by John Shirley
She nodded.
Then he felt another cold gun muzzle on his neck—one of Jasper’s sentries. Really jabbing that muzzle in.
Mordecai turned and looked the sentry in the eye. But he spoke to Daphne as he pointed at the sentry. “Daphne, remind me to kill that one, later on.”
“Okay, Loveygun,” she said, and blew him a kiss.
Mordecai turned and walked through the door, after Commander Ripper.
• • •
“They’re going to be twice as alert in Tumessa now,” Mordecai grumbled as he got into the outrunner. He wore the repaired auto-camo suit, but he didn’t have a lot of faith in it. At least it kept the cold out efficiently. The morning was damp, with a clinging chill; the sun looked sickly through a skein of cloud cover.
“I know,” said Commander Ripper. “Sucks.”
“Yeah. Um—look. For some reason, I find that I respect you. So—I just wanted to say that.”
Ripper looked at him with raised eyebrows. “Okay. Thanks. I’ll take that. Gladly.”
Mordecai climbed into the outrunner and glanced around at the courtyard of Jasper’s stronghold. “Listen, Ripper, I noticed Jasper looking at Daphne a kinda certain way. You notice that at all? I mean . . . I won’t tell him you said it . . .”
Ripper shrugged. “Hard to miss that.”
“He tried to make a move on her?”
Ripper shrugged again. “Could I tell you if he had?”
“No, no you couldn’t.” But the look in Ripper’s eyes was answer enough. “What’s he got on you, man? You don’t seem like you’d be working for him if you had a choice . . .”
Ripper sighed. “I shouldn’t talk about it.” He glanced around, as if to see who might be listening.
Mordecai waited.
Ripper licked his lips and said, in a low voice, “My son. Jasper’s got him under his thumb at some outpost somewhere. Strong young man. Only family I got. Never cared to have any till he came along.”
“Somewhere you say—you don’t know where?”
Ripper shook his head. “He’s got a dozen outposts, camps for his Bandits. Kid’s only sixteen. Says he’s working at one of the outposts. Earning good money. But Jasper won’t tell me where.”
“So he’s got that hold on you. Must think you’re worth it, I guess. You knew what was up when I tried to break Daphne out?”
Ripper nodded. “We figured. That’s why I let you keep the . . .” He pointed at Bloodwing, who was roosting on the back of a seat in the outrunner. “And why I kept back from the cell.”
“Yeah. I figured it out later. Okay. What’s your boy’s name ’case I hear anything?”
Ripper looked uncomfortable. He shuffled his feet for a moment. But at last he whispered, “Tyno.”
Mordecai nodded. “I better get on the road. Just keep in mind—Jasper’s going down one of these days. Reamus, too. And maybe they’ll go down together. You might be around to pick up the pieces.” He started the outrunner’s engine. “Keep an eye on Daphne for me.”
Then he put the outrunner in gear and drove out the front gate of the stronghold.
Within minutes, Mordecai was driving through the Frostbite Highlands, on his way to the Staggering Steppes and, just maybe, certain death.
But then, he reflected, we’re all on our way to certain death, whoever we are. Some get there slow.
Some get there fast . . . and suddenly.
• • •
It was almost dark out when Mordecai pulled up at the edge of the old mining quarry.
“Damn, it’s cold out here,” Mordecai muttered.
Hunched on his shoulder, snuggled against him for warmth, Bloodwing gave out a throaty errr of agreement.
“We’ll camp in one of these old mines.”
Bloodwing made a squawk of complaint.
“Take it easy. We won’t be far inside. I know you hate underground stuff.” Bloodwing didn’t like to be that far from the sky.
Mordecai shut off the engine, grabbed the camping pack from the back of the outrunner, along with the Eridian rifle, and started down the zigzag path to the bottom of the sleet-slashed quarry. He’d brought a shield this time and switched it on; it ran from just below his shoulders on down. The shield got in Bloodwing’s way any higher.
“We’ll get some rest,” Mordecai murmured, his ears burning with the cold wind. The camo suit was heated but it only covered him from the neck down. “In the morning, we’ll scout that blasted Tumessa again from a good distance. Use the scope. I need to think about it before going in there again, if that’s what we’ve got to do.”
How, he wondered, could he turn this whole thing to his advantage? He didn’t trust Jasper to pay the fee—and he especially didn’t trust him to release Daphne.
Walking down the stone path, using a small flashlight to see his way, Mordecai thought: Maybe Jasper’s idea is, I go back to Tumessa and get killed this time. And Jasper thinks he’ll go to Daphne and say, Baby, he’s dead, so you may as well throw in with me. And by the way—I’m rich!
Probably that’s what Reamus had in mind. But even if Mordecai got killed, taking Daphne to bed wasn’t going to help Boss Jasper. Mordecai chuckled at the thought. He knew the story of Daphne and Boss Creel—and how Daphne got her start in “the business” back on the homeworld.
The first time he let her out of that room and into a bed somewhere safe . . . that’d be the last bed he’d ever lie down in, unless you counted the coffin.
Mordecai reached the bottom of the quarry and went to the nearest mine entrance. He detected no smell of skags. He looked around inside—it looked dry, and far from comfortable. But he had a heated sleeping bag; he could stay in here and it was defensible, which was always a plus on Pandora. He went inside and found it was tumbled down in the back, rocks blocking the tunnel.
“This’ll work, Bloodwing.” He made camp. Bloodwing grumbled but stuck close to him, about four paces inside the entrance.
Soon, having eaten, warmed by the heated sleeping bag, and dead tired, Mordecai drifted to sleep, counting on Bloodwing to be his “watchdog”. . .
His sleep was deep for a while, though troubled with dreams of SlagSlugs and men stripped of their skin in razor wire. He awoke for a time when it was still dark. He lay there listening to the wind sigh, shifting to try to get comfortable on the hard surface under his sleeping bag. Sleep returned fitfully—and then he was jolted to wakefulness by a beak tapping his forehead.
“Ow, not so hard, Bloodwing! What is it?”
Bloodwing made a low squeaky-clucking sound, which she used to quietly indicate danger nearby.
Mordecai crawled out of the sleeping bag, picked up the Eridian rifle, and crept quietly to the cold entrance. It was a square of dark blue against the blackness of the mine’s interior.
He took a few quiet steps and froze, listening closely. Voices. Whispery, furtive.
“Smell of flesh . . . manflesh,” one of them said.
“Oh great,” Mordecai murmured, as Bloodwing flapped to his shoulder. “Sounds like Tunnel Rats . . .” The wind brought him a rancid scent. “Smells like ’em, too . . .”
Bloodwing made a soft errr in agreement.
“I’d better chase their asses back into their holes. I don’t want to break camp before daybreak. Once the sun comes out they’ll keep out of our way.”
“Errr.”
He ducked out of the tunnel entrance, the Eridian rifle going to his shoulder—and the Tunnel Rats saw him at the same moment. There were three of the degenerate tunnel dwellers, about ten meters away, one holding an electric lantern illuminating them in a wobbly dome of light.
Tunnel Rat was slang for a miner who’d gone underground and bred there. A Tunnel Rat’s diet was in large part human flesh taken on night raids to the surface. These particular specimens, in raggedy old mining overalls, had the characteristic inbred, rattish look about their faces—chinless, protuberant incisors, squinty eyes, jutting mustaches like rodent whiskers. And al
l three of them were armed with rifles. Two were training their assault rifles toward Mordecai . . . far too slowly.
He’d already picked his targets, long practice letting his hands and eyes do the work. The Eridian rifle was at a good range for its blast effectiveness; his trigger finger squeezed out four shots before the Tunnel Rats got off more than a single, mis-aimed burst. Mordecai sent hot blue-red Eridian pulses through the semidarkness, directly into his targets. Their bodies soaked up the energy for a split second, glowing—before bursting into flaming chunks.
The third Tunnel Rat was backing away, hissing to itself in fear—it dropped the lantern and tried to fire at him but two more Eridian pulses tracered their way through the darkness, burning their courses through the air like murderous fireworks looking to burst—and burst they did, taking the squeaking Tunnel Rat with them.
“There’s your breakfast, Bloodwing,” Mordecai said.
She leapt from his shoulder, flapped down to some still-smoking remnants of flesh, and began to feed on the Tunnel Rats’ eyes. After all, at Tumessa he had promised her some eyes. She pecked happily at the remains as he scouted out the other tunnel entrances. He saw no more Tunnel Rats—but the far tunnel smelled strongly of them. This one must be an intact mine, an entrance to some subterranean domain. The Tunnel Rats would probably have migrated here, picked out the old tunnels, used them as the basis for excavating a colony. Somewhere down that tunnel there were hundreds of the bastards.
He shuddered, thinking about them. Roland claimed they came to the surface, captured women, imprisoned them below, impregnated them, to create new Tunnel Rats. The women were only allowed to live till the child was a year old, at which time a woman became Tunnel Rat dinner—and her child’s first meal of flesh.
That made him think of Bigjaws, a former Tunnel Rat turned into something even worse now. And Daphne, on a sort of glass platter over Bigjaws . . .
He growled to himself. Jasper was going to pay for that.
Mordecai went back to his camp and ate a food bar, not tasting it, thinking only of Tumessa, of Reamus and Jasper. He had to get them working directly against one another—get them face-to-face.
Having gorged on Tunnel Rat, Bloodwing rejoined him, napping near the fallen rocks at the back of the mine shaft.
Dawn was breaking when he put on his backpack and picked up his rifle—and he heard another voice from outside.
It seemed there were more Tunnel Rats to kill after all.
But the voice didn’t sound like a Tunnel Rat . . .
“There’s a one-point-two chance in three he’s somewhere in the vicinity,” said the woman’s voice.
A woman’s voice? Was it a voice he recognized? It was not Daphne. Another voice . . . Familiar, from the past. From years ago . . .
Wait. It couldn’t be her, could it? No. Could not be.
He hoped to God it wasn’t Elenora.
The sun was up, but Mordecai saw no one out in the deserted quarry. There were still some shadowy places in the dig, but he could see the wet, snow-streaked rock quarry well enough. The woman he’d heard simply wasn’t there.
Something was moving out of the shadows of a mine entrance, however—something metallic . . .
He swung the Eridian rifle toward it, thought he ought to fire just in case—and then the Claptrap rolled out into view.
“Greetings!” the robot called out cheerily, in a piping voice.
“A Claptrap!” Bloodwing and Mordecai looked at one another—Bloodwing shrugged. “What the Inferno,” Mordecai asked, “are you doing out here?”
“Looking for Mordecai!” it said, rolling toward him.
“Hold it right there!” he said, aiming the rifle at it. “Bloodwing—get up high, see if you can find who this robot belongs to.”
Bloodwing squawked in assent and flapped up, ascending into the sky and circling overhead.
“I don’t at present belong to anyone,” the Claptrap informed him. It added sadly, “I’m . . . all . . . alone.”
Mordecai snorted. “Claptraps are getting rare. And rare is worth money. You gotta belong to someone.”
“Ah, it’s true—I do feel rare,” it told him. “In fact I might be rare. First of all, because not many of us survived the robolution. And not many survived Hyperion’s raiders. Handsome Jack doesn’t seem to like Claptraps, for some reason completely unknown to people of good taste . . .”
“What I’ve heard,” Mordecai said, lowering the rifle, “is that he doesn’t like anything he doesn’t own.”
“Quite likely—he doesn’t own Extra 88878.01.”
“That would be you? I’m not familiar with the Extra designation. Oh wait . . .” He winced. That woman’s voice . . .
“Just call me Extra, please,” the Claptrap said. “No need for the surname.”
“Last time I heard that term, extra, applied to robotics,” Mordecai said wearily, “it was used by a Professor Dufty. Please tell me she’s not around here anywhere.”
“Yes! I mean, yes, Professor Elenora Dufty, Superior Technician and Robotics Engineer, is the lady in question. And no, she isn’t here. Not precisely. She has shuffled off this mortal shock absorber. Her gears have rusted and her circuits are fried.”
“She was flesh and blood,” Mordecai muttered. “Not a robot. And in that she had some good points. She was quite . . . flexible.”
“Yes? She never told me.”
“Doesn’t matter. I used to work for her and it got a little too cozy, is all. You say she’s dead?”
“She took poison. And it killed her. She did it after the upload . . .”
“Poison. Did she now. Why?”
“Because you didn’t come back!”
Mordecai nodded. “Am I supposed to feel bad about that? She tried to shoot me when I was taking a shower once. She also gashed my arm with a piece of broken glass, to ‘punish me for bad thoughts,’ she said. Naturally I didn’t come back.”
“She thought you were going to work for her, forever, and be her mate. So she tells me.”
“So she tells you? I thought you said she was dead?” He glanced nervously around, then up at Bloodwing, who was spiraling down to alight on his shoulder.
Bloodwing made a particular short brisk squawk that meant, I see no one around.
The Claptrap seemed to hesitate before answering Mordecai’s question. Then a woman’s voice came from its speaker grid. “I cut you, Mordecai, in self-defense, you bastard, you horrible bastard boy,” said the voice.
It was the voice of Professor Elenora Dufty, Superior Technician and Robotics Engineer.
“Self-defense!” Mordecai blurted. “Bullshit!”
“Self-defense from your malevolent thoughts!” she said, in a serrated, cutting tone.
“God—it is her. And she’s still delusional. How am I hearing her, robot? Some kind of . . . transmitter? From somewhere else?” Mordecai once more glanced anxiously around. “You sure she’s not around here? Is she in that mine you came out of?”
“No, no, she’s dead,” the little Claptrap said, in its own voice. It sounded terribly chirpy. “I told you. She took poison.”
“Which was probably to punish me?”
“Yes,” said Elenora Dufty’s voice—from the Claptrap. “You deserve it.” The robot added in its own voice, “She’s inside me—she uploaded her personality onto a chip, along with a voice simulator, some other patented mind-mockery, and here we are! But I’m in charge of myself, I assure you. Mostly. She talks whenever she feels like it.”
It sounded less chirpy now.
“Let me guess,” Mordecai said, starting toward the path that led up to the outrunner. “She sent you to find me, and torment me. Make me feel guilty. That it?”
“No, no!” the robot called, trundling after him up the trail. “She sent me to help you!”
“Sure she did.”
This was cruelly ironic. He was already suffering for having abandoned a woman who didn’t deserve to be abandoned. Daphne. He’
d foolishly let Jasper kidnap her. Now he was to be tormented by the one woman who did deserve abandoning.
“No, no,” Extra insisted, “she sent me to help you! I have vital technology! She says it will defeat your enemies!”
“I know Elenora. The woman is punishment-based. She thinks helping me is going to make me feel guilty, that it?”
“It’s a good hypothesis!”
Mordecai noted the ambiguity of that response. But he did need all the help he could get. And Dufty had been a robotics genius. She did have the capability to create something that would help him—even if it was for all the wrong reasons.
Deep down, he knew there was more to this. There would be a trap hidden somewhere in this gift . . .
But he thought he could probably outsmart the old girl. She’d been smarter than he—in certain ways. But nowhere near as crafty. And if the robot could be useful in the short term . . . why not?
They got to the rim overlooking the quarry, and Mordecai took off his backpack, tossed it in the back.
“Are you . . . are you going to drive away?” Extra asked, with real dismay. “And . . . and leave me here?”
“Tell you what, if you can get in the outrunner without my having to lift you, you can go with me. For now.”
“Oh, hurray!” Extra spun around in apparent joy.
“Whoa—hold it. You are not going to be one of those twitchy, hoppy, whirling, singing, dancing, yappy Claptraps, you understand? If you start doing any of that, I’m tossing you over the first cliff I come to!”
“Oh! No, no, no! I’m solemn! I was always known, in the parts shop, as the Solemn One! I’ll be quiet and good . . . I can’t speak for Professor Dufty. But I’ll be good!”
The robot rolled around to the passenger side of the outrunner, seemed to hunker down, and then it leapt up, coming down in the seat. It bounced once, hitting the seat, turning in midair to face the front.
“Pretty good trick,” Mordecai allowed, climbing in and clipping the Eridian rifle next to the driver’s seat. Bloodwing settled onto his left shoulder, instinctively mistrusting the Claptrap.