Borderlands: Gunsight (24 page)

She tossed Mordecai a med hypo and he didn’t stand on ceremony—he slammed it into Brick’s shoulder, and fast. The gunshot wounds healed up, pretty quick, but Brick would need food after losing so much blood—there was a large puddle of scarlet on the ground, spread out by boot prints.

“Bloodwing, wait out here,” Mordecai said. “You can feed on a couple of these dead cretins here, and then take a nap on the robot.”

“I don’t like it when she roosts on me,” Extra complained. “I keep having to clean off my outer parts.”

Mordecai ignored the Claptrap. “Moxxi, Brick’s gonna have to get something to eat,” Mordecai said, as he and Brick
followed her into the passage. He could see there was some wobble in Brick’s walk. “He’s lost a lot of blood. There’s only so much Dr. Zed can do.”

“Wait!” the Claptrap called, from the outrunner. “What about me? Where should I go? What if someone else comes out here and starts shooting? You’re all too eager to abandon me . . .”

“Oh yes,”
came Elenora’s voice. “
He loves to abandon people!”

Mordecai winced. “Just wait there, Extra, we’ll be back!”

The door slid shut behind them. “Oh sure, ask me to rescue you,” Moxxi said, leading the way up the curved hall. “Then ask for food. After you ran out on me.”

“I didn’t run out. I had a mission.”

“And you never came back. You coulda been my fourth husband. Or was it fifth?”

“Tell you the truth, Moxxi, considering what happened to your other husbands, I wasn’t really eager for, you know, making it official.”

“Yeah, yeah. Wimps. Come on, up the steps, there’s some food in my dressing room.”

“Ain’t she a peach, Brick?” Mordecai asked, as they climbed the steps after Moxxi.

“What’s a peach?” Brick asked, rubbing his neck.

“It’s a fruit back on the homeworld—”

“She’s not a fruit, Mordecai,” Brick said, seeming genuinely puzzled. “She’s a girl.”

“Never mind . . .”

•  •  •

She was squatting on the floor in a small, musty space, her back against the wall.

Daphne thought she was probably trapped here. She couldn’t tell for sure, yet. She was afraid to try to escape. But it seemed like debris had covered the doors.

She figured she’d die here, starving slowly to death. How could Mordecai find her—if he even looked for her—with all this wreckage around?

At least she wasn’t burning to death. There were fires all around Jasper’s stronghold, but when the big machine crushed the building it had done it so thoroughly it didn’t seem to bother with explosives and energy blasts, hence the stronghold was as yet unfried.

Some of the basement had survived. She was in a broom closet, which literally had one broom in it, and several other devices she didn’t recognize. The door was blocked by debris. There was no way out in that direction. A little light came in through the cracked ceiling, because, several floors above, it had been sheared off in the attack—and she was thinking maybe she could get out that way, if she could widen the crack.

But was it safe to get out of here?

A juddering went through the wall at her back and plaster pattered down from above. The cracked ceiling opened a bit wider.

Seemed like she had to take a chance on getting out of here, or she was going to die in this place. Crushed under debris—or worse, the fires could spread . . .

She sighed and stood up, tried to see through the crack. She could make out just a little sky up there.

She pried at the ceiling with her fingers, broke some of it—but there was synthawood she didn’t think she could break through anytime soon. If she fired the shotgun at it, probably a lot of the pellets would ricochet back on her.

She looked around in the closet—and noticed an automated grinder for polishing stone floors. It was about the size and shape of a vacuum cleaner but with a circular scraping face on the bottom.

Daphne took its handle grip in her hands—and a light switched on just below her fingers.

“Yes?” asked the grinder, in a chirpy artificial voice, more or less like a Claptrap’s. “Can I be of service?”

“Uh—you’re a robotic polishing . . . thingy?”

“I am in actual fact
a grinding and polishing unit
. ‘Thingy’ is not in my vocabulary list.”

“If I lift you up to the ceiling, can you grind, you know, upside down?”

“I am sometimes used for ceilings. My lightness makes me ideal. Relative to other models, I—”

“Right, fine.” She lifted the grinder up, pushed it against the crack in the ceiling. “Get to grinding. Full power!”

“Full power! That is usually not recommended! I’ve never been set on full power before!”

“You are now! Get to it before my arms give out!”

“This is quite exciting!” The grinder’s sandpaper-like surface began to spin, biting into the ceiling with a high-pitched
screeeee.

Daphne squinted against the spray of dust, and gritted her teeth at the effort to hold it in place over her head. It was as awkward as dating a eunuch, but she kept the grinder in place, turning it this way and that to widen the gap.

“You know,” the grinder remarked, its voice difficult to hear over the keening, grinding sound, “pretty soon you’ll use up my battery charge. You may have to take me to the shop.”

“Don’t think I’ll be able to find a shop where everyone isn’t dead, around here . . .”

“What’s that you say?”

“Nothing. Keep grinding!”

“I’m . . . running . . . out . . . of . . . pow . . . er . . . if you don’t . . .” Its grinder stopped, and its light went out.

Daphne lowered the grinder, wiped dust from her eyes with one hand, then used the grinder to smash at the widened crack—a considerable piece broke out of the ceiling. She leaned the grinder against the wall, picked up her shotgun, then used the grinder as a clumsy stepladder, jumping up to grab the edge of the opening with one hand. She held on, tossed the weapon up and through, and crawled out after it.

She was in a pile of debris where the rooms over the basement had been. To one side, like the opening to a sea cave, was the broken-open wall through which the light was coming.

Beyond it—smoke, fire, and mystery.

T
hey were sitting around a small table in a cluttered little kitchen in the upstairs of the prefab arena. Brick barely fit into his side of the little room. There were cabinets, a stove, all compactly ordered like furnishings in a recreational vehicle. Every counter surface was stacked with canned food and med hypos.

“I’ve got a desperate mission in Gunsight, Moxxi,” Mordecai told her, as Brick finished his fourth pot of skag chili. “I’ve got to get there, and soon.”

“Where does he
put
all that chili?” she mused, watching Brick eat. Here in the kitchen, with a couple of glasses of Red Dr. Zed wine in her, she let her natural accent emerge, a kind of soft drawl. “I’d hate to sit behind him in an outrunner.”

“Oh you don’t know the half of it. But listen—”

“How are you going to ever leave me, my darling dear,” she interrupted, offering him another drink from the ruby-colored flagon, “with hundreds of enemies waiting outside?”

Mordecai waved the drink away. He was already slightly drunk. “Moxxi, my beautiful friend, may I point out that soon Reamus will find the time to check the report from the men he sent out to catch us or kill us? And he’ll tell them to stop holding off and break into the arena, no matter what it takes. That’s his style.”

“He wouldn’t dare.”

Brick looked up at her. “He
would
dare. He crunched most of his people when that thing came out.”

“Yes, what
was
that thing?” she asked, tilting her hat back on her head with one ornate fingernail.

“It was a . . . battleship.”

She frowned. Her lips were very, very sexy when she frowned. Mordecai had to look away. He would not be tempted. “Battleship? But isn’t that a kind of seagoing vessel, from ancient times, Mordecai?”

“I don’t know how else to describe it. Reamus has built a gigantic . . . vehicle. An armored tank that’s bigger than a lot of settlements, higher than any hill around here, and weaponed up like a bastard.”

“And you want to go where you’ll be on the wrong side of that thing? I like watching a good, uneven, unfair fight, but that’s just silly.”

“I hope to find some way around dealing with it directly.”

“What’s this mission you have?” She gave him a sharp look with narrowed eyes.

“Ah, as to that, well, I’ve gotta kill Reamus. That’s my mission. And Jasper.”

“Both? For who?”

“For—each one of ’em.”

“You mean you got them to hire you to kill
each other
?”

“Close enough,” he said.

“That’s my Mordecai!”

“And there’s the girl, too, don’t forget,” said Brick cluelessly, belching.

Mordecai flinched.

Moxxi glared. “Thought so. Using me to get back with another woman, are you? I’ve got a good mind to call my killbots and have you tossed in the arena. I’ll keep Brick here with me, and we can have a good time watching you fight off ten or eleven Reamers with, maybe, an electric toothbrush.”

“Ha, my beautiful sweet darling, you know that you’re the love of my life. But—I have an obligation to rescue someone who saved my life many times. She’s an admirable person. You’d love her.”

“I’d love her in my arena, fighting one of those SlagSlugs, maybe. Make that four SlagSlugs . . . You’re talking about that Daphne Kuller, I’ll bet. She’s gotten pretty notorious, after kicking Gynella’s ass. I had a guy here tell me about that fight. He’s dead now, of course, but he described it quite vividly. She’s pretty badass, I’ll admit that much.”

“Tell you what, let me get her out of Jasper’s clutches and I’ll bring her here, we’ll fight a good long arena battle for you. Regular rates and whatever else.”

“Hmmm, well . . .”

Mordecai knew Moxxi all too well and he could guess what was going through her mind:
Get the bitch here, sabotage her in the arena, she’ll die and I’ve got Mordecai to myself.

“Okay, Mordecai, tell you what! I’m gonna set it up so you’ve got a good chance of shooting your way out past those Reamers out there, and going on your merry way. I can
always film it and syndicate it. It means letting you have some extra-lovely guns and ammo, for a while, and another of my corrosive SMG specials but . . .”

•  •  •

The cameras were hovering overhead, watching as Brick and Mordecai walked past the outrunner, now parked just inside the gate. Bloodwing flew up to perch on Mordecai’s right shoulder.

“Hel-
loooo
, what about
meeee
,” called the Claptrap. “I’m bored sitting in the backseat and just
waiiii-
ting!”

Mordecai paused and said, “Finally—I thought of a way you could be useful. Besides as a paperweight, I mean. I assume you’re programmed to drive an outrunner if needed.”

“Yes! I have lower extenders that can reach the accelerator! I haven’t had access to a vehicle but I know I can do it. I wish I’d had one; it was such a long, slow roll finding you.”

“Never mind, just get in front of the outrunner and start the vehicle. Prepare to drive. When we jump in, and that gate opens . . . slam on the accelerator and head out like the devil is nipping at your tail. And don’t say you don’t have a tail, I know that.”

“Right you are, Boss!”

Mordecai climbed the stairs to rejoin Brick on the defense platform just inside the top of the front wall.
When we jump in, and that gate opens . . .

But suppose she didn’t open the gate? Could he really trust Moxxi to let him go?

Brick was sorting through an overpacked box of weapons and ammo. He already had a bandolier of grenades over one shoulder.

“Ah,
now
I like this Moxxi girl!” Brick said, picking up
a particularly powerful rocket launcher. It was the orange-painted Torque Creamer. “She knows the way to a man’s heart! She has a lot of this killing gear? Maybe I will marry this Moxxi girl!”

“You do that. Sooner the better, once we get the mission done with.”

Mordecai selected the Hail combat rifle. It fired both rifle bullets and mortarlike rounds and he knew it to be lethally efficient.

An explosion boomed just outside the wall—which shook in the blast. “They’re tired of waiting for us,” Mordecai said, grinning at Brick.

“Then we’ll give them what they’re waiting for,” said Brick. He wasn’t smiling. Not at all.

Brick walked to the wall, which at this place came up to his shoulders, and looked down at the enemy.

Mordecai joined him, checking that the rifle was fully loaded.

He looked cautiously over the wall. Smoke rose from the attempt to breach the gate. So far it was a failed attempt. But if they kept pounding it—or the walls—eventually Moxxi’s shields would fall.

The Reamers were deployed about fifty meters back from the wall, roughly in two rings facing the gate. Coming up behind them were the SlagSlugs, who just might be able to penetrate the gate. A technical fired another shell at the wall, and a machine gunner, catching sight of Mordecai, sprayed bullets his way. Mordecai ducked back, and the rounds ricocheted from the wall.