by John Shirley
“Anybody dead yet?” he yelled, looking over the back of his seat at his passengers.
“We will be if we don’t take the fight to the enemy!” the woman yelled fiercely. “I say we get out and rush ’em! With me around, you might actually get somewhere!” She was hunched between seats, but he saw her goggled face bob up long enough to fire her pistol four times out a shattered window. “Crap! I think I missed the bastard . . . No! I got him! I got that Bruiser . . . Oh, wait, he’s up. I just wounded him.” She ducked back down as half a dozen bullets slammed into the armored side of the bus.
“You got any shields, lady?” Marcus asked her.
“Naw, I was gonna buy one from you!”
“And I got plenty for you to buy, but they’re over in Fyrestone. Only one I had on the bus crapped out on me when I drove out to the spaceport.”
Jakus was flattened on the floor as three more energized bullets sizzled screaming into the bus. Another tire blew. “What we gonna do?” Jakus called. “Driver? Yo! You got any ideas?”
“Listen, amateur—” the woman began, turning to Jakus.
“I’m not an amateur!”
“Okay, prove it! Get out there and head ’em off! If you’re going to survive on this planet, you’ve got to be able to take out a handful of Psycho bandits on your own! You’ve got the rifle! All I have with me’s a pistol!”
“Yeah, well, uh . . . How about sending the robot out first?”
“That would not be a recommended use of my hardware!” the robot protested shrilly. “My guarantee has expired! Helllooooooo!”
Marcus shook his head impatiently. “The robots, they aren’t fighters, kid. That’s not what they’re for.”
“Look, Jakus,” the woman went on, “you want to give me the rifle, I’ll do it. But you better head back to the spaceport after. You’re not going to survive out here without the guts to fight!”
Marcus looked at Jakus, saw him chewing his lower lip. Then the amateur nodded, prepped his rifle, got up, and headed to the door. His voice was hoarse as he said, “I’m goin’.”
“Might do just as well to fight from the bus, kid,” Marcus pointed out.
“I . . . I’m gonna see if I can sneak up on them, maybe if I nail the big one . . .”
Marcus shrugged and opened the door. It would keep the Psychos busy, anyway.
Jakus stepped outside the bus, looking around, face twitching. Then he headed off around the hummock, hunched over, rifle at the ready to fire from the hip.
Marcus lost sight of him. A few seconds passed. Then he heard a thud, saw a flash of light . . . and something flew over the hummock, falling like a soggy cannonball on the hood of the bus.
It was Jakus’s head, blasted from his neck, rolling to stare sightlessly right at Marcus.
“That’s not what I meant by ‘head them off,’” the woman said dryly. “Damn amateurs.”
Marcus sighed. “Dumb kid! Well, anyhow, we know where some of ’em are.”
“Dammit, I should’ve taken his rifle,” the woman grumbled, shaking her head in disgust. “How about giving me that shotgun? I’ll trade you the pistol. Give you the Vladof back later.”
So she knew her weapons. Who the hell was she? “And if you get killed? The Psychos gonna give it back to me later? I don’t think so, lady. Not a chance.”
“Okay, fine. But if we just sit around in here, they’re gonna blow this bus up with us in it.” She started for the door. “I’m not waiting to be fried in this hunk of junk. While you’re enjoying your break, I’m gonna see if I can take a couple out, discourage the scum from getting too close.”
“Wait a minute, dammit! We’ll go together and stick close to the bus. Come on.”
Hefting the shotgun, Marcus went out the door first; she followed behind, pistol ready.
“I’ll stay here and keep an eye on things in the bus!” the Claptrap called after them. “Ah-ha, yes. This seat needs cleaning, by the way. I’ll make a note of it.”
Marcus looked around, but the Psychos were keeping their heads down. He pointed to a spot where she could hunker behind a low boulder, on the right side of the hummock, and she nodded, moved quickly to station herself there.
He climbed over the still-steaming front bumper of the truck to get to the other, stepped onto the ground, and saw a Psycho bandit coming around the hummock, bent from the waist and surprised to see him waiting there.
He fired the shotgun almost point-blank and exploded the bandit’s head from his shoulders.
“A head for a head,” Marcus muttered as the bandit flopped dead at his feet.
He heard a noise and looked up to see another bandit, this one with a scar slashed across his bare chest in an X shape.
The bandit fired spasmodically, the round going over Marcus’s shoulder, and jumped back as Marcus fired. Marcus’s shot missed him, but then he heard the crack-crack of the woman’s pistol. Just as he’d hoped, the bandit had backed into her firing line.
Marcus didn’t bother to check. That woman knew what she was doing.
He grabbed the first bandit’s weapon, then turned to look at the bus—and swore. The shot that missed him had smashed into the severed head on the bus’s hood, blasted it to pieces, scattered them all over what was left of the windshield and inside.
“Gonna be cleaning up messes till sunrise,” he said. He climbed back over the bumper and went to look for the woman.
On the other side of the hummock, he glimpsed a flash of light, a blinking outline of a woman that was there and gone—and a Psycho staggering back, lightly wounded. The Psycho dived behind an outcropping of blue stone.
Where was the woman? It’d looked as if she’d gone invisible for a moment . . .
No, he must’ve been wrong. It was dusk, starting to get dim and shadowy. He must have been seeing things.
Then she was there, behind, tapping him on the shoulder. “We’d better get in the bus.”
He opened his mouth to ask her about what he’d seen, but she turned away from him in a way that suggested she didn’t want any questions. He mutely followed her back to the bus.
What was going on? Had he really seen her vanish? How had she reappeared behind him?
They climbed into the bus and closed the door.
“Am I . . . am I safe now?” the Claptrap asked.
Marcus ignored the robot. He checked the ECHO—no new messages had come through. But Scooter had been clear that he was sending help, and despite his eccentricities, Scooter was usually dependable.
He carried his shotgun to a seat a few rows back and settled in where he had the best cover. Keeping his head low, he peered through the louvered windows, seeing no movement. “I don’t see anybody. If you wounded that Bruiser, as you figured earlier . . . and wounded that Psycho . . .”
The woman nodded as she sat across the aisle from him. “Yeah—I figure they’ll be licking their wounds.”
“That’s disgusting!” the Claptrap called out.
“It’s only an expression,” she said absently. Adding to Marcus, “They’ll be patching themselves up, thinking about how to go at us. Probably be near dawn before they make a move.”
Marcus nodded. “That’s my instinct. With luck, Scooter’ll get someone here to help us by then.”
Time passed—maybe not much. A minute felt like an hour as they waited for another attack.
Finally, the woman said, “Well . . . I don’t think I can sleep. Know any stories?”
“Yes, do tell a story!” the Claptrap shrilled. “Do you know the story about the Brave Little Claptrap?”
The woman rolled her eyes. “Anyway, you were mentioning Gynella . . . and Roland. I’m curious about that.”
“Are you?” What was her interest in Gynella and Roland? “Okay. I’ve got a few supplies in the bus. We can have something to eat, a drink, and I’ll tell you a story. A true story. As far as I know. It’s about Roland and what happened when he and Mordecai and Brick got together and . . . ah! This happened a ways
back but then again, not so very long ago. It started, as so many stories do, in Fyrestone. On a certain day, when Roland showed up there, looking for someone in particular . . .”
Squinting against the noon light glancing off scrap metal, Roland jumped out of his scratched, dented, blast-blackened outrunner. He looked down Fyrestone’s sunbaked, dusty main street with a certain feeling of disbelief.
He could hardly believe he was back here again.
A lot of Fyrestone looked like an aboriginal camp, with circular huts and lodges, but made out of rust-streaked metal, many of them with gatelike steel doors and big numbers painted on the side. Some appeared to be made from parts of old surplus spacecraft and assorted junk, welded together in the vague shapes of shops and impromptu dwellings; others looked prefab, probably brought there by prospectors and Vault Hunters, kits assembled by robots. Nobody’d made any effort at decoration; there were more graves than there were people.
What a hole.
But somehow, he thought as he strolled down the street, hand on his shotgun stock holding the gun barrel casually on his shoulder, everything seems to start here.
And it was here, he’d heard, that he’d find Skelton Dabbits, the mining engineer who’d gotten hold of the orbital scans, if Roland’s source in New Haven was to be believed. Energy signatures on the engineer’s purported scans indicated crystalisks, out past the Eridian Promontory.
Roland was crystalisk hunting. They were part of his retirement plan. He was thinking of making a bundle on Eridium crystals, using the moolah to get to Xanthus—a watery world, as different a planet from this one as he could imagine. He wanted to look up some old friends. Maybe start a sport-fishing business. He used to like to go sport fishing for the big ones, back on the homeworld. And he’d had a bellyful of Pandora.
But that kind of lifestyle change was going to take money. Crystalisks might just provide the scratch he needed.
Asking around, Roland was directed to a small, hemispherical, metal-mesh hut on a side trail—you couldn’t really call it a street—off the main drag of Fyrestone.
He found Skelton Dabbits sitting out front in the sunshine, using a large skag skull as a stool. Dabbits was a spindly little man in mining togs that were too large for him; they hung on him as if he were a coat rack. The hair on his bald, freckled head was wispy, and so was his beard. He was alternately drinking from a flask and chewing smoked Primal testicles. He looked up at Roland through his green-tinted goggles, seeming unsurprised to see him—must have gotten the message Roland had sent through Scooter.
Dabbits asked, “You him?”
“I’m Roland, if that’s the him you mean.”
“That’s the him! Roland!”
“You Skelton Dabbits?”
“If that’s the me you mean. Skelton Dabbits is me all over! You care for some of this?” He offered the flask. “Got some real sweet little narco oil mixed in it. Might make you nod a bit.”
“No thanks. How much for the scans?”
Dabbits cringed a little and looked up and down the side street. Almost whispering, he said, “Keep your voice down about that, mister! I had to steal those babies from my last employer. As for how much, that is a matter for consideration, and I’m still considering it.” He saluted Roland with his flask, took another pull on it, and his head drooped a little. He seemed to stare off into the sky, as if he could see through the atmosphere to another planet entirely . . .
“Dabbits!” Roland said sharply.
His head jerked up. “What? Where?”
“The scans, man. How much?”
“I told you . . . I’m considering on that. They won’t go cheap. Took a big risk. I don’t know if they found out I broke into that mainframe and printed ’em out. If they did, the bastards at Dahl will come after me. But see, they fired me, and that wasn’t fair, no justice in it, so I stole those scans to get my own back.”
Roland wondered how reliable Dabbits could be. “What you get fired for, exactly?”
“Oh, they said I was a narco head. Just because I nodded off while I was flying the prospecting hopper and it crashed into a . . . well, we don’t need to talk about that.”
Roland shrugged. “I’ll give you three hundred for the scans, sight unseen.”
“Three hundred! No screekin’ way, bucko! I took a big chance, putting the word out down here, about those crystalisk readings. There’s big money in it, you’ll get rich off ’em, and you’ll be laughing that you got the scans off an old fool for a pittance and a penny.”
“If there’re such big riches in it, why don’t you go claim it yourself?”
“Because it’s dangerous territory! For one thing, General Goddess is right in the way. And she’s shooting down anything that flies over. Orbital shuttles won’t take you there, nor hoppers. Too dangerous. You got to go overland. I look like I could make that trip? I’m an engineer, not a fighter. Soon’s I sell these scans, I’m getting off this hellhole of a world, and I know a nice, quiet planet where they got some righteous narcoweed growing wild. Why, you can pick it like posies—”
“Dabbits? I’ll make it five hundred.”
“Five hundred? Why, that’s not half enough to pay my way!”
Another five minutes of haggling, and they settled on a thousand. Roland paid him, declined the bag of Primal testicles Dabbits wanted to throw in on the deal, and took his scans back to the outrunner.
Back on the sunny main drag, Roland sat in the driver’s seat—the outrunner was a two-seater, apart from the support for the turret gunner behind—and spread the semitransparent scan sheets out on his lap, holding them below the line of sight of anyone who might be looking his way. He squinted at the scan map and nodded to himself. The crystalisk den—biggest concentration of the creatures yet found on the planet—was marked in Dabbits’s shaky handwriting. Roland knew enough about energy signatures to recognize the flare lines Dabbits had circled. It sure looked authentic—Eridium that moved around, seemingly migrated. That meant crystalisks.
Trouble was, the entrance to the den complex was southwest of the Eridian Promontory, the other side of a lot of desert and a big mountain range. And it was true there weren’t any hoppers going out that way. Dabbits was right—he was going to have to go overland by outrunner. That’d put him right up to his neck in bandits, and maybe the army of General Goddess. Bandits he could handle. But armies? He’d need a couple of solid fighters along to help him with that.
Last he knew, Brick was over in the settlement on Jawbone Ridge, acting as a bodyguard to some mining agent. That’d be a start. Hell, Brick was a couple of guys all in one.
If Roland brought Brick in, he’d have to split his profits with him, but judging by the flare-line strength, there should be plenty of Eridium crystals to go around.
• • •
Smartun was waiting for his Goddess.
A man of medium height, intense black eyes, and otherwise unremarkable features, Smartun leaned against a wall in the shade of the Devil’s Footstool coliseum. Gynella had converted the rickety coliseum atop the Footstool to a kind of temporary fortress.
Heart thudding with anticipation, Smartun waited for Gynella, outwardly calm, arms folded across his metal breastplate. Rakks wheeled and wended, not far above the narrow windswept butte of naked stone. He looked off to his right, past the edge of the cliff and across the burning white desert far below the top of the Devil’s Footstool—the Salt Flats.
Heat shimmered up off the flatlands, a long way below the high, columnar, chop-top pinnacle of the Footstool; the far horizon was blurred by heat, dust, and, perhaps, an unknown murk given off by sheer desperation.
Smartun heard a muffled shout and looked across the parade ground at the barracks. They were getting restless in there. The barracks was a fairly new construction, a big Quonset-shaped metal building, housing Gynella’s core militia of two hundred soldiers.
The wind sighed and lifted skirls of dust from the parade ground—and then the metal door of th
e new First Division quarters banged open, and the Psycho bandits and other thugs who’d joined the Division began to troop noisily out, hooting and muttering standard imprecations.
Smartun snorted to himself. For better or worse, they were his people now. Mostly for the worse. Or it would be for the worse if she weren’t around.
He was a relative newcomer to the planet. Wanted for cat burglary, pocket vacuuming, and human trafficking on Red Ferrous Three and for Egregious Sneaking and Corrosive Treachery on the Mudball Colonies, he’d fled to the one planet law enforcement had given up on. Unlike the Psychos and the Bruisers and the other demented thugs of the Pandoran backcountry, he had not been there long, hadn’t been damaged and mutated by the curious radiation of the Headstone Mine, the subtle emanation of Eridium-based devices, or the warping effect of Vault obsession. In consequence, Smartun’s brain worked fairly well, despite his sociopathy, and he was usually able to think things through. Hence his fellow expatriates—abandoned criminals who’d become the various Psychos of Pandora—knew him as Smartun, for “the smart one,” and he had almost forgotten the name he’d been given at birth: Albatoir Anzlesnass. Forgetting that name was a development to his liking.
Smartun nodded a polite greeting to Flugg, the much-scarred Bruiser whom Gynella had made into a sergeant, as Flugg swaggered out to inspect the troops. The sergeant only glowered back and, waving his rusty hatchet, snarled instructions at the Psychos and the other bandits, the human debris that General Goddess had gathered up into her First Division army. They were a ragtag bunch, and like most of the wild bandits on Pandora, they wore no shirts; they were muscularly ripped, randomly deformed, foul-smelling, some wearing goggles and masks.
But there was one concession to military uniformity. On each man’s chest was an image, tattooed or worn in a crude banner in place of a shirt, of the letter G, in scarlet, somehow made to resemble a skull viewed in profile, under which were the silhouettes of rifles crossed like crossbones.
It took several minutes, but Flugg managed to get the troops lined up in five almost orderly rows facing the entrance to the coliseum fortress. Not a moment too soon, for then the double doors of the fortress creaked open, and out strode Gynella herself, the “General Goddess” of the Army of Pandora. Gynella was at least a head taller than Smartun and more broad-shouldered, muscular, physically powerful—but she was perfectly proportioned, a beautiful golden-skinned woman with flowing flaxen hair, glinting almond-shaped emerald eyes, full red lips that needed no cosmetic in an oval, strong-boned face that seemed perfectly shaped for a man to cup in his hands. She wore a silken red cape and a tight, plunging, lightly armored bodice of black and silver, emblazoned in red with her skullish G and crossed-rifles symbol. Her powerful tanned thighs—he had to avert his eyes from those, as the sight made him feel faint with desire—were set off by knee-high scarlet and black boots and the black edges of a metallic blue microskirt. Holstered on her right hip was an Eridian pistol; on her left was a short sword in a silver scabbard. Her long-fingered hands were gauntleted in black and leather, exposing only her bloodred fingernails. She clicked those nails now on the metal of her skirt, as she stood with her hands on her full hips, gazing at the core cadre of her army.