Two sentries were posted on the road leading to the section of the base under U.S. jurisdiction. They were huge, each man carrying a high-power rifle in arms as big around as my thighs.
Their physiques made them look like suits of armor on display. They didn’t have to say a word to let passersby know who was in charge. Cluster bombs could have rained from the sky, and these guys would have held their ground, unblinking, until they received direct orders to do otherwise.
If you kept them in the corner of your eye and headed for the main gate, you’d be on the path I’d taken when I tried going AWOL on my third time through the loop. Running would be easy. With what I’d learned, I could probably avoid the Mimic ambush and make it to Chiba City. But today I had another objective in mind.
It was 10:29. I was standing in the sentries’ blind spot. With my eighty-centimeter stride, the sentries were exactly fifteen seconds from where I stood.
A gull flew overhead. The distant roar of the sea blended with the sounds of the base. My shadow was a small pool collected at my feet. There was no one else on the path.
An American fuel truck passed by. The sentries saluted.
I had to time my walk just right.
Three, two, one.
The truck approached a fork in the road. An old cleaning lady carrying a mop stepped out in front of the truck. Brakes squealed. The truck’s engine stalled. The sentries turned toward the commotion, their attentions diverted for a few precious moments.
I walked right by.
I could feel the heat cast by their sheer bulk. With muscles like that, I had no doubt they could reach up my ass and yank out my spine. For an instant, I felt an irrational desire to lash out against them.
Sure, I might look like I’d blow over in a stiff wind, but you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Want to try me? Who wants a piece of the little Asian recruit?
Would the skills I’d learned to pilot a Jacket translate to hand-to-hand combat against another human? Had I gotten any stronger, any better? Why wait for the Mimics, why not test myself on these fine specimens now?
The guard on the right turned.
Stay calm. Keep your pace steady. He’s pivoting to the left. When he does, you’ll slip into his blind spot behind the other sentry. By the time he looks around for any sign of Keiji Kiriya, I’ll be part of the scenery.
“Did you see something?”
“Quiet. Captain’s watchin’, and he don’t look happy.”
“Fuck you.”
And like that, I’d infiltrated U.S. territory.
My target was a U.S.-made Jacket. After a few times through the loop, I’d come to the conclusion that I needed a new weapon- something we didn’t have in the Japanese Corps. The standard-issue 20mm rifles weren’t very effective against Mimics. They walked a thin line of compromise between the number of rounds a soldier could carry, the rate of fire necessary to hit a fast-moving target, and the acceptable amount of recoil. They were more powerful than the weapons they used to issue, but if you really wanted to pierce that endoskeleton, 50mm was the only way to be sure.
The basic UDF strategy was to employ a line of prone armored infantry firing 20mm rounds to slow the enemy enough so that artillery and tanks could take them out. In practice, the support never came fast or heavy enough. It fell to us to finish the Mimics on our own.
The weapon of last resort for the old-timers, and one I’d used myself, was the pile driver mounted on the left shoulder. You could punch open a hole and spill a Mimic’s guts with one of those babies. The rocket launcher could come in handy too, but it was hard to a score a hit with, and more often than not you’d be out of rockets when you really needed one. As I grew accustomed to the fighting, I relied more and more on the power of the 57mm pile driver.
But the pile driver had one major drawback: Its magazine only held twenty charges. Unlike our rifles, you couldn’t change magazines, either. Once you fired that twentieth round, you were finished. At best, a soldier was going to punch twenty holes in something. Once the pile driver was out of charges, you couldn’t even use it to drive a stake into the heart of a vampire. The people who’d designed the Jacket just hadn’t considered the possibility that someone would survive long enough in hand-to-hand combat with a Mimic to use more than twenty rounds.
Fuck that.
Running out of charges had killed me plenty of times. Another dead end. The only way to avoid it was to find a melee weapon that didn’t run out of ammo. I’d seen one, once, in the battle that had started this whole loop.
The battle axe. Rita Vrataski, a Valkyrie clad in a crimson Jacket, and her axe. It might have been more appropriate to call it a slab of tungsten carbide in the shape of an axe. A battle axe never ran out of ammo. You could still use it if it got bent. It packed plenty of punch. It was the perfect melee weapon.
But as far as the world was concerned, Keiji Kiriya was a new recruit who had yet to see his first battle. If I asked them to replace my standard-issue pile driver with a different weapon simply because I didn’t like it, they sure as hell weren’t going to listen. Yonabaru had laughed at me, and Ferrell actually threw a punch. When I tried taking it straight to our platoon commander, he ignored me completely. I was going to have to acquire the weapon I needed on my own.
I headed for the barracks of the supply division that had accompanied U.S. Special Forces. Five minutes after crossing into the U.S. side of the base, I came to a spot guarded by only one soldier. She was twirling a monkey wrench in her hand.
The pungent scent of oil drifted in the air, swamping the ocean’s briny tang. The ever present drone of men bustling about the base had receded. In the darkness of the barracks, the steel weapons humanity used to strike down its enemies were enjoying a short nap.
The woman with the wrench was Shasta Raylle, a civilian tech. Her pay was at least on par with a first lieutenant. Way above mine, at any rate. I’d snuck a look at her papers: height, 152 centimeters; weight, 37 kilograms; visual acuity, 20/300; favorite food, passion-fruit cake. She had some American Indian blood in her and wore her black hair pulled back in a ponytail.
If Rita was a lynx on the prowl, Shasta was an unsuspecting rabbit. She belonged at home, curled up in a warm, cozy room watching vids and stuffing her face with bonbons, not smeared with oil and grease on some military base.
I spoke as gently as I could. “Hello.”
Shasta jumped at the sound of my voice. Damn. Not gentle enough.
Her thick glasses fell to the concrete floor. Watching her look for those glasses was like watching a quadriplegic tread water. Instead of putting down the monkey wrench and feeling for them with both hands, she groped in vain with just the one. Not exactly what you’d expect from someone who’d graduated top of her class at MIT, developed some of the most advanced military Jackets at her first defense industry research post, and then, for an encore, leapt into the UDF as the crack technician assigned to a particular gunmetal red Jacket.
I bent over and picked up her glasses-more like a pair of magnifying lenses that had been jury-rigged together.
“You dropped these,” I said, holding them up where I hoped she could see.
“Thank you, whoever you are.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Shasta looked me over. The glass-bottle lenses made fried eggs of her eyes.
“And you are…?”
“Keiji Kiriya.”
“Thank you, Keiji Kiriya. I’m Shasta Raylle.” I had deliberately left out my rank and platoon. Shasta’s head sank. “I realize this might look like a plain, ordinary barracks-well, it is, but that’s beside the point. The point is, it contains highly sensitive military technology. Only people with the appropriate security clearance are allowed in.”
“I know. I don’t want in.”
“Oh. Well! I’m glad we cleared that up.”
“Actually,” I said, taking a step forward, “I came to see you.”
“Me? I-I’m flattered, but I’m afraid I can’t-I mean, you seem very nice and all, it’s just that I don’t think this would be appropriate, and there are still preparations to be made for tomorrow, and-”
“It’s not even noon.”
“It will take the rest of the day!”
“If you’d just listen-”
“I know it looks as though all I’ve been doing is removing and reattaching this one part-and well I have, but I really am busy. Really!” Her ponytail bobbed as she nodded to herself, punctuating her sincerity.
She’s getting the wrong idea. Got to steer this thing back on course-
“So the external memory unit on that suit’s been damaged?”
“It has, but-how did you know that?”
“Hey, you and I both know that an external memory unit doesn’t see a whole lotta use in battle. But since those custom chips contain sensitive military technology by the metric ton, you have to fill out a mountain of paperwork to requisition one of the damn things, am I right? And that bald sonofabitch over at the armory hitting on you no matter how many times you tell him you’re not interested doesn’t make the situation any brighter, I’m guessing. It’s almost enough to make you consider stealing one off one of the Japanese Corps’ Jackets.”
“Stealing one of the-I’d never even think of it!”
“No?”
“Of course not! Well, the thought may have crossed my mind once or twice, but I’d never actually do it! Do I really look like the type to-” Her eyes widened as she saw what was in the sealed plastic bag I pulled from my pocket.
A sly grin spread across my face. “What if someone else stole one for you?”
“Could I have it? Please?”
“How soon we change our song!”
I raised the bag containing the chip high above my head. Shasta hopped as she tried to grab it, but she and her 158 centimeters were out of luck. The oil staining her clothes made my nostrils flare.
“Stop teasing me and just hand it over, would you?”
Hop. Hop.
“You don’t know how much I had to go through to get this.”
“I’m begging you. Please?”
Hop.
“I’ll give it to you, but I need something in exchange.”
“Something… in exchange?”
Gulp.
She clutched the monkey wrench to her chest, flattening the swells of her breasts that lay hidden beneath her overalls. She’d clearly gotten used to playing the victim after a few years with the animals in Special Forces. If it was this easy to get a rise out of her, I can’t say I blamed them.
I waved the plastic bag toward the giant battle axe hanging from a cage at the rear of the barracks and pointed. Shasta didn’t seem to understand what I was looking at. Her eyes darted warily around the room.
“I came to borrow that.” I jabbed my finger straight at the axe.
“Unless my eyes have gotten worse than I thought, that’s Rita’s battle axe.”
“Bingo.”
“So… you’re in the Armored Infantry too?”
“Japanese Corps.”
“This isn’t easy for me to say-I don’t want to be rude-but trying to imitate Rita will only get you hurt.”
“That mean you won’t loan it to me?”
“If you really think you’ll need it, I will. It’s just a hunk of metal- we have plenty of spares. When Rita first asked me for one, I had them cut from the wings of a decommissioned bomber.”
“So why the reluctance?”
“Well, because frankly, you’ll be killed.”
“With or without it, I’ll die someday.”
“I can’t change your mind?”
“Not likely.”
Shasta grew quiet. The wrench hung in her hand like an old rag, and her eyes lost focus. A lock of unkempt hair stuck to the sweat and grease smeared across her forehead. “I was stationed in North Africa before,” she said. “The best soldier of the best platoon down there asked me for the same thing as you. I tried to warn him, but there were politics involved, things got complicated, so I let him have it.”
“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.