I’d been thinking of my first battle, when Mad Wargarita tried to help me, when my mud-stained guts were burnt to cinders, when despair and fear streamed down my face. Keiji Kiriya had been one of the unlucky bastards. Twice.
The third time, when I ran, my luck hadn’t been what you’d call good either. But for some reason, the world kept giving me another chance, challenging me to find a way to survive. Not by luck, but on my own.
If I could suppress the urge to run, I’d keep waking up to a full day of training followed by a day on the battlefield. And what could be better than that? Almost by default, I’d keep learning, one swing at a time. What took those swordsmen ten years, I could do in a day.
Ferrell stood and gave my backside a slap with his hand, bringing my train of thought to a screeching halt. “Not much point worrying about it now. Why don’t you see about finding one of them coeds?”
“I’m fine, Sarge, I was just thinking-” Ferrell looked away. I pressed on. “If I live through tomorrow’s battle, there’ll be another battle after that, right? And if I live through that battle, I’ll go on to the next one. If I take the skills I learn in each battle, and in between battles I practice in the simulators, my odds of surviving should keep going up. Right?”
“Well, if you want to overanalyze-”
“It can’t hurt to get in the habit of training now, can it?”
“You don’t give up easy, do you?”
“Nope.”
Ferrell shook his head. “To be honest, I had you figured for someone different. Maybe I’m gettin’ too old for this.”
“Different how?”
“Listen, there are three kinds of people in the UDF: junkies so strung out they’re hardly alive, people who signed up looking for a meal ticket, and people who were walking along, took a wrong step off a bridge somewhere, and just landed in it.”
“I’m guessing you had me pegged for the last group.”
“That I did.”
“Which group were you in, Sarge?”
He shrugged. “Suit up in first-tier gear. Meet back here in fifteen minutes.”
“Sir-uh, full battle dress?”
“A Jacket jockey can’t practice without his equipment. Don’t worry, I won’t use live rounds. Now suit up!”
“Sir, yes sir!”
I saluted, and I meant it.
The human body is a funny machine. When you want to move something-say, your arm-the brain actually sends two signals at the same time: “More power!” and “Less power!” The operating system that runs the body automatically holds some power back to avoid overexerting and tearing itself apart. Not all machines have that built-in safety feature. You can point a car at a wall, slam the accelerator to the floor, and the car will crush itself against the wall until the engine is destroyed or runs out of gas.
Martial arts use every scrap of strength the body has at its disposal. In martial arts training, you punch and shout at the same time. Your “Shout louder!” command helps to override the “Less power!” command. With practice, you can throttle the amount of power your body holds back. In essence, you’re learning to channel the body’s power to destroy itself.
A soldier and his Jacket work the same way. Just like the human body has a mechanism to hold power back, Jackets have a system to keep the power exertion in balance. With 370 kilograms of force in the grip, a Jacket could easily crush a rifle barrel, not to mention human bone. To prevent accidents like that from happening, Jackets are designed to automatically limit the force exerted, and even actively counteract inertia to properly balance the amount of force delivered. The techs call this system the auto-balancer. The auto-balancer slows the Jacket operator’s actions by a fraction of a second. It’s an interval of time so minute that most people wouldn’t even notice it. But on the battlefield, that interval could spell the difference between life and death.
In three full battles of ten thousand Jackets each, only one soldier might have the misfortune of encountering a problem with the auto-balancer, and if the auto-balancer decides to hiccup right when you’ve got a Mimic bearing down on you, it’s all over. It’s a slight chance, but no one wants to be the unlucky bastard who draws the short straw. This is why, at the start of every battle, veterans like Ferrell switch the auto-balancer off. They never taught us this in training. I had to learn how to walk again with the auto-balancer turned off. Ferrell said I had to be able to move without thinking.
It took me seven tries to walk in a straight line.
2
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.
