Borderlands_Gunsight

by John Shirley

  Ripper glowered at her. “I’m not gonna let her provoke me, Volto, and don’tcha let her provoke you, neither. Don’t get near her! I’m issuing that order to all my men! Treat her like a poison spine off a varkid . . . you just don’t get near it!”

  “So why not gas her again and chain her up?” Volto asked, scratching his bristly chin in puzzlement.

  Ripper shrugged. “Jasper says no. Wants cooperation from some Vault Hunter who’s hung up on her. Can’t treat her that way, he says, ’less we have to.”

  Daphne glared. “Cooperation from Mordecai? On what? Is that what this is all about? Mordecai?”

  “Boss wants to make sure he gives it his all, I reckon, Kuller,” Ripper said, shrugging. “Now—settle down and we’ll give you a pot of stew. Maybe some toilet paper if you’re good.”

  “How we give her stuff without getting close to her?” Volto asked.

  “I dunno . . . maybe put it on the end of a pole with a hook or something. We’ll figure that out. Now come on. Stay outta here unless you got orders otherwise.”

  “Hey!” Daphne called after them, as they turned away. “I wanta see this Jasper! Tell him to come and talk to me! I’ll pay him a fat ransom if that’s what he wants but I want outta here! I can take the job that Mordecai’s supposed to be doing, if—dammit you skagwads, come back here!”

  But they were ignoring her. The hall door clanged shut behind them.

  • • •

  The Claptrap was designated Extra 88878.01. It preferred to simply go by Extra. It had something extra, after all, within it; it had several somethings, really, that most Claptraps didn’t have.

  The robot wheeled along fast as it could, bumping and skidding down the rugged road, feeling its lower parts in danger of rattling loose when it hit ruts and potholes.

  From time to time, Extra scanned overhead for Hyperion vessels. It had no desire to be hit with a Hyperion missile, a Hyperion particle beam, or a Hyperion magnetic-disassembling-beam—or even a monkey wrench thrown by a Hyperion operative. Handsome Jack and Hyperion seemed intent on destroying Claptraps, and it was nervously aware of that H-shaped satellite silhouetted against the moon.

  Extra’s geo-satellite system informed the robot it was somewhere near the settlement of Gunsight, maybe ten klicks out . . . and the ECHO transmission it had picked up earlier suggested that Mordecai would be going to Gunsight.

  And it was imperative, vital, necessary, crucial, and essential—for reasons it did not understand—that it find this Mordecai the Vault Hunter and . . . communicate something to him.

  Its unusually refined holistic mind chip gave it more feelings, more intuition, and more sheer dread than most robots, and even a little self-awareness. It was aware that somewhere inside it, there was another mind, another identity program. The presence of this sometimes mute, mysterious other disquieted Extra. He suspected that it had its own plans that she hadn’t communicated to it. And she was there, too. Professor Elenora Dufty, Superior Technician and Robotics Engineer. He heard her voice, echoing in his head, at times, when he slowed down to do a sunlight-recharge.

  You’re a nasty naughty lazy little Claptrap, and you need to get moving, and find him, and make him understand, he must be made to understand! Only then, only then . . . Oh but oh and oh, I swear to the Angel I shouldn’t have let him look into my eyes!

  Stuff like that. Apparently random comments, really, apart from the constant urging to get back to the quest.

  The quest . . . to find Mordecai the Vault Hunter . . .

  Mordecai had learned some things, hanging out with that peerless tactician Roland.

  And one of the most useful things he’d learned was, Make the enemy think they can predict you. Then do the unpredictable.

  That’s what Mordecai had in mind as, shivering with the chill, he drove up to the outskirts of Gunsight. This Jasper figured he had Mordecai on a string. Figured he’d make him dance like a puppet. Good, let Jasper believe that.

  But Mordecai was more inclined to find his Daphne, break her out, first chance. He’d steal a Buzzard, fly her out of Gunsight—and just leave this whole stinking, ice-cold territory behind.

  Till then he’d let Jasper think he was going to play ball. But when the ball came back to Jasper, it was going to be trailing smoke from a fuse.

  The first thing Mordecai noticed about Gunsight was the big beetling, rocky hillside it was backed up to. Knobbed with boulders, flecked with snow, the steep hillside sheltering the town could also be used against it—except Mordecai could make out the steely glint of heavy weaponry up there, and scanning lenses. Jasper would be controlling that stuff . . . and maybe feeling too confident about it. Mordecai stored that observation away for later.

  The second thing he noticed were the heavily armed Marauders camped around the outskirts, behind concrete and metal porta-wall emplacements. There was a town beyond them, with small houses and bars and supply hutches, but it had been turned into an armed camp. A couple of Buzzards buzzed him, the small flying vehicles passing just a dozen meters over his head; two defensive batteries on wheels rolled up to block his way into town.

  “Time to act like a good guest should, Bloodwing,” Mordecai muttered. “Be polite.”

  Perched on his right shoulder, Bloodwing shuffled her leather wings creakily and seemed to chuckle. He often wondered if she really understood him, when he spoke to her, as fully as she seemed to. Maybe her breed had a little telepathy working for it. Sometimes he thought so.

  He slowed, braked the outrunner to a stop, and raised his hands over his head. “Mordecai reporting to Jasper!” he shouted.

  The Marauders stood behind tanklike mobile defensive batteries: squat metal-studded armored vehicles about twenty meters ahead. A couple of Nomads stood with them, he noticed. A cannon muzzle in one of the batteries swung to sight in on him—it looked to Mordecai like a BL2 Plasma cannon. “Hold your damn fire!” Mordecai shouted. “I told you I’m expected!”

  One of the hulking Nomads approached the outrunner, scowling, keeping a Vladoff shotgun pointed at him. His breath jetted visibly from his nostrils in the cold air. “You’re this Mordecai we’re expecting?” he asked, eyebrows raised. “Mordecai the Vault Hunter? You?”

  “Yeah! What’s so surprising about it?”

  “I figured you’d be a big badass like Roland, or Salvador or that Brick fella . . . one of them . . . But I got boogers bigger’n you!”

  Mordecai shrugged. “And who’d you be with your badass boogers?”

  “Commander Ripper, that’s who I am. And I guess you’re Mordecai all right—Boss said you’d probably have an ugly flying nasty on your shoulder and there it is.”

  At that, Bloodwing stretched out its neck and snapped its beak at Ripper—who took a quick step back. “Keep that thing under control!”

  Mordecai grinned. “I’ll try. But Bloodwing doesn’t like insults—and she does like eating people’s eyes. You going to lead me to your boss or not?”

  “I’m getting in with you, and I’ll guide you. Just don’t let that thing bite me—or poop on me, either!”

  Ripper climbed in, keeping the gun trained on Mordecai. He waved “out of the way!” at the armored vehicles, and the rolling batteries backed up, angling out of the way.

  “Go ahead,” Ripper said, glancing nervously up at Bloodwing, “but take it slow and don’t get cute.”

  “Yeah, yeah, what else would I do,” Mordecai murmured, driving on slowly. They passed the entrenchments, the armored vehicles, and rolled into the main street of the settlement. There was still snow from a recent storm, here and there, edging the metal shacks and Quonsets and scrappy structures that made up the town. A group of young people, maybe teenagers, stood in front of a Quonset hut with a hand-painted sign: HANDSOME JERK’S BAR AND GRILL. On the wall by the sign was a cross-eyed, highly insulting caricature of Handsome Jack. The teens were wearing heavy, floppy clothing, drinking clear liquor out of jars, carrying handmade weapons, and they’d gone
in for some hard-core scarification. They’d blade-scarred their faces, all over, slashing in curious patterns; some of it looked aboriginal, with radiating lines and zigzags; others had traced numbers, and recognizable symbols. A young girl was using a sharp piece of steel, carving a skull face into the cheek of a young boy; the boy gritted his teeth with the pain but he flashed an obscene gesture at Mordecai as he drove by.

  “Healthy little town you got here,” he remarked as they drove up to the fortress at the heart of Gunsight.

  “Don’t much like the locals here,” Ripper said. “But I got tired of wandering out there—” He waved a hand vaguely toward the wastelands outside town limits. “Couldn’t make much of a living out in the Borderlands. Never got laid, either. Better, here. Jasper pays pretty good. You be smart to work for Jasper, Mordecai. But that Reamus—don’t take a job with him. He’ll turn you into a monster . . .”

  Mordecai had heard rumors about the mutated psycho called Reamus, over in Tumessa. And he didn’t question the “turn you into a monster” remark. This was Pandora, after all.

  He slowed for the corrugated gates in the high, metal walls, hardly marked with rust, of Jasper’s fortress. The corners of the walls were set up with bastions and embrasures bristling with gun emplacements. “Looks better constructed than a lotta places I’ve seen,” Mordecai said. “Steel walls, something like fifteen meters high, good ’n’ solid . . . nice job. Your boss must have some money all right, to pay for that.”

  Ripper made a grinding sound in his throat that might’ve been a chuckle. “Sure he’s got money! Other people’s money! Best-organized Bandit outfit on the planet. No secret, really, once you’re here—and of course if you don’t join up, he’ll just kill you, so you won’t be talking about it too much any which way. You join—or you don’t leave alive.” He spoke into a wrist communicator. “Open the Angel-damned door, you skag-sucking idiots, it’s me! I got that Vault Hunter for Jasper!”

  The corrugated metal gates creaked and started to roll back.

  “Moxxi told me, once,” Mordecai said, “about a Bandit clan using Buzzard scouts to suss out a town, then coming out in waves with armored vehicles to rob the place blind. After which they get out, and fast. Bandits with special red and black masks . . . lotta ‘Marauder class’ run by Nomads . . . but nobody seems to know where they’re based. Sound familiar?”

  “You’re a smart one,” Ripper allowed, nodding. “That’s us. But like I say, you don’t join up, good and true and committed, he’ll feed you to Bigjaws. And that ain’t just talk, that’s just what he’d do with you. He’s got people out there, see, agents everywhere . . . they’ll wait their chance, hit you with the gas, disarm you, truss you like a roasted skag, and bring you out here to Gunsight, and you’re Psycho dinner. Bottom line is, it doesn’t matter how good you are, when they come to get you—’cause they won’t fight fair.”

  So the only way to be sure you were safe from Jasper’s agents, Mordecai figured, as he drove through the open gates, is to kill Jasper. A dead man can’t order a murder.

  But he had a pretty strong hunch, as he looked around at the fortress, that killing Jasper wouldn’t be easy.

  Just inside the gates of Jasper’s fortress was about an acre of open common area with tents, storage sheds, men stalking back and forth on errands, all of them heavily armed, some of them wearing the red and black masks, others with the masks pushed up on top of their heads. There was a kind of landing pad for the Buzzards, behind and above the common area, on a steel platform. Mordecai counted two Buzzards up there, with room for two more. He wasn’t sure he could fly one—but Daphne could. She could fly pretty much anything. And when he broke out of here, it would be with her.

  Under the landing pad platform, double doors opened into the fortress’s headquarters and stronghold. The stronghold was big enough, Mordecai reckoned, to include barracks for a lot of men. And somewhere in there would be a room, or a cell, maybe deep in the basement, with his woman locked up in it.

  His hands tightened on the steering wheel as he thought about it, till his knuckles were white. They’d better not have hurt Daphne . . .

  He wasn’t sure whom he was madder at, though—Jasper or himself. If he hadn’t gotten drunk and gone out half-cocked, the scumbags Jasper had sent to kidnap Daphne probably wouldn’t have succeeded. He’d have spotted them coming. He’d have heard their vehicles coming, and anyway their home tower was set up with warning systems.

  But those systems didn’t do any good to people in outrunners, driving away from the building.

  My fault. All my damned fault. His belly burned with anguish like he’d swallowed a road flare.

  No use beating yourself up. All you can do is make up for it. Get her out of here . . .

  The stronghold was several stories higher than the walls; there were a couple of balconies on it, set up with machine guns. Hard to get a stolen Buzzard past those guys. He might have to kill them first. Above the balconies were a few barred windows, and up top were old-fashioned battlements. More muzzles projected up there. Jasper was a fanatic for security. But then, when people figured out it was his men who were methodically robbing nearly every settlement on the planet, this place would be under siege. Jasper had to have some kind of long-term game plan in mind.

  He pulled up in front of the stronghold, Bloodwing fluttering on his shoulder and cawing raspily in his ear.

  “Stay cool, girl,” he muttered to her. “Wait for orders.”

  “Leave your weapons in the vehicle,” Ripper said, climbing out.

  Unarmed, Mordecai climbed from the outrunner, Bloodwing fluttering irritably on his shoulder. Commander Ripper spoke brusquely to the two Marauders standing guard at the door. The men stood aside but kept a sharp watch on Mordecai as he followed Ripper into the stronghold of Boss Jasper.

  • • •

  He was waiting on the roof, near a cannon emplacement, smoking an enormous stogie and muttering to himself inaudibly as he gazed out over the city. Nearby stood a dozen armed men, including three hooded Nomads. They all stared at Mordecai as he and Commander Ripper strode from the elevator housing over to their boss.

  Jasper was a squat, muscular man in chain mail, skag leather, and a high-capacity fast-recharge Pangolin shield; his massive arms, sleeveless, were tattooed with ideograms and lettering from various planets, but nothing local—confirming Mordecai’s suspicion that Jasper was a relatively recent emigrant to Pandora. The Boss of Gunsight had small eyes, a stub of a nose, and round cheeks. When Jasper bared his teeth they gleamed and sparkled: they were gold, encrusted with diamonds; his long beard was divided into three perfect spikes, each spike a different primary color: red, yellow, blue. His head was shaved and on its very top was a small mechanism that seemed built into his skull—it was almost periscope-shaped. But it pointed backward, scanning about when Jasper moved. Mordecai guessed that the device actually allowed the boss to see behind him when he chose to: an electronic “eye in the back of his head.”

  On Jasper’s hip was an Eridian Thunderstorm shotgun-style energy weapon—he wore it in a holster the way a smaller man would wear a pistol. Jasper was almost as intimidating as his fortress.

  The boss grinned glitteringly at Mordecai. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly high and fruity. “There he is. Matching up with his file photo, right down to the scavenger riding around on his shoulder.” He then muttered something else to himself in a low voice, quite inaudible, and gestured for Mordecai to join him at the battlements. “Over here, Mordecai. Want to show you something . . .”

  He strode past a hovering cone-shaped service-bot, over to a silvery metal box on a tripod, set up right at the edge of the battlement. Mordecai strolled coolly to join Jasper, not wanting to seem as if he was in a hurry to comply. He had to pretend, for now, that he was working for Jasper, but he had his pride, too.

  Beyond the parapet, Mordecai could see the town spread out in ragged rings around the fortress. Smoke rose here and there. A gunsho
t thumped, and then another. Someone screamed, thinly, in the distance. Directly below was the Buzzard pad—too far for anyone to jump down to it without breaking his legs. There had to be some better way to get there . . .

  “Now, sir,” said Jasper, “you’ll note that we’re on the Frostbite Highlands, overlooking the rolling hills of Tumess. Beyond those hills, on the Staggering Steppes, you’ll find the town of Tumessa . . . an armed camp, of course . . . Oh, by the way, would you like a hot drink? I have been trying to work on my manners as a host . . . I do tend to forget, since I have to actually kill most of my visitors and . . .” He shrugged apologetically. “Well, I do need to learn how to relate to people in other ways if I’m going to thrive in interstellar commerce. Perhaps you’ll join me? A nice mug of hot wine?”

  “Ah, well—no, no thanks.” Mordecai would’ve liked something just like that—it was biting cold up here, his ears were aching with the sharp wind, and it was all he could do to keep his teeth from chattering. But he didn’t trust Jasper not to drug him.

  “Suit yourself.” Jasper beckoned to the service-bot, which drifted over to him. “Hot mulled Zorian wine,” he told it. A small door opened on the bot’s side, revealing a steaming mug exuding a deliciously spicy smell. Jasper sipped the hot wine, grunted with satisfaction, and turned back to the metal box. “Now . . . I tap the far-seer here, and as it’s voice activated . . . I merely say, Tumessa! And hey presto . . .”

  The box was a holoscope of a kind Mordecai hadn’t seen before—it simply materialized a miniature, 3-D image of a town in the air between Mordecai and Jasper.

  “That’s where you’re going, Mordecai—Tumessa. Ever been there?”

  “Nope.” And he didn’t plan to go, either.

  “Its reputation is bad, even worse than Gunsight’s! And no wonder: it’s run by a scummy, scuzzy, sleazy, backstabbing, sneaky heap of skag droppings named Reamus. Naturally the place is scummy, scuzzy, and sleazy, too.”

  “And why am I supposed to go to Tumessa?” Mordecai asked. He had a sinking feeling he might actually end up going anyway.