All You Need Is Kill

by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Rita watched in the snow as her father fought and was killed. Smoke spiraled up from the flames. Brilliant cinders flitted up into the night. The sky glowed blood red.

She was her father’s daughter.

Upon reaching its destination, the ship’s payload would detonate, showering nanobots over the planet’s surface. Immediately upon arrival, the nanobots would begin to reshape the world, transforming any harsh environment into one suitable for colonization by the people who made them.

There had been countless examples of people destroying habitats and driving species to extinction for their own benefit. If they could do this on their own planet, why should some unknown world in the void of space be treated differently?

The scholars insisted that the ecoforming of a planet which might harbor intelligent life required direct oversight. Their protests were recorded, considered, and ultimately ignored.

Special Forces had a lot of four-letter words in their vocabulary, but fear wasn’t one of them.

Rita Vrataski had somehow managed to toe the piano-wire-thin line that snaked between life and death.

Thick black smoke billowed from the impact crater.

Rita couldn’t speak. Her throat was sandpaper, and she doubted whether she could even manage to swallow.

There was always one Mimic at the heart of the network, a queen of sorts. Its outward appearance was the same as the others.

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.

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.

Fighting a war with the Mimics was a lot like playing a game with a child.

Little by little, humanity was losing ground.

Rita pressed a button. The liquid crystal embedded in the blast-resistant glass opacified, obscuring the view.

“America’s at war, and we still find the time to turn out terrible movies.”

Rita cocked one rust-red eyebrow at the arrival of her unwelcome guest. Her face hardened to steel.

that gaze bearing the weight of the world.

“Do I have something on my face?”

For him, a man who had never experienced a moment of real armed conflict, maybe this training field, with its gentle ocean breezes, was part of the war. To people who had never breathed in that mixture of blood, dust, and burning metal that pervaded a battlefield, it was easy to imagine that deployment was war, that training was war, that climbing some career ladder was war. There was only one person for whom the war extended to that tranquil day before the battle: a woman named Rita Vrataski and her time loops.

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.

Rita was in constant motion.

Another step, another swing, another limb. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Our enemy may have evolved the ability to rewind time, but humanity had evolved a few tricks of its own. There were people who could keep a Jacket in tip-top condition, people who could conjure up strategies and handle logistics, people who could provide support on the front lines, and last but not least, people who were natural-born killers. People could adapt themselves to their environment and their experiences in any number of ways. An enemy that could look into the future and perceive danger fell victim to its own evolutionary atrophy. We learned faster than they could.

I had passed through death 158 times to emerge at heights no creature on this planet could aspire to in a single lifetime. Rita Vrataski had ascended even higher. We strode ahead, far from the rest of the force, an army unto ourselves. Our Jackets traced graceful clockwise spirals as we pressed on—a habit I’d picked up from Rita. Twitching mounds of carrion were all we left in our wake.

It’s not easy telling a person something you know is going to make them cry, let alone doing it with an audience. And if Jin Yonabaru is in that audience, you’re up shit creek in a concrete canoe with a hole in the bottom.

Tears streamed down Rita’s cheeks and dripped from the

point of her chin, then splashed as they landed in the palm of the hand I held out to catch them. I was still hot from exercising, but the tears burned like 20mm slugs. My heart was pounding. I was a junior high school student asking a girl to the dance. Not even battle pumped my blood pressure this much.

Before I joined the army, I saw a show about a man in love with a woman who’d lost her memory in an accident. He must have gone through something like what I was going through now. Hopelessly watching all the things you love in the world being carried away on the wind while you stand by powerless to prevent it.

“The sky in Pittsfield is so washed out. Like the color of water after you’ve rinsed out a paintbrush with blue paint in it. Like all the water in the ground rushed up in the sky and thinned it.” I gazed at Rita. She looked back at me, rich brown eyes staring into mine. “Sorry. Forget I said that,” she said.

She looked surprised at that. A lock of rust-colored hair fell to her forehead, and she raised her hand to play with it. I caught a glimpse of her eyes from between her fingers. They were filled with a strange light. She looked like a girl whose heart strings had begun to unravel, a child whose lies had been laid bare by the piercing gaze of her mother.

I broke the awkward silence. “Is something wrong?”

“What’s it taste like?” “Food is like war. You have to experience it for yourself.”

It was hot, it was loud, and in a way I can’t explain, it felt like home. There was an invisible bond that hadn’t been there my previous times through the loop. I’d had a taste of what tomorrow would bring, and suddenly all the little things that happen in our lives, the minutiae of the day, took on new importance. Just then, being surrounded by all that noise felt

For some reason, my body never grew fatigued. The only thing I brought with me were my memories and the skills I’d mastered.

Looking out across the ocean I could see the gentle curve of the horizon. Uchibo beach was dimly visible through the morning mist. Triangles of waves rose, turned to foam, and faded back into the sea. Beyond those waves lay the island the Mimics had made their spawning grounds. For a moment, I thought I saw a bolt of bright green shoot through the surf. I blinked my eyes. It had only been a glint of sunlight on the water.

The beverage that passed for coffee these days was made from lab-grown beans with artificial flavoring added for taste and aroma. Substitute grounds didn’t smell as strong as the beans Rita was grinding, and they didn’t fight their way into your nose and down your entire respiratory tract like these did, either. I suppose you could extrapolate the smell of the artificial stuff and eventually approach the real thing, but the difference in impact was like the difference between a 9mm hand gun and a 120mm tank shell.

The Full Metal Bitch and the squire at her side were steel death incarnate.

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.

But if I gave up now, everything would be gone. The guts I’d spilled on that crater-blasted island. The blood I’d choked on. The arm I’d left lying on the ground. The whole fucking loop. It would vanish like the smoke out of a gun barrel. The 159 battles that didn’t exist anywhere but in my head would be gone forever, meaningless.

The battle always ends.”

You were just a piece on the board, and I was the piece that replaced you. Nothing more than the false hero the world needed.