Borderlands: Unconquered (14 page)

He’d never desert her. Not really.

Smartun drove on and on, and soon he saw the campfires of the Knife Legion, burning against the horizon like the multiple red eyes of some nightmare predator.

•  •  •

The mine was well shored up; nothing was likely to fall down on him, but Mordecai felt anyway as if it was about to. The helmet light he’d cadged from the supply shed illuminated the down-slanting interior of the mine with a glaucous
glow, the carven stone walls looking slick in the light, descending into shadow like the gullet of some giant saurian.

“I’m being swallowed here,” he muttered, making his way down.

Maybe the feeling of being trapped wasn’t from the outside. Maybe it was from the inside. Maybe he was bothered by something.

It did bother him that he’d left Roland back there. They were almost friends, sort of,
kind of, in
a way . . . and he was leaving him to fight the Knife Legion with a few confused miners. Sure, Roland and Mordecai had spent the afternoon giving shooting lessons to the settlement’s men and offering advice on how to deal with the Psycho soldiers.

“If you haven’t got a good kill shot, try to shoot out their knees before they get too close. Once they get close they’re deadly . . .”

But that wasn’t what the settlement needed. It needed backup. It needed as much firepower as it could get. More important, to Mordecai,
Roland
needed backup—from his sort of, kind of, friend. Closest thing he had to a friend lately. Roland . . .

Stop being a sap,
he told himself, as he stepped over a hummock of loose rock and worked his way deeper into the mine.

Stupid, feeling sorry for the
settlement. That kind of thinking would get you killed on this planet. Dakes’s settlers, especially, coming here to start a legit co-op business, bringing children.

Someone like him or Roland, why, they didn’t fit in anywhere but on a world where killing was the norm, where life balanced on a razor’s edge, where adrenaline and a good weapon were a man’s only salvation. But to bring your
family
? To bring children here? Why, it was practically suicide. Who was he to stand in the way of suicide? Mass suicide at that.

The hell with them
.
All of them. Even those damn
kids, running and playing in the street, counting on the adults to keep them safe
 . . .

Damn kids.

His grim rumination was interrupted by a blast of chill air. He’d come to the end of the mine shaft. It widened there, and
to one side were carts on rails. Up ahead, the way was blocked by a barrier made out of thin sheets of metal. The cold air came from a thin gap in the metal barricade.

“Crap,” Mordecai muttered. That must be the way to the cavern—blocked off.

Looking around, he found a pair of heavy gloves lying beside a cart and put them on, then began to pry at the metal sheets, slowly peeling them back.

•  •  •

Smartun was glad to see that the equipment he’d ordered had gotten there ahead of him. The two new catapults reared in dark skeletal shapes against the sky. It’d been relatively easy to have them built from scrap materials at the last settlement the army had razed.

Stretching his legs with a walk around the encampment, Smartun strode ahead of Skenk and Bulge. They followed loosely, still
acting as bodyguards—and possibly as Gynella’s spies, to make sure he was doing what he was supposed to. He walked past tents and campfires, where men gambled and grumbled. A rank smell swept over
him as he came upon a sewage ditch, a mix of running water and waste, in which one Psycho was, it seemed, drowning a smaller one; the big Psycho was holding the Midget’s head under sewage.

“Yes, you
choke in that!” the big Psycho bandit snarled, as he held the thrashing Midget down. “You choke good!”

“Skenk, stop that waste of resources!” Smartun ordered.

Skenk went to the edge of the ditch, raised his auto shotgun, took careful aim to blow the bigger Psycho’s head off, so he could save the little guy from being drowned.

“No, dammit, Skenk, don’t kill that one either! They’re both resources.
We need them both.”

Skenk turned him a puzzled look. It was hard for the Psycho soldiers to understand the “don’t kill him” order.

Then Skenk shrugged and fired the gun over the man’s head. Someone, somewhere in the background, yelled in pain.

Smartun sighed.

The gunshot got the attention of the bigger man in the ditch. He let go of the choking Psycho Midget and turned to gape at them. “What?”

“What you killing that one for?” Skenk asked, as the Midget sat up, sputtering.

“He tried ta steal something from me!” the bigger Psycho said. “I think. Maybe.”

“I did not!” the little guy said, and sank his teeth deeply into the calf of the big one’s leg.

The bigger Psycho howled and kicked the Psycho Midget loose.

It took another several minutes to get them separated and pacified.

Smartun
had been joined by the subcommander of the Knife Legion, Bolkus, a difficult-to-control Badass Psycho. Now he pointed at the Midget Psycho. “Bolkus, take this one to the special munitions enclosure.”

“What’s that?”

“I sent instructions. Don’t you have the Midgets we captured in a corral? The special munitions enclosure?”

“Oh, that’s what you call the corral? But this one isn’t captured. He’s
one of us.”

“Now he goes in the corral with the bunch you captured. See that they’re watched. I don’t want any of them getting away. We’ll need them.” Smartun looked toward the settlement of Bloodrust Corners. “We’ll need them fairly soon. Just before dawn.”

•  •  •

About a half hour before dawn Roland gave up trying to sleep. Some instinct seemed to insist he get up and look around the settlement.

Carrying a Tediore Genocide Stomper in one hand, his other hand on the pistol in his holster,
Roland left the hut and stretched, then went to the watch fires glowing in pitted metal barrels. Several men stood in the circle of firelight. Dakes was up too, staring pensively into the flames; beside him were Lucky and a muscular, shirtless miner, Gong, a scarred man with filed teeth. A former nomad
who’d changed his ways to marry a settlement girl, Gong rarely spoke, but he was the only one in the camp besides Dakes who hadn’t needed extra instruction with a weapon. Roland intended to keep Gong close to him when the fight came.

Dakes glanced up at him. “You’re up early. Where’s that little partner of yours?”

Roland suspected that Mordecai had slipped out the back way, as he’d said he would,
but he didn’t know for sure, so he only shrugged. “Any movement from out there?”

“Some. They’ve been moving catapults into place—I think that’s what they are. They arrived a few hours ago.”

“No kidding? I’ve never seen a catapult on this planet. But it figures. Gynella’s always got to scrounge for ammo. Smart to use catapults. Stick a boulder in one of those, there’s your free ammo, lying right
on the ground.”

Roland remembered how Brick had used a boulder as “ammo” and damaged the Scorpio turret. He wondered how Brick was doing—had he run into Gynella’s people? At some point, Brick
would have to confront the Psycho soldiers again. The thought almost made him feel sorry for the Psychos. Almost.

Maybe he should’ve stuck with Brick, even if it meant keeping that dark little female killer
with them. Brick sure would’ve been a help here . . .

“There’s extra ammo for that combat rifle,” Dakes said. “It’s in that stack just inside the gate.”

“Good, thanks. Right now I’m thinking about the possibility of a sortie. I might be able to—”

“You might be able to slip away and desert us?” Lucky interrupted, looking at him.

Dakes shot a glare at Lucky. “Dammit, shut up!”

Roland chuckled.
“Kid—” He grinned at Lucky. “You really that worried I’m going to take your girl?”

Lucky ground his teeth together. “You saying she’d go anywhere near you, you Arid Lands bum?”

“Lucky,” Dakes hissed, “the man’s only got so much patience. You’re gonna get yourself killed!”

Roland shook his head. “Kid, the girl is too young for me. Not my style. Even if she throws herself at me, I’d have to disappoint
her. So you can stop with the adolescent hostility—”

“Throws herself at you!” Lucky sputtered in disbelief. He balled his fists and rushed at Roland.

Roland simply stepped aside, extending his leg
a little, so that Lucky tripped over it and fell facedown.

The other men laughed. Roland reached down and hauled Lucky to his feet by the collar. “Take it easy, kid. I was just ribbing you. I’m not
going after your girl. We need to work together, all of us, if we’re going to stay alive. If you and that girl are gonna live to have your kids someday.”

Lucky glared at him, twisting from his grasp, then glanced at Dakes, who nodded, smiling. Finally, Lucky said grudgingly, “Yeah. Okay. But you got lucky just now.”

“Heh heh—he sure did ‘get Lucky.’” Dakes chuckled as Lucky stalked off toward
a watchtower. “He got him facedown in the dirt.”

•  •  •

Mordecai was sick of tramping through this cavern. He was cold and tired, and he wanted to sleep, but it wasn’t safe to close his eyes for long—he was too vulnerable there, with only minor weaponry on him. He had only four grenades, and the Cobra combat rifle. He hadn’t wanted to take gear that Roland might need.

The cavern smelled heavily
of dissolved minerals, and underneath that was a gamy animal smell. What
was
that? Seemed like he’d smelled that once before . . . nasty sort of smell.

He continued on, noticing that the slope angled upward. He was constantly watching for sudden
crevices, trying not to trip over stalagmites, wary for subterranean predators.

And then he heard someone singing, up ahead in the cavern.

“. . . I gotta chip that lets me dance

Come on baby take a chance.”

It was that annoying little Claptrap robot with the pointless song-and-dance chip. Mordecai could hear the robot’s piping voice echoing thinly off the stalagmites and the natural stone dome of the ceiling.

He passed into another, wider chamber of the cavern, and there was the Claptrap, dancing and singing in the middle of the
dirt floor. About fifty long paces ahead, light was coming in from the outside—thin, pale, silver light, probably moonlight. That must be the way out of the cavern.

The curved walls and floor there seemed more like packed dirt than stone. That smell was stronger there too, that odd animal smell.

And the robot was there, jigging and singing. “I gotta program that—”

“Hey, robot!” Mordecai barked.

The Claptrap spun around—literally spun around, more than once, till finally it was facing him. “Wha-a-at? Oh! Oh, you gave me a fright! You almost made me pee lubricant!”

“What the hell are you doing down here?”

“Why, don’t you know, Mr. Dakes set me to watching the back entrance! Of course the guardian is here, but I’m here too ’cause Dakes wants me to come and report to him if the bad lady
finds the back way in and—Wait, what’s the password? You gotta say the password!”

“Never mind that. What guardian are you talking about?”

“Just the Thresher, that’s all. There was two of them, but one of them ate the other one—”

“Wait, did you say a
Thresher
?”

“Oh, yes. He tried to eat me and spat me out, halfway down his gullet. He learned I’m not digestible ’cause I’m metal. But most of
you’d
be digestible. Like what’s not left of that guy—” The robot pointed a mechanical hand at a skull, a few bones, a rusted gun, and some bits of armor left piled in a shaft of moonlight across the chamber.

“Where is this Thresher now?”

“Oh, I don’t know, it could be outside the cavern—it goes down into the dirt and comes up outside and eats people and things out there. It eats dirt too if
it has something tasty and disgusting in it. If you want to see the Thresher, we could sing and dance while we wait for it, if you want. Everyone sing: I gotta program that—”

“Cut that shit out. You think it’s not here now, right? Okay, I’m leaving, before it comes back.”

Mordecai started across the dirt ground of the cavern chamber.

The robot chirped up. “I didn’t say the Thresher wasn’t here!
I said it might be outside. But come to think of it, I do think I feel its vibration in the floor, and is that a tentacle over there near your foot? Oh, dear.”

Mordecai turned in time to see a tentacle whip up from the dirt, and the tentacle stared at him: the gray and yellow tentacle had an
eye
on it partway down its sinuous, barbed length. It was a black, shining eye but clearly an eye. Then
the tentacle slapped toward his leg. He leapt back, just out of reach, hopping awkwardly, remembering being dragged underground by the varkid. And Roland wasn’t there to pull his ass out of the fire this time.

Mordecai tracked the tentacle with his gunsight as it came toward him, the Thresher’s rubbery limb cutting the dirt like a periscope from a subaquatic craft; it was a big, hefty, barbed
tentacle, with a sharp black hook on the end, a hook that now slashed up at him.

Mordecai fired the Cobra and hit the tentacle in its eye, cutting the whipping pseudopod right through, as the gun’s boom echoed in the cavern.

“Ooooh, nice shot!” the Claptrap shrilled.

Mordecai thought about turning back to the stone-floored part of the cavern, but he’d come a long way, and this creature was
between him and the way out.

The remains of the tentacle darted below, but Mordecai had seen these strange, enigmatic creatures once before and knew there were many tentacles and a voracious body down below. There was only one way to kill it—he had to get that hidden, burrowing head and body to show itself. And the only way to do that was to shoot the—

Tentacles whipped upward suddenly, two
of them coming from right and left, as if they were trying to trap him between clapping hands. He saw more eyes glittering on the tentacles, hooks flashing, and he lurched and fell on his back, cursing himself for his clumsiness.