Borderlands: Gunsight by John Shirley Read Free Book Online Page B

Ripper waited with Boss Jasper and three other men, all of them grinning.
    A few moments later, they’d landed on the helipad. Their seat belts unhooked themselves and retracted. Seeing five powerful weapons pointed at them, Daphne dropped her pistol and put her hands up over her head.
    “ Heeeyyy, hi again, you guys!” she said, cheerfully.
    Mordecai glared at her. But then, he figured, what else could she say?

“A nd now,” Boss Jasper was saying smugly, “we can show you the lady’s real accommodations.”
    As he spoke, he led them through an armored door into a fairly large circular room at the top of one of the stronghold’s towers.
    Both Mordecai and Daphne had their arms tightly shackled behind them.
    “You sure that bloody-beaked vulture thing of his isn’t around?” Ripper asked, looking at the other Nomad striding behind Mordecai and Daphne.
    The Nomad, his face scarred, one eye missing, grunted assent. “Flew off. Gone.”
    They stepped into the big circular room and Jasper turned toward them, waving his arms about him grandly. “You see? I had it waiting for her all along!” he crowed gleefully.
    It was ostensibly comfortable in appearance—a large circular room with a circular bed in the center, a pleasant heat emanating from small vents in the curved metal walls. Atintervals, in place of windows, hung a few digital paintings looping through images of the homeworld and other planets. Occasionally they showed Pandora seen from orbit. There was a table and chair, with a lamp on it, beside the bed. A wine pitcher stood on the table, along with wineglasses and cutlery. “Bathroom’s through there,” Jasper said, pointing at the only other door. “Has a shower, the works. Of course, if the floor trigger goes off, why, it goes off there, too, and everything lifts out of the way and . . . well . . . there’s really no escape then. We’ll have to replace the bed and the other little pieces of furniture, if that happens. But as you can see, Mordecai, it’s pretty comfortable. She’ll be well fed, and she won’t be chained up. There are holofilms to watch, books can be ordered on this screen here, and—”
    “I wonder if you’d be good enough to back the docent tour up,” Daphne said. “Just to the part about the floor trigger. What’s that about?”
    “Oh, that?” Jasper beamed at her, teeth sparkling. He reached into a pocket, took out something that looked like an old-fashioned remote control, but with a few crystalline oddments added. “This, of course, is what I used to direct your stolen Buzzard to bring you back to us. It’s good for lots of things. Look . . .”
    He pointed the device at the floor and pressed a button. The floor, till now opaque gray-black, instantly became a thick transparent pane of glass. Through it, they could see another chamber down below.
    In the chamber was a monster. About the monster’s bare, deformed feet was a litter of bones and offal, feces and much-gnawed skulls.
    Daphne gulped, looking at it, but she quickly regained hercomposure. “Ah! Right! That must be Bigjaws! Volto . . . the late Volto . . . mentioned him to me.”
    “Oh yes, that’s dear, dear Bigjaws!” said Jasper proudly. “That’s my little pet!”
    Mordecai stared at the creature. Nude except for a filthy loincloth, the mutant was humanoid but about three meters tall—far taller than Mordecai—and proportionately beefy. Symmetry ended at the giant head. Bigjaws’ skull was small—but his jaws were almost as big as his chest. The mutant’s head was, in point of fact, almost entirely made up of its mouth. Mordecai could make out two tiny eyes on the front of the little hump of its skull back of the huge jaws, and slitlike nostrils. Its neck was thick as a tree trunk and heavily veined.
    Bigjaws saw them, then—and reached upward, huge hands grasping, opening and closing, claws not quite reaching the transparent ceiling that was also the floor of the circular