by Неизвестный
And then the parachutes open. The Colombine lands, hard. Maddy feels its knees take most of the impact, feels it throw out one arm as it comes down in a crouch, but the screens stay blue and the controls, when Maddy works them, do nothing. The Colombine’s alive, but the cockpit is dead.
Maddy levers the cockpit open with the emergency bar and climbs down, leaving the Colombine kneeling in the shadow of a house-sized boulder. The ground is cracked black rock, sloping up behind the Colombine to a snow-covered ridge, its top only a few hundred feet away. As she comes out into the sun Maddy finds grass and tiny white flowers, and a steep slope down into a narrow valley with across it another ridge, not as high as this one, its slopes lined with dark evergreens, pine or fir or something; Maddy’s never been good with trees. The sun is redder than it should be—that’s a zone thing—but it’s warm, and Maddy sits down and takes off her helmet, and after a little while she lies down in the grass, looking up at the sky, cold blue with white clouds.
She’s somewhere in the Alps, or what used to be the Alps, German or maybe Austrian. She can’t say more specifically than that. She figures she’s at least ten miles inside the zone, maybe more. They say the zones are bigger on the inside than on the outside, that it takes longer to walk out of a zone than it took to walk in. Maddy doesn’t know how they know that, how many people have walked into a zone and then back out, but she supposes it must have happened a few times. They say the laws of physics are different in the zones, that that’s why people who stay in the zones without the drugs get sick, why the living things that come out of the zones die so easily and the machines are so hard to kill. It doesn’t, to Maddy’s mind, adequately explain why those machines can only be stopped by teenagers with giant robots, but it’s a fact that tanks and planes didn’t do so well, so maybe it’s true; and whatever’s going on in the zones it’s fucked up Maddy’s GPS along with everything else.
She can feel the Colombine there where she left it, out of sight on the other side of the boulder; she’s found she knows where it is, always, without thinking, the way she knows where her left hand is. She’s never told the UN doctors about this, never talked about it even with Abby and Jacob, though she assumes they feel the same connection to the Scaramouche and the Pantalon. Maddy’s part of the Colombine now and it’s part of her: a mute external body, androgynous at best despite the name, sort of butch even, the long-limbed strength and slightly inhuman proportions of an El Greco saint in thirty feet of blood-red machinery, but part of her.
The Colombine is a weapon.
The Colombine is Earth’s last hope, or nearly.
The Colombine is a job.
The Colombine is Maddy’s other self.
The Colombine is broken.
If Maddy’s anywhere near the war she can’t hear it. She tries putting her ear to the ground like some kind of hunting elf in one of Abby’s fantasy novels but feels stupid immediately, and stops. Now, her face turned back to the sky, she closes her eyes and hears the wind down in the valley, and somewhere a trickle of water. It would be so easy to fall asleep here. Maddy tries to remember the last time she fell asleep in the grass, and can’t.
She’s not going to sleep here. If she does, something will come along and step on her, or the drugs in her system will run out, or the zone will find some other way to kill her. Maddy gets up.
She follows the sound of the water up out of the cleft and across the slope, scrambles over some rocks, comes down into a space like a shallow bowl, where meltwater from the ridge has formed an oval pool about fifty yards long, ringed with gravel and gray mud.
There is a girl there.
She is squatting at the edge of the pool, all knees and elbows, trailing the fingers of one hand in the water. Maddy knows instantly that it’s a girl, though she can’t then say, and won’t later be able to say, how she knows; and Maddy knows instantly that it/she is not human. She is dressed from head to foot in something dark blue and mirror-glossy, so that Maddy can see the clouds above and the rippling water below reflected in it. It rises to cover her head as well, and drops to cover the hand that’s not in the water, so that only the skin of her hand and of her too-round face is uncovered; and that skin too is blue, or bluish, or maybe a pale gray made blue by the blue around it.
The alien sees Maddy and instantly she straightens up, a quick, birdlike motion, and the glossy blue runs swiftly down her bare fingers and across her face, leaving only the eyes, not the inky black of a cartoon alien’s but large and round and bright like the eyes of a lemur. Standing, she’s even more obviously inhuman, her torso too long, her hips and shoulders too narrow, her waist nonexistent. But there’s something beautiful about her all the same, beautiful and strange, the more so as she seems to relax, and the armor or whatever it is withdraws again from her face and hands. It’s hard to read that strange face, but Maddy thinks she looks expectant, or maybe a little puzzled.
Maddy comes down to the water, sliding a little on the loose rocky ground, and the alien stays where she is; then when Maddy stops about ten feet away she comes closer, one pale blue-gray hand extended, long fingers splayed. Maddy tugs off her right glove and raises her own hand to match the alien’s. There’s the tiniest crackle of static electricity as their fingers meet. Maddy laughs.
And then the alien’s head clicks round to train those wide eyes on something over Maddy’s left shoulder, and she grabs Maddy’s hand in a cool, strong grip as if by reflex; and then as Maddy turns to see Tanimura, frozen at the top of the slope, the alien drops Maddy’s hand as quickly as she took it. Her attention flickers from Tanimura to Maddy and back, her strange face agitated and unhappy. And then she jumps away, that blue armor flowing over her, mounding into strange forms that disguise the thinness of her body, opening out around her head like an umbrella or the brim of an enormous round hat, so that Maddy can no longer see the bright eyes.
Then she’s getting bigger, somehow, as she retreats, heavier, wider, taller, impossibly tall, tall as the icy ridge, so that Maddy has to tilt her head back to take the blue shape in. And as Tanimura scrambles past her down the gravel slope and out into the water, hands outstretched, crying, the alien jumps back, seeming to hang for a moment between the snow and the sky, and Maddy recognizes the shape now, from the railroad cut and from Abby’s card game, and the broad cap tilts back and Maddy recognizes the eyes and the mouth that she’d been so sure meant death; and then the alien is gone.
Tanimura is still moving, still wading out into the pool; it’s almost up to his waist. Maddy wonders if she’s going to have to drag him back. And then he stops, suddenly, and turns around, and sloshes his way back to the shore. He squats down and puts his head in his hands. After a little while he looks up.
“ばか,” he says.
Maddy knows that word. Dumbass. Or something like. But she doesn’t think he means her. Maybe he means himself. Maybe he means it’s a dumb-ass situation. Or a dumb-ass world. She can’t say she disagrees.
The Colombine’s cockpit stutters to life as soon as the Pierrot comes near. Together Maddy and Tanimura make their way down off the mountainside, find a road leading out of the zone, and follow it till they find a stretch of autobahn long and straight enough for the transport to land. Maddy speaks briefly to Asano over the radio; she doesn’t say anything to Tanimura. She hasn’t figured out what she wants to say.
Aboard the transport, the Colombine secure in its cradle, Maddy powers the cockpit down again and sits in darkness. The amphetamines they gave her at the start of the mission are wearing off; she can feel it.
She closes her eyes. She wishes she had a home, so that she could feel homesick for it. In the dark, she sees the alien girl.
Back at the secret robot base she finds Tanimura in his cabin. It’s not the hikikomori rathole she’s been expecting. Apart from a few books, a Sony laptop, and a scattered deck of the recognition cards, there’s no real sign anybody lives there. Tanimura is sitting on the bunk, playing some game on his phone, or maybe
texting somebody. He stops when Maddy comes in.
“I figured it out,” she says. “On the way back. She thought I was you, right? You met her before. That’s why you ran away. But I bet they can’t tell us apart, and she thought I was you.”
Tanimura doesn’t say anything.
“It’s all a lie,” Maddy presses on. “Everything they’ve told us about the zones, about the enemy. Isn’t it? Maybe they’re not lying to us on purpose, but it’s all bullshit. They don’t know anything. You and me, we know more than they do.”
Tanimura just looks at her. Maddy can’t tell if he understands her or not.
“Look,” she says. “I want to help, okay? Who is she? What’s her name?”
“Name?” Tanimura says.
“名前,” Maddy says. She goes to the desk, finds the card, holds it up. “Hers.”
Tanimura looks at the card, then up at Maddy.
“Grauekappe,” he says levelly. “AG-7.”
Maddy stares at him.
“Okay,” she says, dropping the card to the floor. “Fuck you too.”
She can’t get into the hangar. She wants to climb into the Colombine’s cockpit and put six inches of red metal between herself and the world, but they aren’t going to let her do that. She goes to the simulator room instead, and climbs up into one of the big white boxes and closes it and sits there unseeing as the computers run it through its routine, never touching the controls, so that she dies again and again; and then she wipes her eyes and opens the box and gets down.
We straddle over the twenty or so corpses that are scattered about on the red clay and reach the top of the hill.
I imagine for a moment that I’m looking down on a huge ocean that’s reflecting back the stars of the night sky. The blue-black vista is sprinkled with glittering clusters of light.
It’s not really water I’m staring down at though, and I know it. Those lights are people. That distant twinkling is people cooking, studying; it’s families gathering after a long day.
That light. That warmth. I take a deep breath. The acrid gun smoke all around us, the smell of burning flesh, the stench of blood and guts, of shit and piss that’s seeped out of the dead bodies—it all merges into one. For a moment it seems that I can also smell the scent of the living as it drifts over from the glittering mass of light in the distance.
I sense wild animals watching us, warily keeping a safe perimeter. They’re biding their time, waiting for their opportunity to chow down on the mangled corpses we’ve so casually scattered about the place. When the white men first came to this country they were shocked at how you only needed to step beyond the narrow confines of the city before the feral underbelly of this savage continent exposed itself.
Forward march! I call out, my voice calm.
Some of the guys are taking their time, others are impatient to get going. We each advance at our own pace. No need to bother anymore with the pretense of trying to step in time.
Fat, thin, lanky, short—we all start moving. Walking, climbing down the slope.
The gentle breeze that meets us carries with it the bustling smell of life, and we advance.
I think back to the day the war ended. At the exact moment I heard the orders for ceasefire, the tip of my AK had been shoved up against my friend’s head.
This fucked-up situation had come about due to a terrible coincidence. Earlier that day orders had come down for us to kill everyone in the encampment. Not just the SLF fighters and their commanders, but every last one of the children and women too, even the pregnant ones. Our ambush was a success, and we captured the frontline base with only five or so casualties on our side, but then we were faced with a lot of Xema women—the womenfolk of our tribe. Kept women for the enemy leaders—bed-warmers, there to be used and abused at a moment’s notice.
The SLF—the Shelmikedmus Liberation Front—were from the Hoa tribe.
That’s why our orders from above were to massacre the girls along with the rest of them. We couldn’t risk trying to mount a rescue mission. The Hoa who managed to escape would have had a field day. The shit they’d talk about us. Even more importantly, if any of the girls were with child, their babies would be tainted by Hoa blood. Just thinking about it gave me the creeps. The very idea that womenfolk from our tribe could have their children.
That’s how they do things, we’d been taught over and over by our leaders. They pollute our bloodlines with their filthy blood, and at the rate they’re going it won’t be long before they manage to wipe the Xema tribe from the face of the African continent. The Hoa abduct our womenfolk so that they can eradicate the Xema.
I shuddered. Just thinking about a Hoa face made me feel sick. Ugly eyes so far apart, big flat noses. Just like toads. The white men in the Peace Corps apparently can’t tell them apart from us. That pisses me off, it’s ridiculous. Nothing on Earth is uglier than a Hoa. As for me, I almost felt that we’d be doing the girl prisoners here a favor by killing them—at least they’d die with their honor intact and wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of whelping ugly Hoa brats.
So orders came down to kill them all, and that’s where it all went tits up.
Ndunga had become separated from his younger sister a few years ago, and it turned out she was among the unlucky ones held captive in the base. Ndunga discovered this fact during the battle and decided to take it upon himself to go against orders and try and rescue her. Well, he failed. The captain shot her dead himself, so I hear, though I wasn’t there to witness it. Our platoon moved out as soon as we set fire to the village that had been serving as their outpost.
It was after we’d reached a safe distance and had stood down that the shit really hit the fan. We had our debriefing by the riverbank as we drank and refilled our canteens. Our leaders wasted no time in getting straight into the postmortem for the battle. Had any of our soldiers wasted any bullets on unnecessary fire? Had we let any standards slip? And just at the end of all the usual debriefing schtick, Ndunga’s name was dropped like a bombshell.
The captain hauled Ndunga out in front of all of us and denounced him. This traitor put the whole company at risk, and what’s more he conspired to pollute the Xema bloodline, we were told. Ndunga didn’t even make the slightest effort to justify himself by explaining that the girl was his sister. The captain proceeded to kick seven shades of shit out of my comrade and then pointed at me. He’s your friend, he said, and you should take care of this. That’s what the captain said to me. You know what to do, don’t you, asked the captain. And, of course, I did. Since joining the army I’d seen no end of cowards and traitors be executed.
That said, I’d never actually killed one of my own comrades with my bare hands, let alone a comrade who I also considered a friend. Ndunga had joined the SDA around the time I had. Both of us had seen our villages burnt to the ground and our fathers, mothers, friends—everyone we had ever known in our lives before the war, in fact—murdered. Ndunga had thought his sister dead right up until the moment he discovered her in that Hoa base. All the people he once knew—from the moment he was born right up until the moment he began his military career—were all dead, vanished from this world.
Well, anyway, I got up, and, anyway, I lifted my gun, and, anyway, I had it trained on Ndunga’s head, but I found that I lacked the strength in my finger to pull the trigger.
I was trembling. It was like that moment three years before when I first killed a man.
I vaguely remember hearing the captain saying that if I couldn’t pull the trigger I’d be executed alongside Ndunga. But I was so zoned out in terror I wasn’t even sure if that’s what I really heard. My fingertips were going numb. My confidence in my ability to ever be able to pull the trigger was seeping away rapidly.
At that very moment I heard a soldier’s voice in the distance. War’s over, came the cry. Central command’s declared a ceasefire, all troops return to base.
I looked toward the voice. It was Muriki from Comms, waving his arms. The war was over—b
ut I felt neither joy nor relief.
None of us did. Not one man from the once thirty-strong company.
Truth be told, none of us really knew how we were supposed to react to this new development. I seem to remember we all just stood there, slack-jawed. Probably ’cause we all found it so hard to remember how we’d passed our days back before the war started. Now what, seemed to be the prevailing sentiment. Apparently the thought of what we’d do once we’d gotten rid of all the Hoa bastards had never crossed our minds.
A shot rang out.
I turned around to see a wisp of smoke rising from the muzzle of a handgun. While I was at it I looked in the direction the gun was pointing, to see the head of my comrade. It now sported a small reddish-black hole in its left temple and a bright red mass of blood and brains spurting out of its right temple. I noticed something weird: Ndunga’s eyes were staring straight into mine, even as he lay there, spread across the ground. Probably a coincidence, but I’ve never been able to shake off that mental image since. Why, why. Why did I have to die.
“The war may be over,” the captain had said, returning his gun to his holster, “but we’re still an army here, and military rule has to be followed. Protocol is protocol.” The captain sighed before turning away, and it occurred to me that he wasn’t addressing this comment so much to me as to Ndunga’s corpse.
Earlier that day the Government Forces, the SLF, and the SDA—that’s us, the Shelmikedmus Democratic Alliance—had agreed on a multilateral ceasefire, brokered by the white men from the Netherlands, the country that used to rule this land. And because the Americans had for some time been using its weird technology to support that unholy union of blood-traitor Xema and filthy Hoa fucks that now called itself the Government Forces, it was a major embarrassment to the Americans when the Dutch negotiators apparently emerged from nowhere to conclude a quick and effective three-way armistice.