Shasta looked up at Rita with worry in her eyes. “Don’t you like it?”
“It doesn’t look anything like you.”
“Neither does yours.”
They looked at each other.
“All right, thanks. I’ll keep it. For luck.”
Shasta lifted another figure when Ralph Murdoch, the requisite camera hanging from his thick neck, walked in.
“Good morning, ladies.”
Rita cocked one rust-red eyebrow at the arrival of her unwelcome guest. Her face hardened to steel. The sudden change in Rita’s demeanor startled Shasta, who looked as though she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to hide from Rita behind this strange hulk of a journalist or the other way around. After a few awkward moments of hesitation, she opted for taking cover behind Rita.
“How did you get in here?” Rita made no attempt to hide her disdain.
“I’m a registered member of your personal staff. Who would stop me?”
“You’re your own staff, and we both know it. You can leave now.” Rita didn’t care much for this man and his never-saw-a-speck-ofbattlefield-mud running shoes. People like him and Shasta could meet and talk in total safety whenever the mood took them. His words were never limned with the dread of knowing you would have to watch your friends die in the next battle. It was that dread, that certainty, that kept Rita away from her squadmates, the only family she had left. Nothing this rambling fool would ever have to deal with in his entire life.
“That’d be a shame after coming all the way up here,” Murdoch said. “I happened upon an interesting piece of news, and I thought I’d share it with you.”
“Send it to the New York Times. I’ll be happy to read all about it.”
“Trust me, you’ll wanna hear this.”
“I’m not all that interested in what you find interesting.”
“The Japanese troops are going to have some PT. Punishment for troublemaking last night.”
“I asked you to leave. I’m never in a good mood before battle.”
“Don’t you want to come watch? They’re going to do some sort of samurai-style training. I’d love to hear the Valkyrie’s take on the whole affair.”
“Your mother must have been disappointed when the abortion only killed your conscience,” Rita said.
“Such talk from a nice, sweet girl like you.”
“I’d say it next time too, but I can’t be bothered.”
“Come again?”
“Believe me, I’d rather not.”
Murdoch raised an eyebrow. “Okay, so you talk trash and nonsense. Two for one.”
“I guess it must be catching.”
“Fine, so I have no conscience and I’m going straight to Hell. You told me the same thing in Indonesia when I took those pictures of the crying kid running from a pack of Mimics.”
“Hell’s too good for you. You’d just find a way to get a picture of Satan and use it to worm your way through Heaven’s back door.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
A smile spread across the Valkyrie’s lips. It was the same smile that came to her in those dark hours on the battlefield, when it was at least hidden behind her helmet. Shasta’s body tensed. Murdoch took a step back without even realizing it.
“Well,” the Full Metal Bitch said, “I’m about to step into Hell. And until I do, I don’t want to see your face again.”
9
Rita ended up going to watch the PT. Shasta didn’t. The only person near Rita was that damned Murdoch. The rest of her squad maintained a respectful distance.
That was when Rita’s eyes met that challenge from the field, that gaze bearing the weight of the world. There was something about the kid that Rita liked. She started walking toward him.
She strode with purpose, each step a perfect movement designed to propel a Jacket across a battlefield with total efficiency. She advanced across the field effortlessly and without a sound. To get 100 percent out of a Jacket, a soldier had to be able to walk across a room full of eggs without cracking a single one. That meant being able to perfectly distribute their body weight with every step.
The soldier was still staring at Rita. She walked right to him, then made a ninety-degree turn and headed toward the tent where the brigadier general was sitting. She gave him one regulation salute.
The brigadier general cast a doubtful glance at Rita. Rita was a sergeant major by rank, but she was also in the U.S. corps, so their actual relative places in military hierarchy were a little muddy.
Rita remembered this man. He had been attached at the hip to the general who had made a beeline to shake Rita’s hand at the start of the frivolous reception held to welcome the Special Forces. There were plenty of officers who had climbed the ranks without ever fighting on the front lines, but this one seemed to have a special love for grandstanding and ass-kissing.
They spoke briefly, the general seemingly bemused and Rita’s stance and body language well-practiced. Then Rita returned to the field, walking past the ranks of men who seemed to bow before her. She chose a spot beside the soldier who’d been staring daggers at her and started her iso push-up. She could feel the heat of his body radiating through the chill air between them.
The soldier didn’t move. Rita didn’t move. The sun hung high in the sky, slowly roasting their skin. Rita spoke in a low voice only the soldier beside her could hear:
“Do I have something on my face?”
“Not that I can see.”
Other than a slightly odd intonation, the soldier’s Burst was clear and easy to understand. Nothing like back in North Africa. People from the former French colonies couldn’t speak Burst to save their lives.
Burst English, or simply Burst, was a language created to deal with the problem of communication in an army comprised of soldiers from dozens of countries. It had a pared-down vocabulary and as few grammatical irregularities as possible. When they drafted the language, they deliberately struck all the profanities from the official vocabulary list, but you couldn’t keep a bunch of soldiers from adding “fuck” in its various noun, verb, and adjective forms to everything anyway.
“You’ve been staring at me for a while now.”
“I guess I have,” he said.
“There something you want from me?”
“Nothing I want to discuss like this.”
“Then let’s wait until this is done.”
“Shit-for-brains Kiriya! You’re slipping!” the lieutenant barked. Rita, with the disinterested expression of someone who’d never had a need for human contact her entire life, continued her iso push-up.
Iso push-ups were a lot rougher than they looked. Beads of sweat formed along your hairline, streamed past your temples, ran into your eyes-making them burn from the salt-and traced the line of your neck before falling from your chest. Having to endure that itch as it makes its way down your body was a lot like what a soldier had to endure encased in a Jacket. This samurai training isn’t completely worthless after all, Rita decided.
When things got too hard to bear, it was best to let your mind wander. Rita let her thoughts drift from her own body’s screams of protest to the surroundings. The brigadier general from the General Staff Office looked baffled by the intruder in his proceedings. For him, a man who had never experienced a moment of real armed conflict, maybe this training field, with its gentle ocean breezes, was part of the war. To people who had never breathed in that mixture of blood, dust, and burning metal that pervaded a battlefield, it was easy to imagine that deployment was war, that training was war, that climbing some career ladder was war. There was only one person for whom the war extended to that tranquil day before the battle: a woman named Rita Vrataski and her
