All You Need Is Kill

Rita Vrataski, the savior of humanity, the Valkyrie, the nineteen-year-old girl, let her mask slip.

The Full Metal Bitch began to cry.

Chapter 4

***

1

“Shit, it’s started! Don’t get your balls blown off, gents!”

Battle 159.

I dart forward, my Jacket’s Doppler set to max.

I spot a target, fire, duck. A javelin whizzes past my head.

“Who’s up there? You’re too far forward! You wanna get yourself killed?”

The lieutenant said the same thing every time. I wiped sand from my helmet. Thunder erupted from the shells crisscrossing the sky. I glanced at Ferrell and nodded.

This time the battle would end. If I stood by and watched as Yonabaru and Ferrell died, they wouldn’t be coming back. It all came down to this. There was no repeating this battle. The fear that clawed at my guts wasn’t fear of death, it was fear of the unknown. I wanted to throw down my rifle and axe and find a bed to hide under.

A normal reaction-the world wasn’t meant to repeat itself. I grinned in spite of the butterflies in my stomach. I was struggling with the same fear everyone struggles with. I was putting my life- the only one I had-on the line.

“You’re not actually caught in a time loop,” Rita had explained to me. My experiences of the 158 previous battles were real; it was me who didn’t really exist. Whoever it was that had been there for the excruciating pain, hopelessness, and the hot piss in his Jacket, he was only a shattered memory now.

Rita told me that from the point of view of the person with the memory, there was no difference between having had an actual experience and only having the memory of it. Sounded like philosophical bullshit to me. Rita didn’t seem to understand it all that well either.

I remember reading a comic, back when I still read comics, about a guy who used a time machine to change the past. It seemed to me that if the past changed, then the guy from the future who went back in time to change it should have disappeared-like the guy in those old Back to the Future movies-but the comic glossed over those details.

I had become an unwilling voyeur to the dreams of the Mimics. In my very first battle, the one where Rita saved my life, I had unknowingly killed one of those Mimics she called “servers.” In every battle since then, from the second right up to the 158th, Rita had killed the server. But the network between me and the server had already been established the instant I killed it, meaning I was the one trapped in the loop, and that Rita had been freed.

The Mimics used the loop to alter the future to their advantage. The javelin that missed Yonabaru in the second battle had been meant for me. My chance encounter with a Mimic when I ran from the base hadn’t had anything to do with chance. They’d been hunting me all along. If it hadn’t been for Rita, they would have had me for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The fighting continued. Chaos stalked the battlefield.

I slid into a crater with the rest of my squad to avoid getting ventilated by a sniper javelin shot. The squad had moved a hundred meters nearer to the coast since the start of battle. The conical hole we had taken cover in was courtesy of the previous night’s GPS-guided bombardment. A stray round landed near my feet, spraying sand into the air.

“Just like Okinawa,” remarked Ferrell, his back pressed against the wall of earth.

Yonabaru squeezed off another round. “Musta been a helluva fight.”

“We were surrounded, just like now. Ran out of ammo and things got ugly.”

“You’re gonna jinx us.”

“I don’t know-” Ferrell sprang up from the cover of the crater, fired his rifle, then sank back against the wall. “I got it in my head that this battle’s going somewhere. Just a feeling.”

“Shit, Sarge is talkin’ happy talk. Better watch out we don’t get struck by lightning.”

“You have any doubts, just watch our newest recruit in action,” Ferrell said. “Wouldn’t surprise me to see him get up and dance the jitterbug just to piss the Mimics off.”

“I don’t know the jitterbug,” I said.

“No shit.”

“Maybe I’ll give that pretty battle axe of yours a try.” Yonabaru nodded at the gleaming slab of tungsten carbide in my Jacket’s grip.

“You’d just hurt yourself.”

“That’s discrimination is what that is.”

Same old, same old. Everyone talking over each other, no one listening.

“Bogies at two o’clock!”

“Our thirty-fifth customer of the day!”

“Which one of you assholes just sent me this huge-ass file? We’re in the middle of a fuckin’ war, if you haven’t been keepin’ up!”

“Man, I need some smokes.”

“Shut the fuck up and shoot!”

The front line edged out of cover and leveled their rifles at the approaching throng. Bullets pierced the air, but the Mimic blitz kept coming. I gripped the handle of my axe.

Without warning, a bomb fell from the sky. The laser-guided precision munition smashed the bedrock, digging deep into the earth before detonating. The Mimics tumbled into the crater.