All You Need Is Kill (12 page)

Static crackled in my headphones. Someone was talking to me. A woman. It was our savior, the Full Metal Bitch, Valkyrie reborn, Mad Wargarita—Rita Vrataski.

“How many loops is this for you?”

1

A brilliant sun traced crisp shadows on the ground. The air was so clean you could have gotten a clear sniper shot from kilometers away. Above the field, the 17th Company’s flag snapped in a moist southerly breeze blowing off the Pacific.

The sea air held a scent that snaked its way down your nose and tickled your tongue on its way to your throat. Rita knitted her brow. It wasn’t the stench of a Mimic. More like the slightly fishy fragrance you got from those bowls of nuoc mam sauce.

Wartime tensions and the constant threat of death aside, the Far East really wasn’t so bad. The coastline, so difficult to defend, afforded beautiful sunsets. The air and water were clean. If Rita, who had about one tenth the refinement and culture of an average individual, thought it was wonderful here, an actual tourist might have considered it paradise. If there were one mark against it, it was the cloying humidity.

The weather that night would be perfect for an air strike. Once the sun had set, bombers laden with GPS-guided munitions would take to the sky in swarms to blast the island into a lifeless moonscape before the next morning’s ground assault. The beautiful atoll and the flora and fauna that called it home would all share the same fate as the enemy, if everything went according to plan.

“Beautiful day, don’t you think, Major Vrataski?” An old film camera dangled from the man’s thick neck, a redwood trunk by comparison to the average Jacket jockey’s beech-tree. Rita casually ignored him.

“Great lighting. Days like today can make even a steel-and-rivets airplane look like a da Vinci.”

Rita snorted. “You doing fine art photography now?”

“That’s hardly any way to speak to the only embedded photojournalist in the Japan expedition. I take great pride in the role I play conveying the truths of this war to the public. Of course, 90 percent of the truth is lighting.”

“Pretty slick talk. They must love you over at PR. How many tongues you figure you have?”

“Only the one the Lord saw fit to bestow Americans with. Though I hear Russians and Cretans have two.”

“Well I hear there’s a Japanese god who pulls out the tongues of liars. Don’t do anything to get yours in trouble.”

“Perish the thought.”

The corner of the training field Rita and the photographer were standing on caught the full force of the wind coming off the ocean. In the middle of the giant field, 146 men from the 17th Company of the 301st Japanese Armored Infantry Division were frozen in neat rows along the ground. It was a kind of training called iso push-ups. Rita hadn’t seen it before.

The rest of Rita’s squad stood a short distance away, their thick, bristly arms jutting out before them. They were busy doing what soldiers did best, which was mocking those less fortunate than themselves.
Maybe this is how they practice bowing? Hey, samurai! Try picking up a sword after an hour of that!

None of Rita’s squadmates would go near her within thirty hours of an attack. It was an unspoken rule. The only people who dared approach her were a Native American engineer who couldn’t hardly see straight and the photographer, Ralph Murdoch.

“They don’t move at all?” Rita seemed doubtful.

“No, they just hold that position.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it samurai training. Looks more like yoga if you ask me.”

“Is it odd to find similarities between Indian mysticism and Japanese tradition?”

“Ninety-eight!”

“Ninety-eight!”

“Ninety-nine!”

“Ninety-nine!”

Staring into the ground like farmers watching rice grow, the soldiers barked in time with the drill sergeant. The shouts of the 146 men echoed in Rita’s skull. A familiar migraine sent wires of pain through her head. This was a bad one.

“Another headache?”

“None of your business.”

“I don’t see how a platoon worth of doctors can’t find a cure for one headache.”

“Neither do I. Why don’t you try to find out?” she snapped.

“They keep those guys on a pretty short leash. I can’t even get an interview.”

Murdoch raised his camera. It wasn’t clear what he intended to do with the images of the spectacle unfolding in perfect stillness before him. Maybe sell them to a tabloid with nothing better to print.

“I’m not sure that’s in very good taste.” Rita didn’t know a single soldier on the field, but she didn’t have to know them to like them better than Murdoch.

“Pictures are neither tasteful nor distasteful. If you click on a link and a picture of a corpse pops up, you might have grounds for a lawsuit. If that same picture appears on the homepage of the
New York Times,
it could win a Pulitzer Prize.”

“This is different.”

“Is it?”

“You’re the one who broke into the data processing center. If it weren’t for your slip-up, these men wouldn’t be here being punished, and you wouldn’t be here taking pictures of them. I’d say that qualifies as distasteful.”

“Not so fast. I’ve been wrongly accused.” The sound of his camera shutter grew more frequent, masking their conversation.

“Security here is lax compared to central command. I don’t know what you were trying to dig up out here in the boondocks, but don’t hurt anyone else doing it.”

“So you’re onto me.”

“I’d just hate to see the censors come down on you right when you land your big scoop.”

“The government can tell us any truths they please. But there are truths, and there are
truths
,” Murdoch said. “It’s up to the people to decide which is which. Even if it’s something the government doesn’t want reported.”

“How egotistical.”

“Name a good journalist who isn’t. You have to be to find a story. Do you know any Dreamers?”

“I’m not interested in feed religions.”

“Did you know the Mimics went on the move at almost exactly the same time you started that big operation up in Florida?”

The Dreamers were a pacifist group—civilian, of course. The emergence of the Mimics had had a tremendous impact on marine ecosystems. Organizations that had called for the protection of dolphins, whales, and other marine mammals died out. The Dreamers picked up where they left off.

Dreamers believed the Mimics were intelligent, and they insisted it was humanity’s failure to communicate with them that had led to this war. They reasoned that if Mimics could evolve so quickly into such potent weapons, with patience, they could develop the means to communicate as well. The Dreamers had begun to take in members of a war-weary public who believed humanity could never triumph over the Mimics, and in the past two to three years the size of the movement had ballooned.

“I interviewed a few before coming to Japan,” Murdoch continued.

“Sounds like hard work.”

“They all have the same dream on the same day. In that dream, humanity falls to the Mimics. They think it’s some sort of message they’re trying to send us. Not that you needed me to tell you that.” Murdoch licked his lips. His tongue was too small for his body, giving the distinct impression of a mollusk. “I did a little digging, and it turns out there are particularly high concentrations of these dreams the days before U.S. Spec Ops launch major attacks. And over the past few years, more and more people have been having the dream. It hasn’t been made public, but some of these people are even in the military.”

“You believe whatever these feed jobs tell you? Listen to them long enough and they’d have you thinking sea monkeys were regular Einsteins.”

“Academic circles are already discussing the possibility of Mimic intelligence. And if they are, it’s not far-fetched to think they would try to communicate.”

“You shouldn’t assume everything you don’t understand is a message,” Rita said. She snorted. “Keep on like that, and next thing you’ll be telling me you’ve found signs of intelligence in our government, and we both know that’s never going to happen.”

“Very funny. But there’s a science here you can’t ignore. Each step up the evolutionary ladder—from single-celled organism, to cold-blooded animal, to warm-blooded animal—has seen a tenfold increase in energy consumption.” Ralph licked his lips again. “If you look at the amount of energy a human in modern society consumes, it’s ten times greater than that of a warm-blooded animal of similar size. Yet Mimics, which are supposed to be a cold-blooded animal, consume the same amount of energy as humans.”

“That supposed to mean they’re higher than us on the ladder? That’s quite a theory. You should have it published.”

“I seem to recall you saying something about having dreams.”

“Sure I have dreams. Ordinary dreams.”

To Rita, looking for meaning in dreams was a waste of time. A nightmare was a nightmare. And the time loops she’d stumbled into in the course of the war, well, they were something else entirely. “We have an attack coming up tomorrow. Did any of the people you interviewed get a message?”

“Absolutely. I called L.A. this morning to confirm it. All three had had the dream.”

“Now I know it’s not true. That’s impossible.”

“How would you know?”

“This is only the first time through today.”

“That again? How can a day have a first time or a second time?”

“Just hope you never find out.”

Murdoch made a show of shrugging. Rita returned her gaze to the unlucky men on the field.

Jacket jockeys didn’t have much use for muscle. Endurance was the order of the day, not stamina-draining burst power. To build their endurance, Rita’s squad practiced a standing technique from kung-fu known as ma bu. Ma bu consisted of spreading your legs as though you were straddling a horse and maintaining the position for an extended period of time. In addition to strengthening leg muscle, it was an extremely effective way to improve balance.

Rita wasn’t sure what benefit, if any, the iso push-ups were supposed to have. It looked more like punishment, plain and simple. The Japanese soldiers, packed together like sardines in a can, remained frozen in that one position. For them, this probably ranked among the worst experiences of their lives. Even so, Rita envied them this simple memory. Rita hadn’t shared that sort of throwaway experience with anyone in a long time.

The stifling wind tugged at her rust-red hair. Her bangs, still too long no matter how many times she cut them, made her forehead itch.

This was the world as it was at the start of the loop. What happened here only Rita would remember. The sweat of the Japanese soldiers, the whoops and jeers of the U.S. Special Forces— it would all be gone without a trace.

Maybe it would have been best not to think about it, but watching these soldiers training the day before an attack, sweat-soaked shirts sticking to their skin in the damp air, she felt sorry for them. In a way, this was her fault for bringing Murdoch along with her.

Rita decided to find a way to shorten the PT and put an end to this seemingly pointless exercise. So what if it instilled a samurai fighting spirit? They’d still wet themselves the first time they ran into a Mimic assault. She wanted to stop it, even if it was a sentimental gesture that no one but herself would ever appreciate.

Surveying the training field, Rita chanced upon a pair of defiant eyes staring directly at her. She was accustomed to being looked on with awe, admiration, even fear, but she’d never seen this: a look filled with such unbridled hatred from a complete stranger. If a person could shoot lasers from their eyes, Rita would have been baked crisper than a Thanksgiving turkey in about three seconds.

She had only met one other man whose eyes even approached the same intensity. Arthur Hendricks’s deep blue eyes had known no fear. Rita had killed him, and now those blue eyes were buried deep in the cold earth.

Judging by his muscles, the soldier staring at her was a rookie not long out of boot camp. Nothing like Hendricks. He had been an American, a lieutenant, and the commander of the U.S. Special Forces squad.

The color of this soldier’s eyes was different. His hair, too. His face and body weren’t even close. Still, there was something about this Asian soldier that Rita Vrataski liked.

2

Rita had often wondered what the world would be like if there were a machine that could definitively measure the sum of a person’s potential.

If DNA determined a person’s height or the shape of their face, why not their less obvious traits too? Our fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers—ultimately every individual was the product of the blood that flowed in the veins of those who came before. An impartial machine could read that information and assign a value to it, as simple as measuring height or weight.

What if someone who had the potential to discover a formula to unlock the mysteries of the universe wanted to become a pulp fiction writer? What if someone who had the potential to create unparalleled gastronomic delicacies had his heart set on civil engineering? There is what we desire to do, and what we are able to do. When those two things don’t coincide, which path should we pursue to find happiness?