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 creche 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.
But the Mimics weren’t the only ones who could benefit from these signals. Kill a Mimic server while in electrical contact with it, and a human would receive the same gift of foresight meant for the network. The tachyon signal sent into the past doesn’t distinguish between Mimic and human, and when it came, humans perceived the portent as a hyperrealistic dream, accurate in every detail.
To truly defeat a Mimic strike force, you have to first destroy their network and all the backups it contains, then destroy the server Mimic. Otherwise, no matter how many different strategies you try, the Mimics will always develop a counterstrategy that ensures their survival.
1. Destroy the antenna.
2. Massacre every Mimic being used as backup for the network.
3. Once the possibility for transmissions to the past has been eliminated, destroy the server.
Three simple steps to escape to the future. It took Rita 211 passes through the loop to figure them out.
No one Rita told would believe her. The army was used to dealing in concrete facts. No one was interested in far-fetched stories involving time loops. When Rita finally broke out of the loop and reached the future, she learned that Arthur Hendricks had died. He was one of twenty-eight thousand killed in the battle.
In the two days Rita had spent in an endless circle of fighting, she’d managed to research the history of war, scour the feeds for information about the Mimics, and enlist a goofball engineer to make her a battle axe. She had succeeded in breaking the loop, in changing her own future, yet Hendricks’ name still ended up with the letters KIA printed beside it.
Rita finally understood. This was what war really was. Every soldier who died in battle was nothing more than another figure in the calculus of estimated casualties. Their hardships, joys, and fears never entered into the equation. Some would live, others would die. It was all up to the impartial god of death called probability. With the benefit of her experience in the time loop, Rita would be able to beat the odds for some and save certain people in the future. But there would always be those she could not save. People with fathers, mothers, friends, maybe even brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, children. If she could only repeat the 211th loop, maybe she could find a way to save Hendricks-but at what cost? Rita Vrataski was alone in the time loop, and in order for her to make it out, someone would have to die.
Hendricks made one last phone call before that battle. He learned he had just become a father, and he was upset that the picture of his kid he’d printed out and taped inside his Jacket had gotten dirty. He wanted to go home, but he put the mission first. Rita had heard the phone conversation 212 times now. She knew it by heart.
Rita was awarded a medal for her distinguished service in the battle-the Order of the Valkyrie, given to soldiers who killed over one hundred Mimics in a single battle. They had created the honor just for her. And why not? The only soldier on the entire planet who could kill that many Mimics in a single battle was Rita Vrataski.
When the president pinned the gleaming medal on Rita’s chest, he lauded her as an angel of vengeance on the battlefield and declared her a national treasure. She had paid for that medal with the blood of her brothers and sisters.
She didn’t shed a tear. Angels don’t cry.