If the townspeople hadn’t noticed something suspicious moving in the shadows, it’s doubtful the scouting party would have taken particular notice of Pittsfield, with its livestock and acres of farmland. As it turned out, the shot fired from the hunting rifle of the night watch led to a massacre.
The state guard was immobilized by the snow. It would be hours before a UDF platoon could be lifted in by helicopter. By then, half the buildings in town had burnt to the ground and one out of three of the town’s fifteen hundred residents had been killed. The mayor, the preacher, and the old man from the general store were among the dead.
Men who had chosen to grow corn rather than join the army died fighting to defend their families. Small arms were no use against Mimics. Bullets only glanced off their bodies. Mimic javelins ripped through the walls of wooden and even brick houses with ease.
In the end, a ragged bunch of townspeople defeated the three Mimics with their bare hands. They waited until the Mimics were about to fire before rushing them, knocking the creatures into each others’ javelins. They killed two of the Mimics this way, and drove off the third.
Dying, Rita’s mother sheltered her daughter in her arms. 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.
From beneath her mother’s body, already beginning to grow cold, Rita considered. Her mother, a devout Christian, had told her that pretending to cry was a lie, and that if she lied, when God judged her immortal soul she wouldn’t be allowed into Heaven. When her mother told Rita that if Mimics didn’t lie they could get into Heaven, the girl had grown angry. Mimics weren’t even from Earth. They didn’t have souls, did they? If they did, and they really did go to Heaven, Rita wondered whether people and Mimics would fight up there. Maybe that’s what awaited her parents.
The government sent Rita to live with some distant relatives. She stole a passport from a refugee three years older than she who lived in a run-down apartment next door and headed for the UDF recruiting office.
All over the country, people were getting tired of the war. The UDF needed all the soldiers they could get for the front lines.
Provided the applicant hadn’t committed a particularly heinous crime, the army wouldn’t turn anyone away. Legally, Rita wasn’t old enough to enlist, but the recruiting officer barely even glanced at her purloined passport before handing her a contract.
The army granted people one last day to back out of enlistment if they were having second thoughts. Rita, whose last name was now Vrataski, spent her last day on a hard bench outside the UDF office.
Rita didn’t have any second thoughts. She only wanted one thing: to kill every last Mimic that had invaded her planet. She knew she could do it. She was her father’s daughter.
3
On the next clear night, look up in the direction of the constellation humanity calls Cancer. Between the pincers of the right claw of that giant crab in the sky sits a faint star. No matter how hard you stare, you won’t see it with the naked eye. It can only be viewed through a telescope with a thirty-meter aperture. Even if you could travel at the speed of light, fast enough to circle the earth seven and a half times in a single second, it would take over forty years to reach that star. Signals from Earth scatter and disperse on their journey across the vast gulf between.
On a planet revolving around this star lived life in greater numbers and diversity than that on Earth. Cultures more advanced than ours rose and flourished, and creatures with intelligence far surpassing that of H. sapiens held dominion. For the purposes of this fairy tale, we’ll call them people.
One day, a person on this planet invented a device called an ecoforming bomb. The device could be affixed to the tip of a spacecraft. This spacecraft, far simpler than any similar craft burdened with life and the means to support it, could cross the void of space with relative ease. 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. The actual process is far more complicated, but the details are unimportant. The spacecraft ferrying colonists to the new world would arrive after the nanobots had already completed the transformation.
The scholars among these people questioned whether it was ethical to destroy the existing environment of a planet without first examining it. After all, once done, the process could not be undone. It seemed reasonable to conclude that a planet so readily adapted to support life from their own world might also host indigenous life, perhaps even intelligent life, of its own. Was it right, they asked, to steal a world, sight unseen, from its native inhabitants?
The creators of the device argued that their civilization was built on advancements that could not be undone. To expand their territory, they had never shied away from sacrificing lesser life in the past. Forests had been cleared, swamps drained, dams built. 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.
There were concerns more pressing than the preservation of whatever life might be unwittingly stomped out by their ecoforming projects. The people had grown too numerous for their own planet, and so they required another to support their burgeoning population. The chosen world’s parent star could not be at too great a distance, nor would a binary or flare star suffice. The planet itself would have to maintain an orbit around a G-class star at a distance sufficient for water to exist in liquid form. The one star system that met these criteria was the star we call the sun. They did not worry for long that this one star might be the only one in this corner of the Milky Way that was home to intelligent life like their own. No attempt was made to communicate. The planet was over forty years away at the speed of light, and there was no time to wait eighty years for the chance of a reply.
The spacecraft built on that distant planet eventually reached Earth. It brought with it no members of their species. No weapons of invasion. It was basically nothing more than a construction machine.
When it was detected, the interstellar craft drew the attention of the world. But all Earth’s attempts to make contact went unanswered. 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.
The crèche machines that came to rest on the ocean floor began carrying out their instructions quietly and 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. Slowly, the land where the creatures fed died and became desert. The seas where they spread turned a milky green.
At first it was thought that the creatures were the result of mutations caused by chemical runoff, or perhaps some prehistoric life form released by tectonic activity. Some scientists insisted it was a species of evolved salamander, though they had no evidence to support their conclusion. Eventually, these new creatures formed groups and began venturing out of the water. They continued their work to reshape the earth with no regard for the
society of man.
When they first appeared on land, the alien xenoformers were not weapons of war. They were sluggish, and a group of armed men could easily dispatch them. But like cockroaches that develop resistance to pesticides, the alien creatures evolved. The crèche machines that created them concluded that in order to fulfill their objective of xenoforming the planet, they would have to remove the obstacles standing in their way.
War engulfed the world. The damage wrought was swift and massive. In response, a worldwide United Defense Force was established. Mankind had a name for the enemy that had brought the world to the brink of ruin. We called them Mimics.
4
Rita Vrataski joined U.S. Special Forces after the battle that earned her the Thor’s Medal of Valor. 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 Mimics had emerged as the only foe capable of standing against a platoon of fifty armed infantry raining a hail of bullets. Few Thor medals needed to be struck.
The officer who hung the gleaming medal around Rita’s neck praised her for joining the elite ranks of those who could claim to have taken down a double handful of Mimics. Rita was the first soldier in history to receive the honor on her second battle. There were some who wondered aloud, to her face, how Rita could have possibly acquired the skills needed to accomplish such a feat by what was only her second field operation. Rita answered them with a question of her own:
“Is cooking dangerous?”
Most would answer no. But what is a gas range but a short-range flame thrower? Any number of flammable materials might lie waiting beneath the average kitchen sink. Shelves lined with pots could weaken and fall in an avalanche of iron and steel. A butcher’s knife could kill as easily as a dagger.
Yet few people would consider cooking a dangerous profession, and indeed, the actual danger is remote. Anyone who has spent any time in a kitchen is familiar with the inherent risks, such as they are, and knows what can be done safely and what can’t. Never throw water on an oil fire, keep the knife pointed away from your carotid artery, don’t use rat poison when the recipe calls for parmesan cheese.
To Rita, war was no different.
The Mimics’ attacks were simpleminded. They reminded Rita of the swine she’d raised back in Pittsfield. Soldiers would single out a Mimic to attack, but Mimics did things the other way around. Like a broom sweeping dust off the floor, Mimics attacked entire groups of soldiers at once. As long as you knew how to avoid the broom, no matter how many times the Mimics attacked, you wouldn’t get swept away. The secret to fighting the Mimics wasn’t avoiding danger, it was running headlong into it.
Try it yourself next time. It’s easy.
That was usually enough to get them to leave her alone. They’d shrug and stumble away, dumbfounded.
Rita, who’d only just turned sixteen, didn’t understand why she was so gifted in battle. She’d have been happier having a knack at baking meat pies, or knowing just where a sow wanted scratching, but apparently God had a sense of humor. He must have noticed her dozing during the sermons all those Sundays her parents had taken her to church.
Special Forces was a place for individualists, for people with authority problems. Everyone in the squad was supposedly a vicious murderer who’d been given the choice between the army and the noose. They were guys who’d as soon shoot a person as talk to him, and they didn’t discriminate between friendlies and Mimics when they were letting fly with 20mm rounds. It was hard duty, and they were always looking for more warm bodies to fill the spots left by all the KIAs.
In fact, Rita’s unit turned out to be a squad full of battle-hardened vets. If you melted down all the medals earned in that squad, you could have made one hell of an Olympic-class weightlifting barbell.
The squad was full of badasses who had been through Hell and back so many times they were on a first name basis with the Devil. When shit started flying, they started telling jokes. Not the kind of jokes you told your mother over dinner, either. Contrary to their reputation, however, there were some good guys in the bunch. Rita took to her new comrades immediately.
A first lieutenant by the name of Arthur Hendricks held the squad together. He had gleaming blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and a beautiful wife so delicate you had to be careful not to break her when giving her a hug. No matter how minor the operation, Hendricks would always give his wife a call beforehand, for which he was constantly derided by the rest of the squad.
In a squad where everyone, men and women both, used language that would have sent a nun into cardiac arrest, Hendricks was the only man who never uttered a single profanity. At first he treated Rita like a little sister, much to her consternation. She’d never admit it, but she grew to like it.
Rita had been in the squad for about half a year when she became trapped in the time loop that had dictated the rhythm of her life ever since. The battle that would turn Rita Vrataski into the Valkyrie was a special operation even by U.S. Special Forces standards. The president was up for reelection, and he wanted to deliver a military victory to secure his own.
Over the objections of his generals and the media, he poured it all into the operation, every tank with treads, every attack chopper that could stay airborne, and over ten thousand platoons of Jacketed soldiers. Their goal: to regain control of the Florida peninsula. It was the most dangerous, most reckless, and by far the hardest battle Rita had ever seen.
Special Forces had a lot of four-letter words in their vocabulary, but fear wasn’t one of them. Even so, it took more than one squad to turn around a hopeless war against a superior enemy. A Jacket granted superhuman strength, but that alone didn’t turn people into superheroes. During the Second World War, Erich Hartmann had shot down 352 planes on the Russian Front, but Germany still lost the war. If the brass drafted plans that called for the impossible, the mission would fail, simple as that.
After the battle, derelict Jackets littered the Florida peninsula, their shattered shells serving as coffins for the corpses inside.
Rita Vrataski had somehow managed to toe the piano-wire-thin line that snaked between life and death. She had bent her pile driver before losing it entirely. She was low on ammo. She clutched her 20mm rifle so tightly it might as well have been welded to her hand. Fighting back the urge to vomit, she stripped batteries from the bodies of her fallen friends. She cradled her rifle in her arms.
“You look like you’re having a bad day.”
It was Hendricks. He sat down next to Rita where she was squatting in a hollow on the ground and looked up at the sky as though he were trying to pick shapes out of the clouds. Right in front them, a javelin, screaming its high-pitched wail, shot into the ground. Thick black smoke billowed from the impact crater. Images of Pittsfield burning against a red sky filled Rita’s thoughts.
Hendricks knew he had to walk Rita back from wherever she was. “My mother once told me that in parts of China, they mix animal blood with their tea.”
Rita couldn’t speak. Her throat was sandpaper, and she doubted whether she could even manage to swallow.
Hendricks went on. “The nomads there can all ride horses. Men, women, even the children. In the Middle Ages, it was their mobility that enabled them to conquer the bulk of Eurasia. Not even Europe was spared. They came from the east, moving through one country after another—savage foreigners who sipped blood from teacups— drawing nearer and nearer. It’s enough to give you nightmares. Some people think it was actually those Chinese nomads who gave rise to the vampire legends of Eastern Europe.”
“. . . Lieutenant?”
“My little story boring you?”
“I’m all right now, Lieutenant. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“Hey, we all need a break sometimes. Especially in a marathon like this. Just a little more, it’ll be time to hit the showers. I promise.” He finished speaking and moved on to the next soldier. Rita rejoined the fray.
And
then she saw it. One Mimic that stood out from the rest. It didn’t look different from the others—another bloated dead frog in a sea of waterlogged amphibians. But there was something about this one that set it apart. Maybe spending so much time in such proximity to death had sharpened senses she didn’t know she had, revealing secrets that lay hidden from normal sight.
When she killed that Mimic, the time loop began.
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 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.
All You Need Is Kill Page 11