with that. Sooner or later something was going to break through; all right, it would break through. And when it did, Maddy was going to kick the shit out of it.
The drop goes wrong. Maddy knows it’s going wrong as soon as the Colombine tumbles out of the back of the transport, curled fetal in its packed ball of parachutes and airbags, the cockpit whirling like a fairground ride to keep Maddy upright. Maddy and the Colombine fall out of the sky into the European zone, and every screen in the cockpit shows nonsense, then goes solid blue; the motors steadying the hamster ball seize up for a stomach-twisting moment, then let go, leaving Maddy turning slowly head-down as the Colombine continues to fall. She has time to decide that whatever’s happened to the screens has done for the parachutes and the airbags as well, and that she’s going to die; and that while she doesn’t especially want to die, there’s nothing she can do about it; and that she ought to have some last words, except there isn’t anything she particularly wants to say to anybody; and that that’s kind of sad.
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
The drop goes wrong. Maddy knows it’s going wrong as soon as the Colombine tumbles out of the back of the transport, curled fetal in its packed ball of parachutes and airbags, the cockpit whirling like a fairground ride to keep Maddy upright. Maddy and the Colombine fall out of the sky into the European zone, and every screen in the cockpit shows nonsense, then goes solid blue; the motors steadying the hamster ball seize up for a stomach-twisting moment, then let go, leaving Maddy turning slowly head-down as the Colombine continues to fall. She has time to decide that whatever’s happened to the screens has done for the parachutes and the airbags as well, and that she’s going to die; and that while she doesn’t especially want to die, there’s nothing she can do about it; and that she ought to have some last words, except there isn’t anything she particularly wants to say to anybody; and that that’s kind of sad.
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
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