Borderlands: The Fallen by John Shirley Page A

of stone—crouching, he turned to see the skag pack leaping headfirst into the spiderants, the spiderants cutting at them with their pickaxe forelimbs, skags lashing with their claws, blood flying …
    Cal turned and crawled away under the overhang, slipped around another rock, ran to the rim of the gulch, dropped down, and ran upstream.
    Panting, wiping sweat from his eyes, he stopped after about a hundred meters, and looked back—to see no pursuit. There was a distant squealing of beastly combat.
    It worked.
He’d turned one group of predators against another. He stood there, breathing hard, his heart still thudding, swept with a feeling of giddy triumph.
    But what about the next attack? And it was getting dark out … The long shadows had joined one another, had multiplied into pools of darkness, and the sky had grown indigo and purple, red at the horizon. Night was coming.
    What chance did he have to survive it?
    “Sure I saw it,” said the old man. Berl ran a filthy hand under his beaked nose, wiping it on his knuckles, and went on. “A white flash in the sky, it was. Not so long after you come down. I’ve seen it before. We’ve had other vehicles explode in orbit …”
    Zac felt his heart shrivel in his chest. “You really think that was a big enough flash—it could’ve been a starship?”
    “Hell yeah it was a starship,” Berl sniffed.
    They were sitting across from one another at a campfire, in a loop of corrugated metal slats tucked into a high narrow notch cut by nature into a butte. Flames painted the old man’s face ghastly yellow and made shadows dance like devils on the rusty walls.
    This was Berl’s camp. The ring of metal was what was left of an old mining expedition’s outpost. A spring bubbled up nearby from the ground, and a thick encircling copse of plants offered coolness in the heat of the day. Metal boxes, rusting weapons, odds and ends were piled up, scavenged by the old man from the wastelands.
    “Ought to know a starship burning up when I see one,” Berl went on. “I served on ’em. I was crystal feeder for one of the old wormhole jumpers. Mighty hairy, going through them wormholes. You had to take a strong drug, make your mind all hypnotized, to get through it. You didn’t take the drug, why, the wormhole showed you the guts of the universe, and you went crazy mad outta your gourd for real and true. Once we come outta the travel trance and find a couple guys gibbering, and lickin’ the walls. These new starships, with that alien tech, why, you got it easy … Sure I know a spaceship when I see it …”
    Old Berl had been alone out here for a while, except for Bizzy, and he’d built up a lot of talk. It was hard to get a word in edgewise. Zac didn’t want to talk about that spacecraft blowing up in orbit anymore. He was going to believe that what the old geezer had seen blowing up wasn’t the
Homeworld Bound
or, if it was, his family had gotten out in time. If he thought anything else he’d go “gibbering” like those early starship travelers. “You didn’t see any other vehicles come down?”
    “Naw—well, I ’spec I saw a streak but it could’ve been burning debris.”
    “Whereabouts?”
    “Off to the west at least a hunnerd klicks or so.”
    “Hmm. You don’t have a radio I could use, at all, do you?”
    “Don’t have any such thing. Have something like that, people use it to find you. Steal from you. And worse!”
    They were quiet for a while as Berl took a spitted skag flank out of the fire and bit into it while the meat sizzled and popped.
    Berl chewed ruminatively, his mouth open, his small reddened eyes never straying long from Zac. He swallowed a big mouthful of meat, drank from a plastic jug, then lifted his head, whistled questioningly to Bizzy, who was crouched at the entrance to the old outpost. Bizzy made a reassuring clicking noise back. “Bizzy says we’re all clear. I was afraid some shit-heel of a bandit spotted us, followed us back.