All You Need Is Kill (9 page)

“And he died?”

“No, he lived. Barely. But his soldiering days were over. If only I could have found some way to stop him.”

“You shouldn’t blame yourself. You didn’t make the Mimics attack.”

“That’s just it, he wasn’t injured fighting the Mimics. Do you know what inertia is?”

“I’ve got a high school diploma.”

“Each of those battle axes weighs 200 kilograms. A Jacket’s 370 kilogram grip can hold on to it, sure, but even with enhanced strength that’s a tremendous amount of inertia. He broke his back swinging the axe. If you swing 200 kilograms with the amplified power of a Jacket, you can literally twist yourself into two pieces.”

I knew exactly what she meant—the inertia she was talking about was exactly what I was after. It took something massive to shatter a Mimic endoskeleton in one hit. That it could kill me in the process was beside the point.

“Look, I’m sure you think you’re good, but Rita’s no ordinary soldier.” Shasta made one final attempt to dissuade me.

“I know.”

“She’s
extra
ordinary, really. She never uses her auto-balancer. And I don’t mean she turns it off before battle. Her Jacket isn’t even equipped with one. She’s the only member of our squad without it. In an elite squad, she’s more than elite.”

“I quit using an auto-balancer a long time ago. I never thought about removing it entirely. I’ll have to do that. Less weight.”

“Oh, so you’re the next Rita, I suppose?”

“No. I couldn’t hold a candle to Rita Vrataski.”

“You know what she told me the first time I met her? She said she was glad she lived in a world full of war. Can you say the same?” Shasta appraised me from behind her thick lenses. I knew she meant what she was saying. I returned her stare without a word.

“Why are you so hung up about her battle axe?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t say I’m hung up about it. I’m just trying to find something more effective than a pile driver. I’ll take a spear or a cutlass, if you have one. Anything I can use more than twenty times.”

“That’s what she said when she first asked me to cut her the axe.” Shasta relaxed her grip on the monkey wrench.

“Any comparison with the Full Metal Bi—uh, Valkyrie is high praise.”

“You know, you’re very . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“I’m very what?”

“Unusual.”

“Maybe so.”

“Just remember, it’s not an easy weapon to use.”

“I have a lot of time to practice.”

Shasta smiled. “I’ve met soldiers who think they can follow in Rita’s footsteps and fail, and I’ve met some who recognize her for the prodigy she is and never even try to match her. But you’re the first person I’ve met who realizes the distance between themselves and Rita and yet is prepared to run it.”

The more I understood war, the more I knew just what a prodigy Rita was. The second time through the loop, when Rita joined us in the PT session, I’d only stared at her the way I had because I was a new recruit who didn’t know any better. Now that I’d been through the loop enough times to call myself a real Jacket jockey, the gap between her and me seemed even greater. If I didn’t have, literally, an infinite amount of time, I would have given up.

With a magnificent leap, Shasta plucked the silicon chip from my hand. “Hang on. Let me give you some papers for that axe before you go.”

“Thanks.”

She made to leave for the papers, then stopped. “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“Why do you have the number forty-seven written on your hand?”

I didn’t know what to tell her. On the spot, I couldn’t come up with a single believable reason a soldier would have to write a number on his hand.

“Oh, was that—I mean, I hope I didn’t say anything I shouldn’t have?”

I shook my head. “You know how people cross off days on a calendar? It’s something like that.”

“If it’s important enough to write it on your hand, it must be something you don’t want to forget. Forty-seven days till you go home, maybe? Or the days until your girlfriend’s birthday?”

“If I had to put a name to it, I’d say it’s the number of days since I died.”

Shasta didn’t say anything else.

I had my battle axe.

3

0600 Wake up.

0603 Ignore Yonabaru.

0610 Steal silicon chip from armory.

0630 Eat breakfast.

0730 Practice basic body movement.

0900 Visualize training during fucking PT.

1030 Borrow battle axe from Shasta.

1130 Eat lunch.

1300 Train with emphasis on correcting mistakes of previous battle. (In Jacket.)

1500 Meet Ferrell for live battle training. (In Jacket.)

1745 Eat dinner.

1830 Attend platoon meeting.

1900 Go to Yonabaru’s party.

2000 Check Jacket.

2200 Go to bed.

0112 Help Yonabaru into his bunk.

This was more or less how I spent my day.

Outside of training, everything had become routine. I’d snuck past those sentries so many times I could do it with my eyes closed. I was starting to worry that I’d become a master thief before I made it as a professional soldier. Not that the ability to steal anything in a world that resets itself at the end of every other day would do much good.

The daily grind didn’t change much from one pass through the loop to the next. If I strayed really far from the routine, I could force something different to happen, but if I didn’t do anything it would play out the same as always. It was like everyone kept reading from the same script they’d been given the day before and ad-libbing was frowned upon.

It was 1136 and I was eating lunch in Cafeteria No. 2. The lunch lady served me the same amount of onion soup at the same time in the same bowl. I moved my arm to avoid the same splash as it traced the same arc through the air. Dodging calls from friends throughout the cafeteria, I sat in the same seat.

Rita was sitting three rows in front of me, her back to me as she ate. I hadn’t chosen this time to eat because it coincided with her lunch; it just worked out that way. For no particular reason, I’d gotten used to watching her eat from this same angle each day.

Cafeteria No. 2 wasn’t the sort of place a sergeant major like Rita would normally be expected to dine. It’s not that the food was bad. It was pretty good, actually. But it didn’t seem likely to impress someone who woke up in an officer’s private sky lounge each morning and had half the base at her beck and call. I’d even heard that U.S. Special Forces had brought along their own cook, which only deepened the mystery of her presence. She could have swallowed a live rat and wouldn’t have seemed more a snake in our midst. And so our savior ate alone. No one tried to talk to her, and the seats around her were always conspicuously empty.

For all her prowess in battle, Rita Vrataski ate like a child. She licked the soup from the corners of her mouth and drew pictures in her food with the tips of her chopsticks. Apparently chopsticks were something new to her. At 1143 she dropped a bean on her plate. It rolled, picking up speed, bouncing first to her tray, and then to the table. The bean flew through the air with a clockwise spin, careening toward the concrete floor. Every time, with lightning reflexes, Rita would extend her left hand, pluck the bean out of the air, and cram it into her mouth. All in under 0.11 seconds. If she’d lived back in the Old West, I imagine she’d have outdrawn Billy the Kid. If she’d been a samurai, she could have read every flash of Kojiro Sasaki’s katana. Even when she was eating, the Full Metal Bitch was the Full Metal Bitch.

Today, like every day, she was trying to eat an
umeboshi
pickled plum. She must have confused it for an ordinary piece of dried fruit. After two or three attempts to pick it up with her chopsticks, she put the whole thing in her mouth.

Down the hatch.

Rita doubled over as though she’d taken a 57mm round right in the gut. Her back twitched. Her rust-colored hair looked like it was about to stand on end. But she didn’t cough it back up. Tough as nails. She had swallowed the whole thing, pit and all. Rita gulped down a glass of water with a vengeance.

She must have been at least twenty-two years old, but you’d never guess it watching her. The sand-colored military uniforms didn’t flatter her, but if you dressed her up in one of those frilly numbers the girls in town were wearing, she’d be pretty cute. At least I liked to imagine so.

What’s wrong with this food? It tastes like paper.

“You enjoyin’ yourself?” The voice came from above my head.

Holding my chopsticks without moving a muscle, I looked out the corner of my eye. A prehistoric face looked down at me from beneath a flattop haircut that leveled off about two meters above sea level. His features were more dinosaur than human. Definitely some velociraptor lurking in that family tree. My spirits fell when I saw the tattoo on his shoulder: a wolf wearing a crown. He was from the 4th, the company holding a grudge against us over that rugby game. I went back to lifting food to my mouth with machinelike regularity.

He raised his eyebrows, two plump bushes that would have been the envy of the caterpillar world. “I asked if you were enjoyin’ yourself.”

“How could I not enjoy myself in such fine company?”

“So how come you’re gulpin’ down your chow like it was something you found stuck on the end of a toilet brush?”

There were only a handful of soldiers sitting at the oversized tables in the cafeteria. The smell of something sweet wafted from the kitchen. Artificial light from the fluorescents in the ceiling washed over the fried shrimp heaped onto our heavy-duty plates.

If you had to categorize the food prepared in the UDF as good or bad, it was definitely good. There were only three things a soldier in the UDF did, after all: eat, sleep, and fight. If the food wasn’t good you’d have a morale problem on your hands. And according to Yonabaru, the food on Flower Line Base was better than most.

The first time I tasted it, I thought it was delicious. That was about five subjective months ago now, maybe more. About a month into the loop, I started heavily seasoning my food. The intentionally mismatched condiments created a taste just horrible enough to remind me the food was there. And now, even that had stopped working. I don’t care if you’re eating food prepared by a four-star chef, after eighty days of the same thing, it all tastes alike. Probably because it is. By that point, it was hard for me to think of food as anything other than a source of energy.

“If the look on my face put you off your lunch, I apologize.” No use trying to start a fight.

“Hold it. You tryin’ to say this is
my
fault?”

“I don’t have time for this.”

I started shoveling the rest of the food on my plate into my mouth. He slammed a palm the size of a baseball glove down on the table. Onion soup splashed on my shirt, leaving a stain where the lunch lady’s best efforts had failed. I didn’t really mind. No matter how tough the stain was, it would be gone by tomorrow, and I wouldn’t even have to wash it.

“Fourth Company grunts not worth the time of the mighty 17th, that it?”

I realized I’d unwittingly set a very annoying flag. This loop had been cursed from the get-go, really. I had accidentally killed Ferrell at the end of the last loop, and that had thrown everything out of whack this time around. From where I was, it hadn’t even been five hours since he’d died vomiting blood. Of course I’d been KIA too, but that was to be expected. Ferrell had died trying to protect a fucking new recruit. It had been just the spur my migraine needed to kick into a gallop.

I’d planned to ease my mind by staring at Rita the way I always did, but my foul mood must have been more obvious than I realized. Clearly, it was bad enough to trigger something that hadn’t happened in any of the previous loops.

I picked up my tray and stood.

The man’s body was a wall of meat blocking my way. People started to gather, eager for a fight. It was 1148. If I lost time here, it would knock off my whole schedule. Just because I had all the time in the world didn’t mean I had time to waste. Every hour lost meant I was an hour weaker, and it would catch up with me on the battlefield.

“You runnin’, chickenshit?” His voice rang through the cafeteria.

Rita turned and glared at me. It was obvious she had just realized that the recruit who’d been staring at her during PT was eating in the same cafeteria. Something told me that if I returned her gaze, she’d help me the way she’d helped during PT—the way she’d helped in my first battle. Rita wasn’t the type who could turn her back on someone in trouble. Her humanity was starting to show through. I wondered what her play would be. Maybe she’d start talking about green tea to cool this guy off. I laughed under my breath at the thought.

“What’s so funny?”

Oops.
“Nothing to do with you.”

My eyes left Rita. The Keiji Kiriya standing in the cafeteria that day was no green recruit. My outward appearance may have been the same, but inside I was a hardened veteran of seventy-nine battles. I could deal with my own problems. I’d imposed on Rita once during PT and once more, indirectly, by smooth-talking my way into one of her spare battle axes. I didn’t need to involve her a third time just to make it through lunch.