All You Need Is Kill

by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

  “How did you get in here?” Rita made no attempt to hide her disdain.

  “I’m a registered member of your personal staff. Who would stop me?”

  “You’re your own staff, and we both know it. You can leave now.” Rita didn’t care much for this man and his never-saw-a-speck-ofbattlefield-mud running shoes. People like him and Shasta could meet and talk in total safety whenever the mood took them. His words were never limned with the dread of knowing you would have to watch your friends die in the next battle. It was that dread, that certainty, that kept Rita away from her squadmates, the only family she had left. Nothing this rambling fool would ever have to deal with in his entire life.

  “That’d be a shame after coming all the way up here,” Murdoch said. “I happened upon an interesting piece of news, and I thought I’d share it with you.”

  “Send it to the New York Times. I’ll be happy to read all about it.”

  “Trust me, you’ll wanna hear this.”

  “I’m not all that interested in what you find interesting.”

  “The Japanese troops are going to have some PT. Punishment for troublemaking last night.”

  “I asked you to leave. I’m never in a good mood before battle.”

  “Don’t you want to come watch? They’re going to do some sort of samurai-style training. I’d love to hear the Valkyrie’s take on the whole affair.”

  “Your mother must have been disappointed when the abortion only killed your conscience,” Rita said.

  “Such talk from a nice, sweet girl like you.”

  “I’d say it next time too, but I can’t be bothered.”

  “Come again?”

  “Believe me, I’d rather not.”

  Murdoch raised an eyebrow. “Okay, so you talk trash and nonsense. Two for one.”

  “I guess it must be catching.”

  “Fine, so I have no conscience and I’m going straight to Hell. You told me the same thing in Indonesia when I took those pictures of the crying kid running from a pack of Mimics.”

  “Hell’s too good for you. You’d just find a way to get a picture of Satan and use it to worm your way through Heaven’s back door.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  A smile spread across the Valkyrie’s lips. It was the same smile that came to her in those dark hours on the battlefield, when it was at least hidden behind her helmet. Shasta’s body tensed. Murdoch took a step back without even realizing it.

  “Well,” the Full Metal Bitch said, “I’m about to step into Hell. And until I do, I don’t want to see your face again.”

  9

  Rita ended up going to watch the PT. Shasta didn’t. The only person near Rita was that damned Murdoch. The rest of her squad maintained a respectful distance.

  That was when Rita’s eyes met that challenge from the field, that gaze bearing the weight of the world. There was something about the kid that Rita liked. She started walking toward him.

  She strode with purpose, each step a perfect movement designed to propel a Jacket across a battlefield with total efficiency. She advanced across the field effortlessly and without a sound. To get 100 percent out of a Jacket, a soldier had to be able to walk across a room full of eggs without cracking a single one. That meant being able to perfectly distribute their body weight with every step.

  The soldier was still staring at Rita. She walked right to him, then made a ninety-degree turn and headed toward the tent where the brigadier general was sitting. She gave him one regulation salute.

  The brigadier general cast a doubtful glance at Rita. Rita was a sergeant major by rank, but she was also in the U.S. corps, so their actual relative places in military hierarchy were a little muddy.

  Rita remembered this man. He had been attached at the hip to the general who had made a beeline to shake Rita’s hand at the start of the frivolous reception held to welcome the Special Forces. There were plenty of officers who had climbed the ranks without ever fighting on the front lines, but this one seemed to have a special love for grandstanding and ass-kissing.

  They spoke briefly, the general seemingly bemused and Rita’s stance and body language well-practiced. Then Rita returned to the field, walking past the ranks of men who seemed to bow before her. She chose a spot beside the soldier who’d been staring daggers at her and started her iso push-up. She could feel the heat of his body radiating through the chill air between them.

  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.”

  Other than a slightly odd intonation, the soldier’s Burst was clear and easy to understand. Nothing like back in North Africa. People from the former French colonies couldn’t speak Burst to save their lives.

  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. It had a pared-down vocabulary and as few grammatical irregularities as possible. When they drafted the language, they deliberately struck all the profanities from the official vocabulary list, but you couldn’t keep a bunch of soldiers from adding “fuck” in its various noun, verb, and adjective forms to everything anyway.

  “You’ve been staring at me for a while now.”

  “I guess I have,” he said.

  “There something you want from me?”

  “Nothing I want to discuss like this.”

  “Then let’s wait until this is done.”

  “Shit-for-brains Kiriya! You’re slipping!” the lieutenant barked. Rita, with the disinterested expression of someone who’d never had a need for human contact her entire life, continued her iso push-up.

  Iso push-ups were a lot rougher than they looked. Beads of sweat formed along your hairline, streamed past your temples, ran into your eyes—making them burn from the salt—and traced the line of your neck before falling from your chest. Having to endure that itch as it makes its way down your body was a lot like what a soldier had to endure encased in a Jacket. This samurai training isn’t completely worthless after all, Rita decided.

  When things got too hard to bear, it was best to let your mind wander. Rita let her thoughts drift from her own body’s screams of protest to the surroundings. The brigadier general from the General Staff Office looked baffled by the intruder in his proceedings. 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 had often dreamt that someday she would come across another person who experienced the loops. She’d even come up with a phrase they could use to identify themselves to each other. A phrase only Rita knew. A phrase the two of them would share.

  For another person to be caught in a time loop, it would mean that someone other than Rita had destroyed a Mimic server by accident. Just as Rita was forced to leave people outside the time loop behind, this person would have no choice but to leave her behind. He would be alone.

  She might not be able to travel through the time loop with him—though she also might be able to, and the thought terrified her—but she could give him advice either way. Share his solitude. Tell him how to break out of the loop, knowledge it had taken Rita 211 deaths to learn. He would fight through his doubts, the way Rita had. He would become a great warrior.

  Deep in a quiet corner of Rita’s heart, she was sure no one would ever come to tell her the words only she knew.

  The Mimic tachyon signal was the pinnacle of an alien technology, a technology that had en
abled them to conquer the vastness of space. Rita’s entrapment in the time loop during the battle to recapture Florida had been an impossible stroke of luck for humanity. If not for that chance occurrence, the earth would have fallen to xenoforming. Not just humans, but virtually every species on the planet, would already be extinct.

  Rita’s fame grew with each battle, and her loneliness with it. She had broken out of the time loop, but she felt as though she were still reliving the same day. Her one hope was that humanity’s victory, the day when every last Mimic had been blasted to extinction, would somehow rid her of her terrible isolation. Until then, she would continue to play her unique role in the conflict.

  Rita didn’t mind the battles. She didn’t have to think to fight. When she climbed into her red Jacket, the sadness, the laughter, the memory that haunted her more than the rest—it all slipped away. The battlefield, swirling with smoke and gunpowder, was Rita’s home.

  PT ended less than an hour later. The general, the bile in his mouth forgotten, hurried off to the barracks.

  As Rita stood, the man beside her staggered to his feet. He wasn’t particularly tall for a Jacket jockey. He was young, but he wore his fatigues as though he’d been born in them. His clothes looked as though they’d just come from the factory, so there was something strangely jarring about his appearance. His lips were twisted in a Mona Lisa smile that did a good job of concealing his age.

  The number 157 was scrawled in Arabic numerals on the back of his hand. Rita didn’t know what it meant, but it was an odd thing to do. Odd enough that Rita didn’t think she’d be forgetting him anytime soon. She had heard of soldiers taping their blood type to the soles of their feet in the days before Jackets were standard-issue, but she’d never heard of a soldier who kept notes in ballpoint pen on the back of his hand.

  “So you wanted to talk. What is it?”

  “Ah, right,” he said.

  “Well? Get on with it, soldier. I’m a patient girl, but there’s a battle tomorrow, and I have things to do.”

  “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.

  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.

  A crimson Jacket appeared amid the downpour of earth and clay. Tungsten carbide slashed away at flailing limbs and those thick, froggy torsos. After a few minutes, nothing was left moving. Nothing alien anyway.

  Static filled my ears, then her voice came through. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” The Full Metal Bitch stood, hefting an enormous battle axe, amid our sand-colored platoon. Her gunmetal red armor glistened in the sun.

  I lifted my hand so she could pick me out of the crowd. “We just got here ourselves.”

  “What’s the Full Metal Bitch doin’ here?” Yonabaru forgot all about taking cover and stared stupidly at her Jacket. I would have paid good money for a look at
his face.

  Rita addressed Ferrell. “I need to talk to whoever’s in charge of this platoon. Patch me in.”

  Ferrell opened a channel between Rita and the lieutenant. “You’re good to go.”

  “This is Rita Vrataski. I have a request for the officer in charge of the 3rd Platoon of the 17th Company, 3rd Battalion, 12th Regiment, 301st Armored Infantry Division. I need to borrow Keiji Kiriya. That all right with you?”

  She didn’t state her rank or division. In a military culture where the sky was whatever color your ranking officer said it was, only the Valkyrie was free to operate outside the chain of command. Even back in that first battle, it hadn’t been the Full Metal Bitch who cradled my head as I lay dying. It was Rita Vrataski.

  The lieutenant’s reply was unsure. “Kiriya? Maybe you’d like someone with more experience, someone—”

  “Yes or no?”

  “Well, uh, yes.”

  “I appreciate your help. Sarge, how ’bout you? Mind if I borrow Kiriya?”

  Ferrell shrugged his approval, his Jacketed shoulders rising like an ocean wave.

  “Thank you, Sarge.”

  “See that he doesn’t do any jitterbugging near our squad.”

  “Jitterbugging? That some sort of code?” Rita asked.

  “Just a figure of speech.”

  “Keiji, what’s all this about?”

  “Sorry, Sarge. I’ll explain later,” I said.

  “We’ll hit ’em from twelve o’clock.”

  “Uh, right.”

  “Hey, Keiji! If you see a vending machine, pick me up some smokes!” Yonabaru called out right before I disconnected from the comm link.

  Rita chuckled at Nijou’s wisecrack. “You’ve got a good squad. You ready?”

  “Be gentle.”

  “I’m always gentle.”

  “That’s not the way I hear it.”

  “Just worry about the Mimics, okay?”