All You Need Is Kill

I knew the routine well enough: destroy the antenna and the backups to prevent the Mimics from sending a signal into the past. I thought I’d gotten it right on my 159th loop, and it wasn’t likely Rita had screwed things up. But somehow everything had reset again. Getting to know Rita a little more intimately on this 160th loop had been nice, but in exchange Flower Line had taken it on the chin. There would be heavy noncombat personnel casualties and a lot of dead when the dust had finally settled.

I could tell that Rita had an idea. She’d been through more loops than I had, so maybe she saw something I didn’t. I thought I’d turned myself into a veteran, but next to her I was still a greenhorn fresh out of Basic.

We were standing on the No. 3 Training Field, barbed wire barricade overturned to one side, chain link fence trampled flat along the other three. Mimics packed into the area, shoulder to shoulder-as if they had shoulders. Unable to support the massive weight of the Mimics, the concrete had buckled and cracked. The sun had begun to sink lower in the sky, casting complex shadows across the uneven ground. The wind was as strong as it had been the day before, but the Jacket’s filter removed all trace of the ocean from its smell.

Then there it was, the Mimic server. Rita and I spotted it at the same time. I don’t know how we knew it was the one, but we knew.

“I can’t raise my support squad on comm. We won’t have any air support.”

“Nothing new for me.”

“You remember what to do?”

I nodded inside my Jacket.

“Then let’s do this.”

The field was packed with ten thousand square meters of Mimics waiting for our axes to send them into death’s oblivion. We advanced to meet them.

Four stubby legs and a tail. No matter how many times I saw a Mimic, I’d never be able to think of anything but a dead and bloated frog. To look at them, there was no telling the server from its clients, but Rita and I knew the difference.

They ate earth and shat out poison, leaving behind a lifeless wasteland. The alien intelligence that had created them had mastered space travel and learned to send information through time. Now they were taking our world and turning it into a facsimile of their own, every last tree, flower, insect, animal, and human be damned.

This time we had to destroy the server. No more mistakes. If we didn’t, this battle might never end. I put all the inertia I dared behind my axe-a clean hit on the antenna. “Got it!”

The attack came from behind.

My body reacted before I had time to think. On the battlefield, I left my conscious mind out of the business of running my body. The cool, impartial calculations of my subliminal operating system were far more precise than I could ever be.

The concrete at my feet split in two, sending gray dust shooting into the air as though the ground had exploded. My right leg rolled to maintain balance. I still couldn’t see what was attacking me. There was no time to swing my massive battle axe into play.

My arms and legs moved to keep pace with my shifting center of gravity. Shudders coursed through my nerves, straining to provide the necessary evasive response in time. If my spine had been hardwired to the armor plating on my back, it would have been clattering up a storm.

I thrust with the butt of my axe. Done right, it would pack a punch similar to that of a pile driver. With the possible exception of the front armor plating on a tank, there weren’t many things that could withstand a square hit with 370 kilograms of piercing force.

The blow glanced off. Fuck!

A shadow moved at the edge of my vision. No time to get out of the way. I held in the breath I’d taken before the jab with the axe. The hit was coming. There. For an instant my body lifted off the ground, then I was rolling, my vision alternating between sky and ground, sky and ground. I came out of the roll and regained my feet in a single, fluid motion. My axe was at the ready.

There, with one leg still lifted in the air, stood a gunmetal red Jacket. Rita!

Maybe she had knocked me out of the way of an attack I hadn’t seen coming, or maybe I’d gotten in her way. But she had definitely been the one who sent me careening across the ground.

What the hell…?

The red Jacket crouched and charged. The axe blade was a gleaming razor’s edge. I surrendered my body to the battle. One hundred fifty-nine loops had trained it to move with ease, and it did. The first strike came from the side, missing me by a hair’s breadth. I deflected the second, a vicious overhand swing, with the haft of my axe. Before the third swing could come, I leapt out of harm’s way and put some distance between us.

I caught my breath and the reality of the situation sank in.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Rita walked slowly toward me, battle axe swinging low, almost brushing the ground. She stopped, and her voice crackled over the comm link. Her high, delicate voice, so out of place on the battlefield:

“What’s it look like I’m doing?”

“It looks like you’re trying to fucking kill me!”