Borderlands: The Fallen Read Online Free

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 peacefullounge 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.