Rita snorted. “You doing fine art photography now?”
“That’s hardly any way to speak to the only embedded photojournalist in the Japan expedition. I take great pride in the role I play conveying the truths of this war to the public. Of course, 90 percent of the truth is lighting.”
“Pretty slick talk. They must love you over at PR. How many tongues you figure you have?”
“Only the one the Lord saw fit to bestow Americans with. Though I hear Russians and Cretans have two.”
“Well I hear there’s a Japanese god who pulls out the tongues of liars. Don’t do anything to get yours in trouble.”
“Perish the thought.”
The corner of the training field Rita and the photographer were standing on caught the full force of the wind coming off the ocean. In the middle of the giant field, 146 men from the 17th Company of the 301st Japanese Armored Infantry Division were frozen in neat rows along the ground. It was a kind of training called iso push-ups. Rita hadn’t seen it before.
The rest of Rita’s squad stood a short distance away, their thick, bristly arms jutting out before them. They were busy doing what soldiers did best, which was mocking those less fortunate than themselves. Maybe this is how they practice bowing? Hey, samurai! Try picking up a sword after an hour of that!
None of Rita’s squadmates would go near her within thirty hours of an attack. It was an unspoken rule. The only people who dared approach her were a Native American engineer who couldn’t hardly see straight and the photographer, Ralph Murdoch.
“They don’t move at all?” Rita seemed doubtful.
“No, they just hold that position.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it samurai training. Looks more like yoga if you ask me.”
“Is it odd to find similarities between Indian mysticism and Japanese tradition?”
“Ninety-eight!”
“Ninety-eight!”
“Ninety-nine!”
“Ninety-nine!”
Staring into the ground like farmers watching rice grow, the soldiers barked in time with the drill sergeant. The shouts of the 146 men echoed in Rita’s skull. A familiar migraine sent wires of pain through her head. This was a bad one.
“Another headache?”
“None of your business.”
“I don’t see how a platoon worth of doctors can’t find a cure for one headache.”
“Neither do I. Why don’t you try to find out?” she snapped.
“They keep those guys on a pretty short leash. I can’t even get an interview.”
Murdoch raised his camera. It wasn’t clear what he intended to do with the images of the spectacle unfolding in perfect stillness before him. Maybe sell them to a tabloid with nothing better to print.
“I’m not sure that’s in very good taste.” Rita didn’t know a single soldier on the field, but she didn’t have to know them to like them better than Murdoch.
“Pictures are neither tasteful nor distasteful. If you click on a link and a picture of a corpse pops up, you might have grounds for a lawsuit. If that same picture appears on the homepage of the New York Times, it could win a Pulitzer Prize.”
“This is different.”
“Is it?”
“You’re the one who broke into the data processing center. If it weren’t for your slip-up, these men wouldn’t be here being punished, and you wouldn’t be here taking pictures of them. I’d say that qualifies as distasteful.”
“Not so fast. I’ve been wrongly accused.” The sound of his camera shutter grew more frequent, masking their conversation.
“Security here is lax compared to central command. I don’t know what you were trying to dig up out here in the boondocks, but don’t hurt anyone else doing it.”
“So you’re onto me.”
“I’d just hate to see the censors come down on you right when you land your big scoop.”
“The government can tell us any truths they please. But there are truths, and there are truths,” Murdoch said. “It’s up to the people to decide which is which. Even if it’s something the government doesn’t want reported.”
“How egotistical.”
“Name a good journalist who isn’t. You have to be to find a story. Do you know any Dreamers?”
“I’m not interested in feed religions.”
“Did you know the Mimics went on the move at almost exactly the same time you started that big operation up in Florida?”
The Dreamers were a pacifist group-civilian, of course. The emergence of the Mimics had had a tremendous impact on marine ecosystems. Organizations that had called for the protection of dolphins, whales, and other marine mammals died out. The Dreamers picked up where they left off.
Dreamers believed the Mimics were intelligent, and they insisted it was humanity’s failure to communicate with them that had led to this war. They reasoned that if Mimics could evolve so quickly into such potent weapons, with patience, they could develop the means to communicate as well. The Dreamers had begun to take in members of a war-weary public who believed humanity could never triumph over the Mimics, and in the past two to three years the size of the movement had ballooned.
“I interviewed a few before coming to Japan,” Murdoch continued.
“Sounds like hard work.”
“They all have the same dream on the same day. In that dream, humanity falls to the Mimics. They think it’s some sort of message they’re trying to send us. Not that you needed me to tell you that.” Murdoch licked his lips. His tongue was too small for his body, giving the distinct impression of a mollusk. “I did a little digging, and it turns out there are particularly high concentrations of these dreams the days before U.S. Spec Ops launch major attacks. And over the past few years, more and more people have been having the dream. It hasn’t been made public, but some of these people are even in the military.”
“You believe whatever these feed jobs tell you? Listen to them long enough and they’d have you thinking sea monkeys were regular Einsteins.”
“Academic circles are already discussing the possibility of Mimic intelligence. And if they are, it’s not far- fetched to think they would try to communicate.”
“You shouldn’t assume everything you don’t understand is a message,” Rita said. She snorted. “Keep on like that, and next thing you’ll be telling me you’ve found signs of intelligence in our government, and we both know that’s never going to happen.”
“Very funny. But there’s a science here you can’t ignore. Each step up the evolutionary ladder-from single- celled organism, to cold-blooded animal, to warm-blooded animal-has seen a tenfold increase in energy consumption.” Ralph licked his lips again. “If you look at the amount of energy a human in modern society consumes, it’s ten times greater than that of a warm-blooded animal of similar size. Yet Mimics, which are supposed to be a cold-blooded animal, consume the same amount of energy as humans.”
“That supposed to mean they’re higher than us on the ladder? That’s quite a theory. You should have it published.”
“I seem to recall you saying something about having dreams.”
“Sure I have dreams. Ordinary dreams.”
To Rita, looking for meaning in dreams was a waste of time. A nightmare was a nightmare. And the time loops she’d stumbled into in the course of the war, well, they were something else entirely. “We have an attack coming up tomorrow. Did any of the people you interviewed get a message?”
“Absolutely. I called L.A. this morning to confirm it. All three had had the dream.”
“Now I know it’s not true. That’s impossible.”
