Borderlands: The Fallen Read Online Free PDF Page A

The constant fear of predation, Psychos, and bandits was traumatic.
    They sat across from one another in the bright room, Rans sipping the booze and glancing at the door with twitching eyes. “So uh, let’s get right to it. When we talked on the subspace gabber, I toldya maybe I’d found the Eridian Vault but I couldn’t get it to it myself. Well—turns out, it’s not Eridian. It’s something else.”
    “Now wait a minute, Rans,
you
said—”
    “I know, but hear me out. It’s an old alien ship—an ET crash site. I saw it, I took pictures, and I found a xenotech who could analyze them for me. He confirms it! It’s alien, pure offworld stuff—but it’s
not
Eridian. Far as my guy can tell, it’s from a civilization we’ve never seen before. I used up the last of my cred talking to this guy and I’m not sure I trust him. Now, Atlas has hired some mercs to find this thing. They know the general area within a hundred klicks—but not exactly
where
it is. Guy named Crannigan, ex–Crimson Lance, real pain in the ass—he’s their man.We gotta find this thing before he does, Zac. We’ll take it to their competitors, you and me, we’ll go right to Hyperion, they’ll pay double to keep it away from Atlas! There’s gotta be alien weaponry on that ship Hyperion could retro-engineer!”
    “A crash site, huh?”
    “You got it. Now it just happens the crash site is under a kind of overhang in an old volcanic cone—so the Study Station can’t see it. Only me and you know where it is!”
    “If you’ve got photos, that might be proof enough for Hyperion …”
    “Could be faked! You’ve got to get in closer, retrieve an artifact out of there. Take the real goods to Hyperion! You and me, we’ll split the take!”
    “I don’t know—you told me it was Eridian—”
    “Stop obsessing about that, dammit! This is even better! Listen, all you gotta do is wait till the Study Station is over the area—less than an hour from now. Then you take a DropCraft, give it the coordinates, drop almost right on top of the thing. You’ll hop out, grab a few artifacts, get back in the DropCraft, hit return, bing-bang-boom it’ll bring you up here and you’re on your way. We’ll be rich! Now—I got all the info you’ll need right here …”
    “I dunno, Rans, sounds pretty risky. What can I expect to run into down there?”
    “What? Oh-h-h—a rakk or two, or a skag whelp, little bitty spiderant maybe. There’s a gun on every DropCraft, don’t even worry about it.”
    The DropCraft bay was in the bottom level of the Study Station. Zac walked along the semiflexible transparentcorridor, thirty meters long, between the ship and the station, glancing up through the shield glass at the moon over Pandora. He felt naked, exposed to space here, though a filtering force field insulated him from damaging radiation. He heard a whirring sound, glanced over his shoulder—something was flickering in the air back there: a small, disklike flying security drone. Was it following him? No big deal—probably it routinely patrolled the Study Station.
    He entered the station proper, nodding to two scientists at a scanning monitor, and crossed hastily to the elevator. Theoretically, passengers on the
Homeworld Bound
had the run of the station while it was docked here, but the scientists always seemed annoyed by tourists.
    He took the elevator down, thinking he heard that whirring again, this time coming from the elevator shaft overhead. Probably some servo noise.
    He found six shiny DropCrafts lined up on the lowest level, in release bays. The little vessels, no bigger than a flying car, could be rented by the hour. His was craft number one.
    DropCraft One was an iridescent teardrop-shaped vehicle designed mostly for emergency escapes, but it could be used for a quick visit to a narrow-gauge area. It carried just enough fuel for one trip straight down and one back up.
    He would have to confess all to his wife—but only when he had the