Borderlands: The Fallen (4 page)

He didn’t head straight for the Nomad, but drove right by him.

The mad giggling of Psycho Midgets came from close behind as he passed the Nomad—then came a snarling roar, the thumping of feet. Bellows of rage, a spate of cursing.

He smiled. He knew his outlanders.

Nomads hated Psycho Midgets.
Hated
them. Never missed a chance to kill them. One of their favorite methods was binding them and holding them up as living shields to catch gunfire meant for the Nomad.

He heard a grenade blast, another, a burst of gunfire, and lunatic giggling that became shouts of pain.

The Nomad had gone for the targets, engaging both Psycho Midgets and their mounts. That’d keep them all busy for a while.

Roland gunned the outrunner, circling off to the right, heading back to try to intersect Crannigan.

He bounded the vehicle over ridges, low hills, around boulders—finally pulled up, seeing a flying vessel of some kind—hard to make out what exactly—taking off in the distance.

Chances were, Crannigan was in that orbital shuttle, heading off to conference with his handlers at the Atlas Corporation.

Okay. He’d catch up with Crannigan eventually. All he had to do was wait, and patrol the area. And meanwhile look for those bandits. That cache of salable goods.

He went back to the lowlands, looking for McNee’s body.

There it was, about fifty meters off. It was already being torn apart by scavenging skags.

Roland pulled the outrunner up, and stared, thinking that McNee deserved better.

But that’s what happened on Pandora. You made a friend—they got killed. Should’ve learned that lesson a long time ago.

Stay solitary as long as you stayed on this planet.

Because Pandora wasn’t just a world. It was a planet-sized homicidal maniac.

Pandora glowed like a dying ember in the big rectangular viewport of the
Homeworld Bound
. Zac Finn stood in the ship’s lounge with his arm around his wife’s shoulders,
the two of them looking at the viewport. Their son, Cal, his face in VR blinders, was playing mindtouch on a sofa nearby, the boy’s fingers and shoulders twitching as he played. The artificial gravity was on, the ship at 80 percent gravity, still lighter than the homeworld, so Zac felt mildly buoyant.

A drunk, pudgy, middle-aged man with a bubbly green cocktail in his hand stepped wobblingly up, nodded at the viewport. “Lookitthat. Another goddamn planet. Sick of all these planet stops. Shoulda taken th’ express ship. Tryin’ a get to Xanthus.” The drunk turned to Zac, pointed at him with the hand holding his drink, so he spilled some on the lounge carpet. He didn’t seem to notice. “Where you folks headed?”

“Heading to Xanthus, too,” Zac said shortly, not wanting to encourage the guy. “Settlers.”

But Zac hoped he wouldn’t have to be a hardscrabble settler on Xanthus, if things worked out here on Pandora. With luck, he could leave here with some real money, buy an estate on Xanthus for his family, and they’d all live there comfortably. He glanced at his wife, Marla, a compact, shapely woman in a traveler’s clingsuit; she had copper-colored hair and bright green eyes. She seemed only mildly interested in Pandora, the third planet the
Homeworld Bound
had stopped at, on this zigzag trip across the galaxy, and he felt a twinge of guilt.

She didn’t know he was going down there. Pandora had a reputation—a bad one. If Zac told her what he was planning she might take Cal and go back to the homeworld …

Zac glanced at the time under the viewport. 24:00—Rans would be arriving any minute.

There—was that a transport, that silvery oblong emerging from the upper atmosphere?

“Looks like the passengers from Pandora are coming,” said Marla. “Maybe we’ll be able to get out of orbit and on to Xanthus soon.”

“Yeah. Keep an eye on Cal, huh? I’m going to go and … check with the bursar.”

“Cal?” She shook her head, her green eyes flashing as she looked at her son. “He’s been locked in that thing for hours. He’s thirteen, he ought to show more interest in the real world. It’s no way for a kid to grow up.”

“Oh, he’s not there all day. Just … part of it. Anyway, it’s just a phase, hon. Wait’ll he discovers girls. He’ll take more interest in the real world.”

“They mostly discover VR girls. It’s a surprise people still manage to reproduce.”

“Me and you had no trouble,” he whispered, kissing her on the cheek. He turned and hurried off to the deck lift. But he wasn’t going to the bursar.

Cal Finn was flying a bodysuit through a lightning storm, evading the blasts of enemy fighters, and calculating his counterattack—when someone knocked on the sky.
Thunk thunk thunk
.

It sounded like a door being hammered on in the distance. The hammering sound came right through the roar of his repulsors, the crack of lightning and the whining of machine gun rounds.
Knock knock knock … KNOCK.

“Cal!”

“Awright
awright
!” Hissing to himself he pulled the VR helmet off, blinking in the transition to the peaceful
lounge of the
Homeworld Bound
. There was something intimidating about the way the big golden-red planet hung there, filling the viewport. But his mom, hands on her hips, stepped into his line of sight, silhouetting herself against Pandora.

“Cal—you need to put that thing away.”

“Why? It’s just another orbit. We’re going back into subspace, right? This trip is taking, like,
forever
—”

“No we’ll be here awhile—they’re delivering supplies down to Pandora.”

“I thought there was no one on Pandora but a bunch of criminals and crazies.”

“That’s not true. Exactly. There are settlers. Towns. In fact—we said we were going to learn about the planets we saw on the trip …”

He rolled his eyes. “Seeing it from orbit isn’t really seeing it.”

“… So we’re going to learn about this one.” She sat down next to him, took a uniceiver from her shoulder bag, and began tapping at the uni’s screen for the
Identify
application. The universal receiver was also a powerful computer. She held the uni up so it looked at the planet hanging in space.

The uni took the image in and said, in a woman’s friendly voice, “The planet Pandora.”

“Text,” Marla told the uni. “Pandora history.”

“
Mo
-om… .”

“Quiet, Cal.” She squinted at the text on the screen. “Okay, here we go, I’ll just pick out some of the main points: ‘Pandora has human-friendly conditions with respect to gravity and atmosphere. Its mineral deposits
convinced the Dahl Corporation to set up colonization on Pandora, largely for mining purposes.’ And—says they were also interested in the alien ruins.”

Cal peered over her shoulder at the small image accompanying the text. “Alien ruins? I wish we could see that.” Mostly he said it just to make his mom happy. Partly because he wanted her to lay off him—and also for a reason he wouldn’t like to admit out loud: he loved his mom and wanted her to be happy.

“The alien ruins,” his mom went on, paraphrasing the text, “were thought to belong to the same culture that left similar artifacts on the planet Promethia …”

“Promethia—that’s where we got the new starship tech, everybody knows that.”

“We got faster starships, anyway. Um—‘a large sealed vault on Promethia discovered by the Atlas Corporation contained alien technology and weaponry.’ The Dahl Corporation hoped to find a similar trove on Pandora. Says here that before they could really find it, they kind of gave up—”

“Gave up? Why?”

“Apparently some kind of cyclic change happened on Pandora, and all kinds of local creatures came out of hibernation and started … well, they attacked people, and destroyed a lot of the mining camps. Plus it turned out the best minerals had mostly been used by the aliens thousands of years ago, although there are ‘useful deposits of specialized crystal.’ Says it’s ‘not known if the extraterrestrials who left the artifacts were native to the planet, as none are known to have survived there.’ So I guess they didn’t find as much as they’d hoped for, and the planet was so dangerous the Dahl Corporation basically pulled out.”

“But you said there were settlements.”

“Some settlers stayed. There’s New Haven, some other settlements—but it’s tough down there. Especially because … if I understand what it’s saying here … Dahl brought a lot of convict labor to the planet to do most of the mining work. When they left, they just unlocked the gates of the prison camps and abandoned the convicts. So the convicts are wandering around down there terrorizing the colonists. According to this, a lot of the convict laborers have gone psychotic, right out of their minds. There are still some working factories down there. Hyperion has a robot operation on Pandora—robots, and weapons. Especially weapons. There are more weapons of different types sold on Pandora than on any other known planet …”

“But—nobody ever found the Vault they were looking for?”

She scanned the univiewer, going on to the next page. “Seems like they found some stuff, but not the big discovery—not the Vault itself. Or anyway they couldn’t get close to it … Says there’re conflicting accounts of what happened to that.”

He gazed at the enigmatic orb of Pandora. “So—the Vault
could
still be down there … somewhere.”

She nodded. “But I wouldn’t want to go and look for it! There are a few scientists—but mostly they stay on the Study Station.”

“What’s the Study Station?”

“It’s the station the
Homeworld Bound
’s docked at right now—which you’d know if you didn’t have your head in that helmet all day. I guess from up here they can look at Pandora from a safe distance. Even without the bandits
from the prison camps and the … good Lord, look at that picture! Is that a human being? Must be some kind of mutation. Some of the bandits are cannibals, it says. Even without that, the animals that roam around down there are as savage as anywhere in the galaxy. Oh—here’s a picture of a
rakk.
They’re flying creatures—not like a bird, more like a pterodactyl. But they don’t have beaks. Barbed mouth slits, barbed tails. ‘They swoop down and strike without warning.’ Some of them get huge … Oh! Apparently they’re born in a rakk
hive
… which is a quadruped, bigger than a bus, that sort of spews the rakks out of its mouth. Oh and look at that creature—they call it a spiderant. But it’s a good two meters long, that one… .” Her voice trailed off. “Really quite interesting …”

Cal looked at his mom. She seemed a bit wistful. “You wanted to be an exobiologist. Sounds like you kind of wish you could go down there and study these creatures.”

She sighed. “I was a year away from getting my degree when I quit to help your dad. These creatures are best studied from a distance—like from orbit. They’re just too dangerous.” She smiled wanly. “Believe me—I’m
glad
we’re not going down there.”

It took Zac a long moment to recognize Rans Veritas. His old patrol partner was standing in front of the wedge-shaped transport in the shuttle hangar of the
Homeworld Bound
. Rans had changed—gotten chunky, red-nosed, and balding. The layered, rugged, dirt-streaked outfit he wore, goggles pushed up on his head, seemed more suited for the dusty plain of the wasteland below than a spacecraft. Didn’t they have a laundry on Pandora? “Rans!”

Hearing his name called, Rans seemed to cringe, then he looked nervously around the echoing, metal-walled hangar—and spotted Zac.

“Zac!” Rans came limping toward him, wide face split in a grin, and they shook hands warmly. “You haven’t changed much.”

“Oh, I’m an old married man now. I’ve slowed down a lot.”

“Not too much I hope.” Rans lowered his voice, eyes shifting around nervously. They were alone except for a self-operating forklift carrying supplies into the shuttle cargo bay and a single shuttle crewman hurrying toward the station’s bar. “You’ll need some guts, Zac—it’s a great opportunity but it’s going to take nerve.” Rans’s face twitched, and he gnawed a knuckle, as his eyes darted around again.

“There’s a commissary for the crew—no one in it right now. Let’s talk there.”

“Good, good, lead the way …”

Zac noticed Rans limping again. “You okay there?”

“Yeah—yeah that’s a big parta the reason I can’t go after this myself. Don’t get around as well as I used to. Skags jumped me, tore up my leg. Almost didn’t get outta there alive. We got some good medical rebuilds planetside, from ol’ Dr. Zed, but they ain’t free. Can’t afford it right now. Wouldn’t’ve been able to get to orbit here, except I had a trip ticket left over.” That facial tic twitched again.

They went through the glass doors and into the commissary. It was a low-ceilinged, overlit room filled with plain white plasteel tables and orange chairs, the farther wall inset with snack and drink dispensers.

“Have a seat,” Rans said. “I’ll—oh, uh, say, you got any cred? I’m busted.”

“Oh—here, take this. We talked about the advance so you can have it now …” Zac passed him the smart voucher for a thousand dollars. It hadn’t been easy to raise the money. He’d had to sell his late father’s collection of computerized insects.

“Great, great!” Rans took the card, used a fraction of it to buy a chocolate bourbon at the dispenser, brought it back to the table. “I need a drink, bad … got the shakes again …”

Zac had heard about Pandora Syndrome. Lots of settlers on the planet suffered from a specialized PTSD. The constant fear of predation, Psychos, and bandits was traumatic.

They sat across from one another in the bright room, Rans sipping the booze and glancing at the door with twitching eyes. “So uh, let’s get right to it. When we talked on the subspace gabber, I toldya maybe I’d found the Eridian Vault but I couldn’t get it to it myself. Well—turns out, it’s not Eridian. It’s something else.”

“Now wait a minute, Rans,
you
said—”

“I know, but hear me out. It’s an old alien ship—an ET crash site. I saw it, I took pictures, and I found a xenotech who could analyze them for me. He confirms it! It’s alien, pure offworld stuff—but it’s
not
Eridian. Far as my guy can tell, it’s from a civilization we’ve never seen before. I used up the last of my cred talking to this guy and I’m not sure I trust him. Now, Atlas has hired some mercs to find this thing. They know the general area within a hundred klicks—but not exactly
where
it is. Guy named Crannigan, ex–Crimson Lance, real pain in the ass—he’s their man.
We gotta find this thing before he does, Zac. We’ll take it to their competitors, you and me, we’ll go right to Hyperion, they’ll pay double to keep it away from Atlas! There’s gotta be alien weaponry on that ship Hyperion could retro-engineer!”