Borderlands: The Fallen Read Online Free Page A

“Seeing it from orbit isn’t really seeing it.”
    “… So we’re going to learn about this one.” She sat down next to him, took a uniceiver from her shoulder bag, and began tapping at the uni’s screen for the
Identify
application. The universal receiver was also a powerful computer. She held the uni up so it looked at the planet hanging in space.
    The uni took the image in and said, in a woman’s friendly voice, “The planet Pandora.”
    “Text,” Marla told the uni. “Pandora history.”
    “
Mo
-om… .”
    “Quiet, Cal.” She squinted at the text on the screen. “Okay, here we go, I’ll just pick out some of the main points: ‘Pandora has human-friendly conditions with respect to gravity and atmosphere. Its mineral depositsconvinced the Dahl Corporation to set up colonization on Pandora, largely for mining purposes.’ And—says they were also interested in the alien ruins.”
    Cal peered over her shoulder at the small image accompanying the text. “Alien ruins? I wish we could see that.” Mostly he said it just to make his mom happy. Partly because he wanted her to lay off him—and also for a reason he wouldn’t like to admit out loud: he loved his mom and wanted her to be happy.
    “The alien ruins,” his mom went on, paraphrasing the text, “were thought to belong to the same culture that left similar artifacts on the planet Promethia …”
    “Promethia—that’s where we got the new starship tech, everybody knows that.”
    “We got faster starships, anyway. Um—‘a large sealed vault on Promethia discovered by the Atlas Corporation contained alien technology and weaponry.’ The Dahl Corporation hoped to find a similar trove on Pandora. Says here that before they could really find it, they kind of gave up—”
    “Gave up? Why?”
    “Apparently some kind of cyclic change happened on Pandora, and all kinds of local creatures came out of hibernation and started … well, they attacked people, and destroyed a lot of the mining camps. Plus it turned out the best minerals had mostly been used by the aliens thousands of years ago, although there are ‘useful deposits of specialized crystal.’ Says it’s ‘not known if the extraterrestrials who left the artifacts were native to the planet, as none are known to have survived there.’ So I guess they didn’t find as much as they’d hoped for, and the planet was so dangerous the Dahl Corporation basically pulled out.”
    “But you said there were settlements.”
    “Some settlers stayed. There’s New Haven, some other settlements—but it’s tough down there. Especially because … if I understand what it’s saying here … Dahl brought a lot of convict labor to the planet to do most of the mining work. When they left, they just unlocked the gates of the prison camps and abandoned the convicts. So the convicts are wandering around down there terrorizing the colonists. According to this, a lot of the convict laborers have gone psychotic, right out of their minds. There are still some working factories down there. Hyperion has a robot operation on Pandora—robots, and weapons. Especially weapons. There are more weapons of different types sold on Pandora than on any other known planet …”
    “But—nobody ever found the Vault they were looking for?”
    She scanned the univiewer, going on to the next page. “Seems like they found some stuff, but not the big discovery—not the Vault itself. Or anyway they couldn’t get close to it … Says there’re conflicting accounts of what happened to that.”
    He gazed at the enigmatic orb of Pandora. “So—the Vault
could
still be down there … somewhere.”
    She nodded. “But I wouldn’t want to go and look for it! There are a few scientists—but mostly they stay on the Study Station.”
    “What’s the Study Station?”
    “It’s the station the
Homeworld Bound
’s docked at right now—which you’d know if you didn’t have your head in that helmet all day. I guess from up here