Borderlands: Unconquered by John Shirley Page A

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 outriderparked 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 theplan . . .”
    “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.”

T he 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, tongueswhirling. 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 skagroadkill. I need youhere! 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 outcroppingslengthening, 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 ofthe outrunner as Bloodwing, still perched