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was sent in to reinforce the northern end of Kotoiushi Island.
Sergeant Bartolome Ferrell had been around longer than anyone else in our platoon. He’d lived through so many battles, he was more than soldier, he was the glue that kept our company together.
After their defeat a year and a half ago at the Battle of Okinawa Beach, the Japanese Corps made it a matter of honor to recapture a little island perched off the coast of the Boso Peninsula, a place named Kotoiushi. With a foothold there, the Mimics were only a stone’s throw away from Tokyo. The Imperial Palace and central government retreated and ruled from Nagano, but there wasn’t any way to relocate the economic engine that was Japan’s largest city.
After twenty years fighting an enemy whose identity we didn’t even know, losing ground day by day, we grunts didn’t need another muscle-bound savior who grunted and sweat and had hamburger for brains just like we did.
After finishing the war in North America, they moved on to Europe and then North Africa. Now they’d come to Japan, where the enemy was knocking on the door of the main island of Honshu.
crammed into the same oven as the Christmas turkey. Rita’s lips made the subtlest of movements. A low voice only I could hear. “Do I have something on my face?” “What?” “You’ve been staring at me for a while now.” “Me? No.” “I thought maybe there was a laser bead on my forehead.” “Sorry. There wasn’t—it’s nothing.”
“Any blisters today?” Ferrell’s attention never left his shoes. He spoke Burst with a roll of the tongue peculiar to Brazilians.
Ferrell had a mix of Japanese and Brazilian blood in him, but he came from South America.
Nanobots spilling from Mimic corpses would eat the lungs out of whatever soldiers were left. And so, little by little, lifeless desert spread through the lands people once called home.
“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.”
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.
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.
The first victims of the Mimic attacks were also the most vulnerable: the poorest regions of Africa and South America. The archipelagos of Southeast Asia. Countries that lacked the means to defend themselves watched as the encroaching desert devoured their land. People abandoned the cultivation of cash crops—the coffee, tea, tobacco, and spices coveted in wealthier nations—and began growing staples, beans and sorghum, anything to stave off starvation. Developed nations had generally been able to stop the Mimic advance
Four years later, the Mimics would attack Pittsfield. The raid came in the middle of an unusually harsh winter. Snow fell faster than it could be cleared from the streets. The city was frozen to a halt. No one knew this at the time, but Mimics send out something akin to a scouting party before an attack, a small, fast-moving group
Then the ship split into eight pieces. Four of the pieces sank deep under the ocean, while three fell on land. The final piece remained in orbit. The pieces that landed in North Africa and Australia were handed over to NATO. Russia and China fought over the piece that landed in Asia, but China came out on top. After much arguing among the nations of Earth, the orbiting mothership was reduced to a small piece of space junk by a volley of missiles.
methodically. In the depths, the machines chanced upon echinoderms—starfish. The crèche-produced nanobots penetrated the rigid endoskeletons of the starfish and began to multiply in symbiosis with their hosts. The resulting creatures fed on soil. They ate the world and shat out poison. What passed through their bodies was toxic to life on Earth, but suitable for the people who had sent them.
The medal, which bears a likeness of said deity brandishing a hammer, is awarded to any soldier who kills ten or more Mimics in a single battle.
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 crèche 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
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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.
“Your mother must have been disappointed when the abortion only killed your conscience,” Rita said.
The soldier didn’t move. Rita didn’t move. The sun hung high in the sky, slowly roasting their skin. Rita spoke in a low voice only the soldier beside her could hear: “Do I have something on my face?” “Not that I can see.”
Burst English, or simply Burst, was a language created to deal with the problem of communication in an army comprised of soldiers from dozens of countries.
“I, uh, have an answer to your question.” He hesitated like a high school drama student reading from a bad script. “Japanese restaurants don’t charge for green tea.” Rita Vrataski, the savior of humanity, the Valkyrie, the nineteen-year-old girl, let her mask slip. The Full Metal Bitch began to cry.
I found my Jacket in Shasta’s workshop. Shasta was there too. Someone had scratched the words “Killer Cage” into the breastplate. “Cage”—that was how the Americans pronounced my name. I guess I had a call sign of my own now.
