All You Need Is Kill (2 page)

Then my pile driver fires. The blast throws me at least ten meters into the air. Bits of the armor plating from the back of my Jacket scatter across the ground. I land upside down.

Death swings his battle axe.

Metal screams as he cuts through the uncuttable. The axe cries out like a freight train screeching to a halt.

I see the Mimic’s carapace sailing through the air.

It only took one blow to reduce the Mimic to a motionless heap. Ashen sand poured from the gaping wound. The two halves of the creature shuddered and twitched, each keeping its own strange rhythm. A creature humanity’s greatest technological inventions could barely scratch, laid waste by a barbarian weapon from a thousand years past.

Death turned slowly to face me.

Amid the crush of red warning lights crowding my display, a sole green light winked on. An incoming friendly transmission. “. . . as a little . . . kay?” A woman’s voice. Impossible to make it out over the noise. I couldn’t stand. The Jacket was spent and so was I. It took everything I had left just to roll right side up.

Upon closer inspection, I was not, in fact, in the company of the Angel of Death. It was just another soldier in a Jacket. A Jacket not quite like my own, as it was outfitted with that massive battle axe where the regulation pile driver should have been. The insignia on the shoulder didn’t read
JP
but instead
U.S.
In place of the usual desert camouflage mix of sand and coffee grounds, the suit shone head-to-toe in metallic crimson.

The Full Metal Bitch.

I’d heard stories. A war junkie always chasing the action, no matter where it led her. Word had it she and her Special Forces squad from the U.S. Army had chalked up half of all confirmed Mimic kills ever. Maybe anyone who could see that much fighting and live to tell about it really was the Angel of Death.

Still carrying the battle axe, the blazing red Jacket started toward me. Its hand reached down and fumbled for the jack in my shoulder plate. A contact comm.

“There’s something I’ve been wantin’ to know.”

Her voice filled my suit, clear as crystal. A soft, light tone, at odds with the two-meter axe and carnage she’d just created with it.

“Is it true the green tea they serve in Japan at the end of your meal comes free?”

The conductive sand spilling out of the fallen Mimic danced away on the wind. I could hear the distant cry of shells as they flew. This was a battlefield, the scorched waste where Yonabaru, Captain Yuge, and the rest of my platoon had died. A forest of steel shells. A place where your suit fills with your own piss and shit. Where you drag yourself through a mire of blood and muck.

“I’ve gotten myself in trouble for believing everything I read. So I thought I’d play it safe, ask a local,” she continued.

Here I am, half dead, covered in shit, and you want to talk about tea?

Who walks up to someone, kicks them to the ground, and then asks about tea? What was going through her fucking head? I wanted to give her a piece of my mind, but the words wouldn’t come. I could think of the words I wanted to say, but my mouth had forgotten how to work—a litany of profanities stalled at the gate.

“That’s the thing with books. Half the time the author doesn’t know what the hell he’s writing about—especially not those war novelists. Now how about you ease your finger off the trigger and take a nice, deep breath.”

Good advice. It took a minute, but I started to see straight again. The sound of a woman’s voice always had a way of calming me down. The pain I’d left in battle returned to my gut. My Jacket misread the cramps in my muscles, sending the suit into a mild spasm. I thought of the dance Yonabaru’s suit did just before he died.

“Hurt much?”

“What do you think?” My reply wasn’t much more than a hoarse whisper.

The red Jacket kneeled down in front of me, examining the shredded armor plate over my stomach. I ventured a question. “How’s the battle going?”

“The 301st has been wiped out. Our main line fell back to the coast to regroup.”

“What about your squad?”

“No use worrying about them.”

“So . . . how do I look?”

“It pierced the front, but the back armor plate stopped it. It’s charred bad.”

“How bad?”

“Bad.”

“Fuck me.” I looked up at the sky. “Looks like it’s starting to clear.”

“Yeah. I like the sky here.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s clear. Can’t beat islands for clear skies.”

“Am I going to die?”

“Yeah,” she told me.

I felt tears well up in my eyes. I was grateful then that the helmet hid my face from view. It kept my shame a private thing.

The red Jacket maneuvered to gently cradle my head. “What’s your name? Not your rank or your serial number. Your name.”

“Keiji. Keiji Kiriya.”

“I’m Rita Vrataski. I’ll stay with you until you die.”

She couldn’t have said anything I’d rather hear, but I wasn’t going to let her see that. “You’ll die too if you stay.”

“I have a reason. When you die, Keiji, I’m going to take your Jacket’s battery.”

“That’s cold.”

“No need to fight it. Relax. Let go.”

I heard an electronic squelch—an incoming comm signal in Rita’s helmet. It was a man’s voice. The link between our Jackets automatically relayed the voice to me.

“Calamity Dog, this is Chief Breeder.”

“I read you.” All business.

“Alpha Server and vicinity under control. Estimate we can hold for thirteen minutes, tops. Time to pick up that pizza.”

“Calamity Dog copies. Running silent from here in.”

The red Jacket stood, severing our comm link. Behind her an explosion rumbled. I felt the ground tremble through my spine. A laser-guided bomb had fallen from the sky. It plunged deep into the earth, piercing the bedrock before it detonated. The sandy white ground bulged like an overcooked pancake; its surface cracked and sent darker soil the color of maple syrup spewing into the air. A hail of mud splattered on my armor. Rita’s battle axe glinted in the light.

The smoke cleared.

I could see a writhing mass in the center of the enormous crater left by the explosion: the enemy. Red points of light sprang to life on my radar screen, so many that every point was touching another.

I thought I saw Rita nod. She sprang forward, flitting across the battlefield. Her axe rose and fell. Each time it shone, the husk of a Mimic soared. The sand that poured from their wounds spiraled on the whirlwinds traced by her blade. She cut them down with the ease of a laser cutting butter. Her movements took her in a circle around me, protecting me. Rita and I had undergone the same training, but she was like a juggernaut while I lay on the ground, a stupid toy that had run down its batteries. No one had forced me to be here. I had dragged myself to this wasteland of a battlefield, and I wasn’t doing a damn bit of good for anyone. Better I’d gotten plugged alongside Yonabaru. At least then I wouldn’t have put another soldier in harm’s way trying to protect me.

I decided not to die with three rounds left in my pile driver.

I lifted a leg. I put a hand on one knee.

I stood.

I screamed. I forced myself to keep going.

The red Jacket turned to me.

I heard some noise over my headphones, but I couldn’t tell what she was trying to say.

One of the Mimics in the pack stood out from the rest. It wasn’t that it looked different from the others. Just another drowned, bloated frog. But there was something about it that set it apart. Maybe proximity to death had sharpened my senses, but somehow I knew that was the one I was meant to fight.

So that’s what I did. I leapt at the Mimic and it lashed out at me with its tail. I felt my body lighten. One of my arms had been cut off. The right arm—leaving the pile driver on the left intact. Lucky me. I pulled the trigger.

The charge fired, a perfect ninety-degree angle.

One more shot. A hole opened in the thing’s carapace.

One more shot. I blacked out.

2

The paperback I’d been reading was beside my pillow.

It was a mystery novel about an American detective who is supposed to be some sort of expert on the Orient. I had my index finger wedged into a scene where all the key players meet for dinner at a Japanese restaurant in New York. The detective’s client, an Italian, tries to order an espresso after their meal, but the detective stops him cold. He starts on about how at Japanese restaurants, they bring you green tea after dinner, so you don’t have to order anything. Then he veers off on how green tea goes great with soy sauce, and oh, why is it that in India they spice their milk tea? He’s finally gathered everyone involved in the case in one place, and he talks a blue streak about everything but whodunit.

I rubbed my eyes.

Passing my hand over my shirt I felt my stomach through the cloth. I could make out a newly formed six-pack that hadn’t been there half a year back. No trace of any wound, no charred flesh. My right arm was right where it should be. Good news all around.
What a crappy dream.

I must have fallen asleep reading the book. I should have known something was up when Mad Wargarita started striking up small talk about mystery novels. American Special Operators who’d crossed the entire Pacific Ocean just for a taste of blood didn’t have time to read the latest best seller. If they had spare time, they’d probably spend it tweaking their Jackets.

What a way to start the day. Today was going to be my first real taste of battle. Why couldn’t I have dreamed about blasting away a few baddies, getting promoted a grade or two?

On the bunk above me a radio with its bass blown out was squawking music—some kind of prehistoric rock so ancient my old man wouldn’t have recognized it. I could hear the sounds of the base stirring to life, incoherent chatter coming from every direction, and above it all, the DJ’s over-caffeinated voice chirping away with the weather forecast. I could feel every word pierce my skull. Clear and sunny out here on the islands, same as yesterday, with a UV warning for the afternoon.
Watch out for those sunburns!

The barracks weren’t much more than four sheets of fire-resistant wood propped up together. A poster of a bronze-skinned bikini babe hung on one of the walls. Someone had replaced her head with a shot of the prime minister torn from the base newspaper. The bikini babe’s head grinned vapidly from its new home atop a macho muscle builder on another nearby poster. The muscle builder’s head was MIA.

I stretched in my bunk. The welded aluminum frame squealed in protest.

“Keiji, sign this.” Yonabaru craned his neck over the side of the top bunk. He looked great for a guy I’d just seen get impaled. They say people who die in dreams are supposed to live forever.

Jin Yonabaru had joined up three years before me. Three more years of trimming the fat, three more years of packing on muscle. Back when he was a civilian he’d been thin as a beanpole. Now he was cut from rock. He was a soldier, and he looked the part.

“What is it?”

“A confession. The one I told you about.”

“I signed it yesterday.”

“Really? That’s weird.” I could hear him rifling through pages above me. “No, not here. Well, sign one for me again, will ya?”

“You trying to pull a fast one on me?”

“Only if you come back in a bodybag. Besides, you can only die once, so what difference does it make how many copies you sign?”

UDF soldiers on the front line had a tradition. The day before an operation, they’d sneak into the PX and make off with some liquor. Drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. The shot they gave you before battle broke down any acetaldehyde left in the bloodstream. But if you were caught, they’d bring you up before a disciplinary committee—maybe a court martial if you screwed the pooch real bad—after taking stock of inventory once the fighting was over and everyone was back on base. Of course, it was hard to court-martial a corpse. Which is why we’d all leave notes before the battle explaining how the robbery had been our idea. Sure enough, when the investigation started, it was always some poor sap who’d got himself killed who had masterminded the whole thing. It was a good system. The people running the PX were wise to the racket, so they made sure to leave out some bottles that wouldn’t be missed too much. You’d think they’d just go ahead and give everyone a few drinks the night before a battle—for morale’s sake, if nothing else—but no, it was the same old song and dance every time. Good ideas don’t stand a chance against good bureaucracy.

I took the paper from Yonabaru. “Funny, I thought I’d be more nervous.”

“So soon? Save it for the day, man.”

“What do you mean? We suit up this afternoon.”

“You nuts? How long you plan on wearing that thing?”

“If I don’t wear it today, when will I?”

“How about tomorrow, when we roll out?”

I nearly fell out of bed. For an instant, my eyes settled on the soldier lying on the bunk next to mine. He was flipping through a porn magazine. Then I stared up into Yonabaru’s face.

“What do you mean, tomorrow? They postpone the attack?”