All You Need Is Kill

There was always one Mimic at the heart of the network, a queen of sorts. Its outward appearance was the same as the others. Just as all pigs looked alike to someone not in the business of raising pigs, the difference between that Mimic and the rest was one only Rita could see. Somehow, as she fought and slew countless Mimics, she began to tell them apart. It was something subliminal, bordering on instinct. She couldn’t have explained the difference if she tried.

The easiest place to hide a tree was in the forest.

The easiest place to hide an officer was in among the grunts.

The Mimic at the heart of each pack was hiding in plain sight. Think of it as the server of the network.

When you kill the server, the Mimic network emits a specific type of signal. The scientists would later identify it as a tachyon pulse, or some other particle that could travel through time, but Rita didn’t really understand any of that. The important part was that the signal emitted by Mimics that had lost their server traveled back in time to warn them of the imminent danger they faced.

The danger appeared in the memory of the Mimics as a portent, a window into the future. The Mimics that received this vision could modify their actions to safely navigate the pending danger. This was only one of many technologies discovered by that advanced race from a distant star. The process, built into the design of each creche machine, served as a warning system to prevent some freak accident from upsetting a xenoforming plan that had taken so long to place in motion.

But the Mimics weren’t the only ones who could benefit from these signals. Kill a Mimic server while in electrical contact with it, and a human would receive the same gift of foresight meant for the network. The tachyon signal sent into the past doesn’t distinguish between Mimic and human, and when it came, humans perceived the portent as a hyperrealistic dream, accurate in every detail.

To truly defeat a Mimic strike force, you have to first destroy their network and all the backups it contains, then destroy the server Mimic. Otherwise, no matter how many different strategies you try, the Mimics will always develop a counterstrategy that ensures their survival.

1. Destroy the antenna.

2. Massacre every Mimic being used as backup for the network.

3. Once the possibility for transmissions to the past has been eliminated, destroy the server.

Three simple steps to escape to the future. It took Rita 211 passes through the loop to figure them out.

No one Rita told would believe her. The army was used to dealing in concrete facts. No one was interested in far-fetched stories involving time loops. When Rita finally broke out of the loop and reached the future, she learned that Arthur Hendricks had died. He was one of twenty-eight thousand killed in the battle.

In the two days Rita had spent in an endless circle of fighting, she’d managed to research the history of war, scour the feeds for information about the Mimics, and enlist a goofball engineer to make her a battle axe. She had succeeded in breaking the loop, in changing her own future, yet Hendricks’ name still ended up with the letters KIA printed beside it.

Rita finally understood. This was what war really was. Every soldier who died in battle was nothing more than another figure in the calculus of estimated casualties. Their hardships, joys, and fears never entered into the equation. Some would live, others would die. It was all up to the impartial god of death called probability. With the benefit of her experience in the time loop, Rita would be able to beat the odds for some and save certain people in the future. But there would always be those she could not save. People with fathers, mothers, friends, maybe even brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, children. If she could only repeat the 211th loop, maybe she could find a way to save Hendricks-but at what cost? Rita Vrataski was alone in the time loop, and in order for her to make it out, someone would have to die.

Hendricks made one last phone call before that battle. He learned he had just become a father, and he was upset that the picture of his kid he’d printed out and taped inside his Jacket had gotten dirty. He wanted to go home, but he put the mission first. Rita had heard the phone conversation 212 times now. She knew it by heart.

Rita was awarded a medal for her distinguished service in the battle-the Order of the Valkyrie, given to soldiers who killed over one hundred Mimics in a single battle. They had created the honor just for her. And why not? The only soldier on the entire planet who could kill that many Mimics in a single battle was Rita Vrataski.

When the president pinned the gleaming medal on Rita’s chest, he lauded her as an angel of vengeance on the battlefield and declared her a national treasure. She had paid for that medal with the blood of her brothers and sisters.

She didn’t shed a tear. Angels don’t cry.

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