around the edge of the Salt
Flats, generally southwest, the light glaring off the white surface of the plain, making Roland reach for his shaded goggles.

“Where’s that army Brick was talking about?” Roland
wondered aloud, pulling the goggles on.

“I don’t know, it’s a big country. Maybe we’d better head down into that draw, keep out of sight.” Mordecai pointed into a declivity to the left, a canyon off the badlands close by the edge of the Salt Flats. “Far as I remember, there’s a way out on the other side.”

“You better remember right,” Roland said, turning the steering wheel. They veered down
into the draw, into a shallow canyon rimmed with irregularly shaped blue and red boulders and the occasional spike of glittering crystal. The floor of the canyon was smooth blue dust, almost like a man-made dirt road. They passed through most of it without incident, drove up a rise on the other side—and then Roland hit the brakes.

Up ahead, against the sky, he could make out the movement of men,
numerous men, and passing outriders.

“This canyon was your idea, Mordecai,” he said. “Get out and scout it, and keep your head down.”

Mordecai slipped soundlessly out of the idling vehicle and, Bloodwing on his shoulder, went quietly up the rise.

Five minutes passed. Roland waited impatiently.

Mordecai came running back down the slope, looking pale. “It’s Gynella’s army. Or part of it. Maybe
two hundred heavily armed men up there. And they’ve surrounded the canyon. I saw a few at the place we came in, too. They’ve just set up at that end. I don’t
think
they know we’re here—but we’re trapped. And they’re bound to spot us.”

S
he stood alone on the plain, dirty, bloody, and footsore.

There were bruises and welts across her. One of her teeth had been knocked loose. She was dizzy from dehydration, and her feet were bloody in the shreds of her boots. But she’d found the supply lines, just as she’d figured on, and she’d waited—and here they came.

She watched the dust rising in quivering lines, approaching across the plain.
She knew just what it was. She waited some more.

The engines rumbled, and the rumbles became roars, as the vehicles approached closer and closer. She could make out the marching men, some distance behind them, a rough line, not genuinely orderly but with a unified purpose.

The dusty plumes arrived, their metal cores throwing off splinters of light. Then the engines
slowed, the dust cleared,
and the vehicles, approaching ahead of the supply column, ground their brakes. The outriders came to a halt near her, their drivers—and the soldiers hanging on, poised on the running boards—leering at her as they arrived: a panoply of deformed faces, masked faces, goggled faces. The skull-shaped
G
of Gynella blazed red on every outrider, every breastplate or tattooed bosom.

A chunky, short Psycho
sergeant she knew to be called Skenk climbed out of an outrider and approached her, shotgun in hand. “You! You’re AWOL, you are. Absent without leave and likely to be fed to the skags for it!”

“Kiss my fragrant ass,” she said, spitting on the ground between them. “I have important information for General Goddess.”

“They’ve been trying to find you, Broomy. And here you are, looking like a trash
feeder tasted you and spat you out. Lost your ECHO, didya? Where’s Cess?”

“Dead. So’s Khunsuela. I’ve got information the General needs. And I need to see her in person.”

He scratched his crotch thoughtfully, then shrugged. “All right. I’ll give you an outrider. But you better have something she can use.”

“You bunch are supplying what, Hatchet?”

“Yeah, Hatchet Legion.”

“If they’re where they
should be, they need to be told about something. In fact, I’ll show ’em myself before I head back to the Footstool.”

“They’re three klicks off, breaking camp. Watch out for that bunch. They like a kill before breakfast.”

“They’re
the ones better watch out.”

•  •  •

“I think maybe I can fix this,” Brick said, looking at the engine. “Maybe he didn’t know how to wreck it good. Or maybe he wasn’t
trying.”

At Daphne’s urging, Brick had pushed the outrunner into the center of the hilltop camp, near the dead campfire left by Roland and Mordecai. That way the outrunner was out of sight of potential enemies on the lowlands below. And this being Pandora, pretty much anyone down there was a potential enemy.

Daphne leaned on a bumper and looked at the engine. “Mordecai wasn’t trying to cripple
us for good. Just slow us down.”

“How do you know?” Brick asked, removing his studded gauntlets so he could reach more deeply into the engine.

“Oh, Mordecai wouldn’t do that to me.” She looked out over the desert. She could just see the dust of Roland’s outrunner in the distance. “Mordecai’s kind of cute in a way. I wonder if I could get him to shave off that beard.”

“Kind of
cute
? That one?
Ha! I could crush him with one hand!”

“And that contradicts kind of cute, how?
Anyway, he’s a damned good shot.” She heard a rumble of engines from the north side of the hill. “What’s that?”

Gruff voices followed the engine noise, accompanied by the sound of metal clanking.

“What’s what?” Brick asked distractedly, reattaching a wire.

“I just remembered something—” She picked up her rifle,
an Atlas Pearl Havoc, and checked the load. “Cess was saying something about how the General Goddess’s second division is divided into Knife Legion and Hatchet Legion. And Knife Legion was headed off to the southwest, to prep for some assault on a settlement. But Hatchet Legion . . .”

Brick looked up from the engine. “They’re here? Time for me to bust heads!” He pulled his gauntlets back on.
“I’m
ready
to bust heads. I’m hot to trot for punch time!”

“Maybe you’ll get your chance, Brick,” she said in a low voice. “But I’d rather give that fight a miss right now. Stay low, let me see if—”

But it was too late. She fell silent as Psycho soldiers bearing the skull-like
G
rose up over the rim of the hilltop—on all sides. They scrambled into view almost simultaneously, stepping onto the
rim with a clop of many boots, as if choreographed. They grinned at her, and hooted, and pointed their rifles and shotguns . . . and seemed to wait for permission to start killing.

Daphne swallowed, looking around. So many of them, so well armed, and they were all around. There really was no way out.

She’d fought for her life a dozen times, across the galaxy. She’d killed numerous men, all of
them scumbags . . . and then she’d gone to the scumbags who’d hired her, to get her pay. She’d survived the torpedoing of her spacecraft in orbit around Vargas Two, a bullet that’d just missed her heart on Grimm’s World, a cloud of deadly toxins on the Choking Moons, and having to fight her way past two eight-legged, tusked guard mastiffs twice the size of a full-grown skag on Cerberus III. All
that—only to die here, it seemed, on this hellhole of a planet.

Brick saw it differently. He was delighted with the arrival of an army of enemies. “Now
this
is odds I like!” He cracked his fists together, backing toward the rear of the outrunner, probably planning to get to the turret gun.

Then Daphne saw Broomy, climbing up to the hilltop and into view, her scarred face creased with a grin.
“I found the Goddess’s army!” Broomy crowed, with a sweep of her hand, “and I brung it back with me just fer you!”

“If you’re looking for Roland, he’s not here!” Daphne yelled. “Neither is Mordecai! You can find their outrunner tracks on the other side of the hill! Your fight is with them, Broomy, not with us! We got no grudge against the General!”

Broomy laughed, and the others laughed with
her, a psychotic chorus. The smell of their mouths, rank and rotten, rolled over Daphne with their laughter.

Broomy pointed at her. “You know how many of our people that Brick there killed?”

Brick hooted at that. “
I
know! Ask me. Thirty-seven!”

“And you,” Broomy went on, glowering at Daphne. “The General knew you was with him, but she wanted to recruit you anyhow. She gave you a chance! And
what’d you do? You walked away! Well, you lost your chance!!”

Doesn’t much matter if I die here,
Daphne decided.
Everybody’s got to die somewhere. It’s probably never going to be where you want it to be.

She raised her combat rifle, very slowly . . .

“Who gets to git some offa that little woman first there?” asked a bare-chested Psycho in a plastic industrial mask, tittering after he asked
it. His chest showed Gynella’s insignia—but in scars.

“Not
you
!” Daphne told him, and she shot him in the head—twice. He fell back stone dead, his shield flickering.

“Cheap shield,” one of the Psychos observed, looking at the body.

“Get her!”
Broomy howled.

Guns were trained on Daphne; the Psycho soldiers started toward her and Brick.

“Don’t kill her yet!” a Psycho howled gleefully, stepping
down from the rim onto the hilltop. “I likes the bodies warm!”

But before the others could fire at Daphne, Brick vaulted into the outrunner; he scooped up a rocket launcher and was working the outrunner’s machine-gun turret with one hand while firing the rocket launcher—tucked against his side—with the other.

“Yeah, bringing the pain!” Brick shouted as he fired.

Broomy dived out of the way
just as a rocket shell blasted a chunk of rock near her, the blast flinging three Psychos into the air.

“Show me some blood!” Brick cackled.

Four more Psycho soldiers were shot off the hilltop, ripped in a strafe of his concentrated machine-gun fire. “Damn, I’m good!” he yelled.

Daphne had turned, was firing methodically at the Psycho soldiers ranged behind Brick, to protect his back, blowing
away the top of one Psycho’s skull, knocking another backward off his perch on a boulder—but the soldiers were firing too, and she was hit. She staggered and danced with the impacts of their bullets on her energy shield.