by John Shirley
Mordecai turned to look at her. “You and . . . Brick?”
“We both got hired the same time is all,” she said. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
Roland didn’t feel right about bringing Brick into the mission if that meant bringing Daphne along. If she was who he thought she was, she was wanted by a lot of real sons of bitches, who wouldn’t quit till they found her. He didn’t want any distractions from the mission. And he had a feeling that if Brick went along, so would she.
“So what was it you wanted to talk tuh me for?” Brick asked.
Roland cleared his throat. “Oh, just wondering if you needed any more help here. I could use the work. But it looks like it’s over with. We’ll be moving on, then.”
Brick shrugged. It looked like a mountainside in an earthquake. “Bah, I’m gonna go into town and drink a keg or two. Hey—what’s that thing sittin’ in the outrunner?”
“That’s Bloodwing,” said Mordecai.
“That stinky buzzard bat of yours? You call that thing a pet?” He put his hand to the mummified dog’s paw. “That thing ain’t no fitting pet for nobody. Not like Priscilla.” Brick sniffled a couple of times and rubbed at his nose. He pointed off to the right, and Roland saw something stacked over there, almost like a lumpy log cabin, hard to make out in the darkness beyond their small cone of light. “What I found out is, if you lay out dead fellas real nice and straight and let ’em go stiff, why, you can stack ’em just like toy blocks. I was makin’ a fort outta that bunch, the ones I killed outta Gynella’s outfit. And Priscilla, when I was a kid, she used to watch me with my blocks, and then she’d smell ’em and knock ’em over, and we’d have a good laugh. Priscilla . . .”
Roland glanced at Daphne—she was rolling her eyes. He hoped Brick didn’t notice that. He didn’t countenance any disrespect to Priscilla’s memory.
“Where exactly are you two going?” Daphne asked, quite casually, as Roland and Mordecai climbed back into the outrunner.
Roland frowned. On this planet, it wasn’t done to be too inquisitive about where a man was going. Especially with the demanding tone she was using.
Mordecai glanced questioningly at Roland, and at last he said, “Ohhhh . . . out westerly. Check out that army. See if we can get Brick some more building blocks.”
Roland started the outrunner, put it in reverse, backed it up, changed gears, and drove carefully but quickly out of the mining camp.
“You decide against recruiting Brick?” Mordecai asked when they’d gone out of earshot.
“We don’t need the distraction of that woman along, not in any damn way, and I figured she’d horn her way into our mission. She seems attached to Brick. If she’s who I think she is, she’s dangerous—dangerous as all hell. And I mean dangerous to the wrong people. You feel?”
Mordecai said nothing. Bloodwing shifted on its perch and made a soft squawking sound, then settled back to sleep.
• • •
“He’s got something going,” Daphne said. “Something he’s keeping quiet. He was going to tell you about it. Then I showed up.” Staring after the outrunner, she shook her head. “I don’t like being aced out of anything. I don’t know when we’re gonna be able to collect the rest of our money from these Dahl bastards. They’ll say we didn’t do the job, just because the miners got scared and bugged out like a lotta pussies.”
Brick grunted and scratched his head. “I dunno. Roland’s okay. So what if he’s got a mission. None of my business. I can always find something to smash. Or someone.”
“Sure. But he’s being secretive. Must be something big! Anyway, I haven’t got anything else. I’d like to know what he’s up to.”
Brick grunted. “We could ask him.”
“How we gonna do that?”
“I dunno. Find him.”
She smiled. He seemed willing to tag along with her. She liked having him along—he was like a one-man army. Like having artillery. Only it was Brick.
“Okay. Let’s grab our stuff and get in my outrunner. We’re gonna follow and see what he’s up to.”
Brick looked at her with his head cocked, a sort of craftiness flickering in his eyes. “I wonder if I should ask what you’re up to. I don’t know much about you.”
She gave him a friendly shot with her fist to the arm—it hurt her knuckles. “I’m up to finding us a fortune. I’ve got an intuition Roland’s gonna lead us to it.”
He gave another one of his seismic shrugs. “Sure. Out westerly—plenty of heads to bash. I’m in. But first, I’m hungry. I could eat two or three skags. In fact, I think I will. Then we go.”
“But we’ll lose them!”
“Naw. Not a lotta traffic out here. We got the moon, we got headlights. Out here, easy to follow tire tracks. We can be right up on Roland’s ass in no time.”
• • •
“Broomy and Cess should’ve reported back by now,” Smartun said, looking at the schedule. “We gave ’em two days, after the recall for the Second Division.”
Gynella glanced up from the computer scan she was frowning over.
They were in her headquarters, a bunker with maps of Pandora all over the cement walls, tables with computers and communications equipment, glaring bulbs overhead, a chaise longue with a refreshment cabinet next to it for when she wanted to relax.
Smartun sometimes fantasized about stretching out on that chaise longue with her . . .
“What concerns me more,” said Gynella, “is all those men we lost.”
Smartun blinked and looked more closely at her. Was she really expressing compassion for lost soldiers?
“I mean,” she went on, “it’s a waste of resources. But . . .”
Ah, that made more sense.
“But, Smartun, it also demonstrates one thing. The man who killed most of them is a potentially valuable tool. He is a tool I wish to grip in my hand and use. A weapon I can take to war.”
Smartun sniffed. “Oh, you mean Brick.”
“Yes. I had a choice of losing another twenty troopers taking him down or pulling them back and finding a way to recruit him. With him and Roland leading the First and Second Divisions, we can rule this planet.”
Smartun quivered inwardly. He liked it when she said we. “He had some help. That little woman with the tattoos.”
“Yes. That woman. I know exactly who she is. She does not know me, but I know her.”
“You reviewed the drone footage?”
“Yes.” She rewarded him with a smile. “You’re really quite clever with electronics. Your surveillance drones are . . . very responsive. And subtle. Daphne Kuller is alert, but she never spotted them.”
He chuckled. “They’re well camouflaged.”
“I recognized her the second I saw the vid. She once killed someone I was very close to. Of course, she was only doing her job, but I will punish her for it.”
• • •
Broomy’s face was nastily crisscrossed by crusting red slashes, the consequence of her encounter with Bloodwing. Still, Cess didn’t think her face was much worse than it had been before—but she wasn’t going to make that remark in front of Broomy.
They were climbing into Cess’s outrider parked near the Steel Incisor, Broomy taking shotgun, sucking down Dr. Zed and painkillers, and snarling to herself, “Find ’em, make ’em pay. Find ’em, make ’em pay. Strangle that buzzard thing. Strangle it slow. Real slow! Maybe take one of ’em slave. Chain him up. Make him do what I want. The little one’d be easier. Mordecai. The big one, we shoot him dead. That’s the plan. Yeah, that’s the plan . . .”
“How we going to find them, Broomy?” Cess asked worriedly, starting the outrider and heading west. “Could take a long time, and we’re supposed to get back to the Footstool. General Goddess—”
“Why, them tracks is clear. They headed off in the direction we got to go anyway. Westerly. We won’t follow ’em direct—we’ll take the trail up the ridge and over, then cut west, head ’em off, catch ’em unawares.
We’ll ambush ’em. We’ll make ’em pay.”
The geological formation that had lent its name to the half-dead settlement of Jawbone Ridge extended to the southwest some distance past the town, stabbing mile after mile into the wasteland. Roland and Mordecai drove along below the ridge, following it southwest. It wasn’t yet midday, and they were still in the ridge’s shadow.
A couple of large skags loomed up, their trisected jaws opening, tongues whirling. Roland sideswiped them just hard enough to break their necks and drove through the low depression of the skag den. The rest of the pack snarled in frustration as they left them behind.
Bloodwing straightened up, opening its wings as if thinking of taking to the air.
“Forget it, buddy!” Mordecai told the creature. “You’re not going back there to feed on that skag roadkill. I need you here! We’ll find you some food up ahead.”
Grumbling to itself without words, squawking deep in its gullet, Bloodwing settled back into place.
“We got any food, Roland?” Mordecai asked, speaking loudly over the rumble of the engine and the hiss of the wind.
“Sure, I got a crate of canned food back there. Help yourself. Some of it’s self-heating.”
“When we stop. I could use a break.”
“Yeah, okay, girls gotta have a pee stop.”
“Fuck you, Roland.” But Mordecai was smiling.
They stopped to pee and stretch their legs; they consumed a can of glutinously indeterminate food, and then Roland said, “We’re burning daylight.”
They headed ever westward, following the ridge as if the formation were a bony finger pointing their way.
It was getting dusky, the shadows from the shrubs and outcroppings lengthening, when they stopped on a low hilltop to make camp. “Really could go on a couple more hours,” Roland remarked, pulling up, “but I want to go over Broomy’s minicom, see what we can find out. If we could completely avoid the asshole army of General Goddess, that’d work for me big-time.”
“Yeah, I’ll take on an army if I have to.” He grimaced, climbing out of the outrunner, stretching. “But I haven’t got the ammo to kill ’em all.”
Roland chuckled, arching his back to crick it straight after the hours of bouncing over the rough landscape. “You could take down an army if you had enough ammo, that what you’re saying?”
“Well, sure, if I had the distance on them. I can pick ’em off, five or ten at once, move back, pick off a few more. I’m the best sniper on this planet. One shot, one kill.”
Roland shook his head skeptically. “One shot, one kill is something you don’t see often around here. Something about the radiation on this planet seems to make ’em resistant to a quick kill. Come on, let’s make camp. I’m hungry.”
They ate more canned food, and Mordecai shot a scythid for Bloodwing’s dinner.
Then they did an inventory of their weaponry, poking through the back of the outrunner as Bloodwing, still perched on Mordecai’s seatback, hunched over them with its head cocked, seeming to take inventory with them. Roland had his Scorpio turret but with limited ammo, and there was the outrunner’s gun, which fired only small cannon shells, and he had precious few of those left. He had a Vladof Hammer, an orange-colored shotgun with a nine-shot magazine, deadly at close range. He had two crates of ammo for it. “I got twelve grenades . . . my sidearm, lotta ammo for that . . . I got this Eridian rifle, but it’s been acting up. Not really reliable. I got the turret. You got your Cobra burstfire.”
“We’re kinda underweaponed, man. Not even a rocket launcher. I got badly depleted last mission. We should maybe take a side trip to a settlement, load up on some goods. I haven’t got much money, but . . .”
“You know what, I can scrounge weapons almost as easily as I can buy them, Mordecai. Easier a lotta times. Of course, that usually means killing some Psychos and takin’ their hardware, but I expect to do that anyway. We’ll weapon up, don’t you worry about it. Come on, let’s look at my scan map—and Broomy’s minicom.”
He unrolled the scan map he’d bought from Skelton Dabbits. “You see that mark? See the readings? That marks the biggest den of crystalisks known on this planet.”
“Long way to go. And a lot of hassle in between.”
“Let’s see just how much.” Roland pulled out Broomy’s minicom and activated it. “Now how do I get into this thing . . .”
It was Mordecai who figured out Broomy’s password. He’d seen the tattoo on her: Fuckemorkillem. Lucky guess.
Some of the photos they found on the device made Roland’s stomach churn. “Ugh—get outta that folder!”
They found what they wanted under tactics: a holographic image projected into the air from the minicom, displaying a map of the Salt Flats. It appeared in glowing yellow 3-D, with red and green lines for topographic and other markers.
Mordecai pointed at the Devil’s Footstool on the map. “There, the Devil’s Footstool! She’s got it marked ‘GG HQ.’ That must be where they’re centered.”
“Squares with a rumor I heard. Those X’s—troop encampments?”
“Looks like every other klick across the Salt Flats, a lot of other places too. They’ve got it sewn up!”
“Well, maybe we can slip through.” Roland shook his head. “But I figure they’ll have people posted on high points looking for intruders in captured territory.”
“Maybe we can go back to New Haven, see if we can get a hopper—or, if you can pay for it, even a trip to orbit. We can drop down behind their lines.”
“Nah. She’s shooting down anything that flies over. No one’ll go there. And I can’t afford the other method. Besides, I doubt we could get permission for an orbit drop back there. They don’t care if we get killed, but loss of their shuttles or even pods . . . no way.”
“So we got to go overland. We’ll have to shoot our way through. Or find an easier mission.”
Roland looked at him with his eyebrows raised. “That what you want to do? Wimp out?”
Mordecai grinned at him. “Are you kidding? This’ll be the ultimate test of my sharpshooting, man. No way I’m missing this mission. I just wanted to give you the chance to blow it off.”
“Very thoughtful. I’m after crystalisks and Eridium. So we head southwest.”
They didn’t see the varkids till sunset was melting into the night, and Roland was hunkering to build a campfire, thinking he should set up the Scorpio turret. There was still enough light for Mordecai to notice the ground trembling at the far edge of the hilltop.
“What the hell,” Mordecai said, staring at the tremulous sand. He pointed. “Over there! We got spiderants coming up?”
Roland dropped the wood he was stacking and grabbed his Vladof Hammer, which was never out of reach when he was away from a settlement.
The two of them stalked slowly toward the place where Mordecai had spotted the sand movement, Mordecai with his Cobra burstfire in his hands.
They didn’t have to discuss it any further, not then; Roland and Mordecai both knew the kind of things they were looking for. They were both men with long experience on Pandora. This kind of action was second nature now. They moved laterally apart from each other, as if by signal but simply by instinct, yet still angling toward the target . . .
Which boiled up out of the sand with startling suddenness—and it was something Roland hadn’t seen before. “That’s no spiderant! What the hell is that?”
“It’s a varkid!” Mordecai shouted, popping his gunstock to his shoulder and sighting in.
Roland was aiming too, as his mind came to grips with the varkid—a giant insectile red and black creature about the size of a skag, it seemed almost all jagged chiton, enormous barbed jaws, six clawed feet, no visible vulnerable parts. It was one of the most armored creatures he’d ever seen. And like pretty much any creature of Pandora, it was vicious and aggressive. It came at them, quick and scuttling, clacking its jaws open and shut hungrily. Those jaws were big enough to sever a man’s head from his neck with
one snip.
Roland only had time to fire from the hip, almost point-blank—a moment after Mordecai fired, hitting the cluster of three eyes behind its jaw parts. There was barely any head to aim at. Roland’s shotgun spread caught the creature in its thorax, the blast knocking off chunks of its craggy natural armor plates.
The varkid squealed and retreated, shaking its foreparts in pain, just as Roland was taking aim again—and he assumed the thing was going to back off.
He was wrong. It leapt into the air, coming down on Mordecai before he could get a bead to fire again—Mordecai was too meticulous a gunman to fire point-blank as a reflex. It knocked Mordecai onto his back, so that he dropped the burstfire rifle. He fell heavily, and the varkid was poised on his chest, snapping at his face with its barbed mandibles. Mordecai shouted in wordless horror.
Roland couldn’t fire for fear of hitting Mordecai. He rushed toward the varkid, hoping to kick it off Mordecai, but Bloodwing got there first, the leather-winged raptor swooping down, screeching in fury. It struck the creature glancingly, before flapping up for another run, knocking the varkid to the side enough that Mordecai was able to tip the giant insect off him. It scrambled to get back onto its six legs, oozing green and red fluid from its damaged eye cluster.
Mordecai rolled over, grabbing his rifle as he rolled, coming up aiming, firing at the varkid, striking it just behind its heaviest armor sheath, where there was another cluster of sensors, just before the razor-sharp stinger on its hind parts.
The creature shrieked and flipped backward, then seemed to dive straight down into the sand. It was burrowing to escape, Roland assumed, firing at it—but most of his shot missed, as it vanished into the grit.
“Now what’s it up to?” Mordecai muttered, checking his rifle. “Knocking my damn rifle out of my hands—did not expect it to—what the hell is that thing?”
They were both staring at it. It was as if a plant had been filmed and the film was running in fast action, the plant sprouting miraculously from the ground. Only it wasn’t a plant. Its texture was grotesquely fleshy; it was like a bloated blossom of larval flesh.