by John Shirley
They plowed through tents, Roland feeling the outrunner roll over a Psycho bandit lying in a tent, the guy’s bones audibly crunching, the man’s scream even more audible.
“Sorry, buddy,” Roland said.
He drove on, and startled faces turned toward him as Psychos leapt out of the way. Three bandits in a row peeing in a trench jumped into the sewage to get out of Roland’s way as he drove past the urinal ditch.
He drove on, bullets smacking against the outrunner, even as an energy bolt from an Eridian rifle struck the seat beside him, burning a hole through it, and another bolt caused a charge explosion to detonate just in front of the outrunner.
“Dammit!” Mordecai said, as the vehicle jumped at the near impact.
Roland glanced over his shoulder in time to see Mordecai with his feet bounced into the air, his hands desperately holding on to the turret grips, till the smaller man fell back down on his feet again.
Roland chuckled, returning his attention to crossing the enemy camp, and saw a big man—a damned big Psycho—looming up: a Badass Bruiser, just a stump for a left arm but an overgrown right arm; in his right hand he carried a mace-like weapon crackling with electricity. His eyes were hidden in goggles, his head in a striped helmet, his chest decked out in a G breastplate.
They were hard to bring down, this variety of Bruiser—the radiation had mutated them into gigantic killing machines. And one sweep from that weapon might well smash into his outrunner engine, with the next swipe aimed at his head.
Bloodwing was suddenly there, raking at the Badass Bruiser’s exposed arms, then deftly avoiding the swish of his electrified mace.
Just before Roland came into the Bruiser’s reach, five shots from the turret cannon on the outrunner whoomed in quick succession, and the Badass Bruiser staggered back, his energy shield taking the impacts but not all of the force.
The fourth and fifth shells penetrated the shield, and the Bruiser’s head parted company with his neck. Roland tried to avoid the heaving fall of the enormous headless cadaver, but it fell half across the outrunner, gushing blood from a neck stump into his vehicle.
“Crap,” Roland muttered.
Then the last few sentries dived to avoid being run down, and he was through the enemy lines, with bullets whining past him from behind. Bloodwing was flying ahead of them, and Mordecai was shouting into his wrist communicator, trying to raise Bloodrust Corners.
Roland drove in an irregular pattern to throw off the enemy’s aim but working his way toward his goal, that rusty metal gate up ahead.
They were getting damned close. He wondered if he could smash through it with the outrunner.
More likely he’d smash on it.
A rocket shell exploded just to the right of the outrunner, raining dirt and rocks on Roland and Mordecai.
The gate was only another ten meters ahead . . .
And then the big rusty barrier grated open, and Roland drove through, into the settlement of Bloodrust Corners.
• • •
They stood in the open steel chamber, Dakes and Mordecai and Roland, at the top of a lookout tower. The tower jutted up at the corner of the western wall of the settlement. Reticulating energy fields protected the lookout from snipers. Below them, outside the wall, were the Salt Flats and a lot of level open ground, here and there pocked by shell craters. Past the open ground, smoke rose from fires, unruly lines of men marched, sentries leaned on rifles, Gynella’s symbol flapped on standards, pitched tents of cheap yellow plastic looked like disease blisters . . . and the desert was choked with milling Psycho soldiers.
Turning around, Roland looked over the fifteen-acre spread of Bloodrust Corners. The small settlement was enclosed by a rusty metal wall three times higher than a tall man. Within the boxy confines of the walls were humplike houses of concrete and wattle, roofed by curved slats of tin, and boxy outbuildings for pumps and storage. Smoke rose here and there, and a few children played in a central commons. People chatted in groups or pushed carts; the occasional mining tractor putted along slowly through the narrow lanes. Against the farther wall were the low entrances to the three mines, where elevators carried miners down to the digs—low, roughly pyramidal shapes against the rusty metal backdrop. The scene looked quiet enough, but at each corner of the walls was a watchtower, with two armed men. Gun slots opened in the walls at regular intervals, and three mortars stood ready to lob shells at the enemy should they get close. Kill-mechs waited just inside the gate; a strip of ground around the settlement was treated with an incendiary fluid.
Dakes was a large black man with salt-and-pepper hair matching his salt-and-pepper beard. He wore green coveralls and a bulletproof vest. When Roland shook his hand, it was like grasping sandpaper. The man had calluses. This was a working man.
Dakes stared at Mordecai. “Say, weren’t you here before? A few months ago?”
Mordecai nodded, tugging his beard. Bloodwing shifted uneasily on his shoulder. “Yeah. I stayed maybe twenty-four hours. A while back.”
Dakes kept looking him up and down. “You didn’t happen to get one of our girls pregnant while you were here, did you?”
“What? Me?”
Roland managed not to laugh. What? Me?
“I mean, why would you say that?” Mordecai asked. “Someone accusing me?”
“No. I don’t know who did it. We do get a lot of damn vagabonds through here.”
“Vagabonds!” Offended, Mordecai sniffed. “So I’m a vagabond?”
Dakes looked evenly at him. “If you’re not, what are you?”
“Me? Well, I . . . uh . . . I sort of . . . um . . .” Bloodwing cawed a laugh. “Shut your beak, Bloodwing.”
“Mr. Dakes—” Roland began.
“You can call me Cronley, boy. Cronley Dakes.”
“Cronley, you know what you’re in for, with that horde of Psychos and bandits out there?”
Dakes nodded. “I just wonder why they’re waiting.”
“Waiting for orders, maybe. Or thinking to starve you out because they know you’re pretty well defended. How are you set up for supplies?”
Dakes frowned at him. “Who wants to know?”
“You really think I’m a spy? You see how many of those so-called soldiers we killed, coming in here?”
Dakes nodded grudgingly. “You’ve got a point—you made quite a mess out there. We’re pretty well supplied for a while. A week or two.”
“Water supply?” Mordecai asked.
“That’s the good news. We have an excellent well.” Dakes scowled out at the horizon. “What a place. This planet—just try getting the settlements to help one another. Not much of that. Help under siege? Sorry, we’re busy scratching our asses. We got a little help from New Haven but not much. No one does anything for anybody else on this rolling rock. Not outside these walls.”
Mordecai blinked. “But inside these walls you’re trying to build some kind of community? On Pandora?” He seemed mildly amazed by the concept.
Dakes smiled ruefully. “We’re trying. We’re going to build a schoolhouse. We have a clinic. We’re trying to teach the kids it matters what you do for other folks—and what they do for you. Community matters. But that’s a strange idea on this planet.”
Roland remembered Cal, a boy he’d befriended, not so long ago, on Pandora. He’d been relieved when Cal and his mother had left the planet—relieved because this was no place to raise a kid. These people were either crazy or visionaries to try it.
“What do you mine here?” Roland asked. “Iridium?”
“No, that stuff’s dangerous to be around much.” He pointed at Gynella’s army. “Look at them! That’s iridium damage, from the radiation.”
Roland nodded. He planned on limiting his exposure when he went after the crystalisks.
“No,” Dakes went on, “we mine glam gems. They’re a fairly new find on the planet—just last year big deposits of glam gems were located here.”
“I don’t think I know what a glam gem is
.”
Dakes drew two polished gems from his pockets. One pebble-sized gem was prevailingly green, the other red. “You never saw these?” He brought the two gems, one in each hand, into contact with each other. The red one took on some of the green one’s color; the green one took on a strong tinge of red. “They’re beautiful, and they’re sensitive to one another—”
“Huh,” Roland said, puzzled. “And people buy stuff like that?”
“People put them in marriage rings.”
“Hey, I’d buy a couple of those,” Mordecai said. “The ladies would totally—” He cleared his throat. “Well, anyway, you guys are making good money from this, I guess—and General Goddess Gynella wants to take it from you?”
“That’s what our prisoner said. She wants the gems.”
“You’ve got a prisoner, one of the soldiers?” Roland asked. He needed information. An imprisoned Gynellan could provide it.
He was trying to figure out how to get Gynella to give up on this settlement so her army would withdraw and he could go on his way . . . or figure a way out of there, just him and Mordecai. It kind of bothered him to leave these people on their own, with Gynella’s Psycho soldiers waiting out there. The residents of Bloodrust Corners seemed capable but maybe a bit naïve. Earlier Dakes had said he’d only been on the planet a couple of years.
Dakes shook his head. “We’re trying to treat the prisoner with decency, but it’s hard. He bit off somebody’s finger when they were trying to give him a sandwich. He tried to bite a Claptrap, too.”
“Must’ve been hard on his teeth,” Roland said. “Any chance we could talk to him? We need to get out southwest, need to know what he knows.”
“You ask him, he’ll spit blood in your eye.”
Mordecai chuckled grimly. “Bloodwing’ll get him to talk.”
• • •
She woke to a banging sound, like someone hitting a big hammer on a slab of steel.
After a moment, Daphne realized the sound was coming from within—it was her head throbbing.
She forced her eyes open—it felt as if the eyelids might tear at the effort, as if they were glued shut. But at last she was able to prise them open and blink blearily around her.
She was lying on her left side, on the ground, just far enough from a campfire to get no real warmth from it. She could see that the sky was dark beyond it, and little more. It was night, then. Psycho bandits, wearing the livery of Gynella, shuffled about, carrying weapons, cursing when they got in one another’s way. Scuffles broke out; a ways off, a gunshot sounded, someone yelped, and a gruff authoritarian voice bellowed, “You damn fool, now he’s wounded, and I’ll have to shoot him! We got a shortage of Dr. Zed, we got no way to carry no damn invalids, and you’ve wasted a good soldier. He dug a latrine like no other man!”
Someone called feebly, “Don’t shoot me, Sarge, I’m fine! Hardly hurts at all. You don’t have to—”
There was a gunshot, followed by the echo of the shot—and silence.
Daphne groaned. She was alive, but she was prisoner of the Psycho bandits.
She tried to wriggle about, push herself up from the ground, but her hands were bound behind her, tied by a long cord to her ankles. Not a good situation.
She wondered if anyone had their way with her when she was out cold. And if they had, how many of them?
But she didn’t feel as if she’d been violated. Maybe they were saving her for something special. She turned her head to look right, as much as she could, and to her surprise saw a heavily chained, bound figure lying on his back, his head the only part of him unbound. It was Brick! She could see his eyes slightly open, the eyelids fluttering slightly.
So Brick was alive. There was a nasty splotch of dried blood on the side of his head. He’d been hit hard enough to put him down, maybe render him comatose. But he was alive.
That was something to hold on to. Despite the growing agony in her wrists and ankles, the strain on her shoulders from the awkward binding, she felt a glimmer of hope. She wasn’t quite alone in this.
Only—if she was to get any help from Brick, he had to live. He had to wake up. And somehow he had to get free.
“Well, now, opened her itty-bitty eyes, has she, the little thing?” said a harsh voice from behind her. She couldn’t see the woman speaking, but she knew from the sound and the smell just who it was.
“Hello, Broomy,” Daphne said raspily. “How are you?”
“Me? Pretty good! Had some food, some medicine, took a nap on a nice bedroll. Had a good crap. Plenty of water to drink, too. And of course I don’t have my little wrists tied to my ankles like some people do. How’s your circulation? Hurt, does it?” Broomy creaked with laughter.
Daphne forced an insouciant smile. “Could be worse. I could be an ugly mama-skag like you.”
Shouldn’t have said it. She knew that. Knew it even more sharply when Broomy kicked her, hard, in the middle of the back.
“You enjoy that? It’s only gonna get worse. They’ve got something planned for you. They’re gonna let a Goliath kill Brick in the coliseum. And for his reward, the Goliath gets to play with you! You know what a Goliath’ll do to a little girl like you? He’ll pull your legs apart, keep pullin’ an’ pullin’ till you rip in half, right down the middle, and he’ll dance in the mess, n’ laugh as he does it!”
There wasn’t much room in the stone storage shack Bloodrust Corners was using for a jail cell. Roland was crowded in with Mordecai and Dakes, with the prisoner lying on the dirt floor at their feet.
“I want to know what Gynella’s little army out there is waiting for,” Dakes said. “I want to know what she plans for us. You tell us that, you’ll get better treatment.”
“Okay, here’s my conditions for telling you all about Gynella’s army,” said the Psycho prisoner, his grin displaying a mouth in which the few teeth were snaggled and red with blood. His bare, bloodied ankles were chained to the wall; his fox-narrow face was tattooed with a pattern like a web of broken glass, centered on his nose. His scalp was scabby and hairless. “First, you bring me a bee-yew-tiful girl, make that two girls, and leave me alone with them and a bottle of fine narcojuice. Then you take their bodies out, and you bring me in a feast, maybe a big juicy steak of a—”
“I’ve got another idea,” Mordecai interrupted. “How about if I stop my friend Bloodwing here from taking both your eyes? One might be enough. He does like to eat both, though. He’s partial to a man’s eyes.”
The prisoner stared. “Your friend who?”
Mordecai smiled thinly and opened the door of the jail cell. He whistled, and Bloodwing flapped into the cell and landed on his outstretched hand. It cocked its head to eye the prisoner hungrily.
The prisoner recoiled into a corner. “What is that thing?”
“It eats carrion, and it doesn’t care,” Mordecai said, “if the carrion is alive or dead.”
“Can there be living carrion?” Dakes asked, as if academically curious.
“There can be, in this case. So—” Mordecai smiled coldly at the prisoner. “Which eye do you want to lose first? Left or right? Your choice.”
Roland winced at this. Torture was not his style. But he knew that Mordecai was largely bluffing. He’d maim anyone who was trying to kill him, but an unarmed man in a cell? No, he wouldn’t really order Bloodwing to rip a man’s eyes out under those conditions.
Or would he?
The prisoner swallowed hard, and Roland could see him working up his courage. He spat at Bloodwing, which squawked and snapped its beak with a clack.
The prisoner snarled, “Go to the pit of darkness and rot there! I’ll twist that thing’s neck if it gets anywhere near me!”
Mordecai sighed and murmured something to Bloodwing, something inaudible to Roland. Bloodwing sprang into the air and immediately dove at the prisoner, who flailed his arms to keep Bloodwing back. Bloodwing hovered, flapping its wings rapidly, deftly avoiding the man’s hands, then pointed its wings at the ceiling
so that it dropped at the prisoner’s face and dug its talons deeply into the skin just over the Psycho’s right eye. The prisoner grabbed at Bloodwing, but it performed a remarkably adroit twist with its entire body, pushing off the bloodied face to leap into the air, out of reach. It screeched mockingly, flying over to light on Mordecai’s shoulder.
“You missed his eye, Bloodwing, you only got close to it,” Mordecai said chidingly.
Bloodwing ducked its head as if in sorrow and shrugged.
The prisoner was furiously wiping blood from his eyes. Mordecai grunted and said, “Well, one more time, then. This time, see if you can get both eyes, really rip them up good—I know you can do it! This is a great training opportunity, Bloodwing!”
“No no no!” the prisoner screamed. “I’ll tell you! It doesn’t matter, because you can’t stop her! Gynella’s just waiting for her new commander. She’s waitin’ for Smartun, and when he gets here he’s gonna take the whole place down. And Gynella’s gonna waltz in here, and she’s gonna take her pick of the prisoners, and Dr. Vialle’s gonna use some for experiments, and she’ll use some for slaves to help build stuff, and they’ll kill anybody that resists, and if there’s women or girls, they’ll be given as prizes to the soldiers for good behavior—”
“Good behavior!” Dakes burst out, laughing and shaking his head. “Oh, for the Angel’s sake.”
“Obedience to her is good behavior!” the Psycho prisoner insisted, pointing a filthy, bloody finger at them. “And you’d better obey the General Goddess! Because she’s going to come here, and she’ll tear you right in half! I promise you she will! Why, she could kill any one of you personally! There’s a reason we call her Goddess! She has the power in her hands to take a man to heaven! And she has the power to take his life—” He snapped his fingers. “Like that! And she’s coming to you, to destroy you or enslave you. And you can’t stop her. Because she is the vengeful soul of this world!” He tittered madly and howled, “She is the vengeful soul of Pandora!”