Borderlands: Unconquered Read Free Page B

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 someonehere 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 curiousabout 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 storiesdo, in Fyrestone. On a certain day, when Roland showed up there, looking for someone in particular . . .”

S quinting 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 ofthem 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 werepeople.
    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’spurported 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 liketo 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 Dabbitssitting 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