time loops.
Rita had often dreamt that someday she would come across another person who experienced the loops. She’d even come up with a phrase they could use to identify themselves to each other. A phrase only Rita knew. A phrase the two of them would share.
For another person to be caught in a time loop, it would mean that someone other than Rita had destroyed a Mimic server by accident. Just as Rita was forced to leave people outside the time loop behind, this person would have no choice but to leave her behind. He would be alone.
She might not be able to travel through the time loop with him-though she also might be able to, and the thought terrified her-but she could give him advice either way. Share his solitude. Tell him how to break out of the loop, knowledge it had taken Rita 211 deaths to learn. He would fight through his doubts, the way Rita had. He would become a great warrior.
Deep in a quiet corner of Rita’s heart, she was sure no one would ever come to tell her the words only she knew.
The Mimic tachyon signal was the pinnacle of an alien technology, a technology that had enabled them to conquer the vastness of space. Rita’s entrapment in the time loop during the battle to recapture Florida had been an impossible stroke of luck for humanity. If not for that chance occurrence, the earth would have fallen to xenoforming. Not just humans, but virtually every species on the planet, would already be extinct.
Rita’s fame grew with each battle, and her loneliness with it. She had broken out of the time loop, but she felt as though she were still reliving the same day. Her one hope was that humanity’s victory, the day when every last Mimic had been blasted to extinction, would somehow rid her of her terrible isolation. Until then, she would continue to play her unique role in the conflict.
Rita didn’t mind the battles. She didn’t have to think to fight. When she climbed into her red Jacket, the sadness, the laughter, the memory that haunted her more than the rest-it all slipped away. The battlefield, swirling with smoke and gunpowder, was Rita’s home.
PT ended less than an hour later. The general, the bile in his mouth forgotten, hurried off to the barracks.
As Rita stood, the man beside her staggered to his feet. He wasn’t particularly tall for a Jacket jockey. He was young, but he wore his fatigues as though he’d been born in them. His clothes looked as though they’d just come from the factory, so there was something strangely jarring about his appearance. His lips were twisted in a Mona Lisa smile that did a good job of concealing his age.
The number 157 was scrawled in Arabic numerals on the back of his hand. Rita didn’t know what it meant, but it was an odd thing to do. Odd enough that Rita didn’t think she’d be forgetting him anytime soon. She had heard of soldiers taping their blood type to the soles of their feet in the days before Jackets were standard-issue, but she’d never heard of a soldier who kept notes in ballpoint pen on the back of his hand.
“So you wanted to talk. What is it?”
“Ah, right,” he said.
“Well? Get on with it, soldier. I’m a patient girl, but there’s a battle tomorrow, and I have things to do.”
“I, uh, have an answer to your question.” He hesitated like a high school drama student reading from a bad script. “Japanese restaurants don’t charge for green tea.”
Rita Vrataski, the savior of humanity, the Valkyrie, the nineteen-year-old girl, let her mask slip.
The Full Metal Bitch began to cry.
1
“Shit, it’s started! Don’t get your balls blown off, gents!”
Battle 159.
I dart forward, my Jacket’s Doppler set to max.
I spot a target, fire, duck. A javelin whizzes past my head.
“Who’s up there? You’re too far forward! You wanna get yourself killed?”
The lieutenant said the same thing every time. I wiped sand from my helmet. Thunder erupted from the shells crisscrossing the sky. I glanced at Ferrell and nodded.
This time the battle would end. If I stood by and watched as Yonabaru and Ferrell died, they wouldn’t be coming back. It all came down to this. There was no repeating this battle. The fear that clawed at my guts wasn’t fear of death, it was fear of the unknown. I wanted to throw down my rifle and axe and find a bed to hide under.
A normal reaction-the world wasn’t meant to repeat itself. I grinned in spite of the butterflies in my stomach. I was struggling with the same fear everyone struggles with. I was putting my life- the only one I had-on the line.
“You’re not actually caught in a time loop,” Rita had explained to me. My experiences of the 158 previous battles were real; it was me who didn’t really exist. Whoever it was that had been there for the excruciating pain, hopelessness, and the hot piss in his Jacket, he was only a shattered memory now.
Rita told me that from the point of view of the person with the memory, there was no difference between having had an actual experience and only having the memory of it. Sounded like philosophical bullshit to me. Rita didn’t seem to understand it all that well either.
I remember reading a comic, back when I still read comics, about a guy who used a time machine to change the past. It seemed to me that if the past changed, then the guy from the future who went back in time to change it should have disappeared-like the guy in those old Back to the Future movies-but the comic glossed over those details.
I had become an unwilling voyeur to the dreams of the Mimics. In my very first battle, the one where Rita saved my life, I had unknowingly killed one of those Mimics she called “servers.” In every battle since then, from the second right up to the 158th, Rita had killed the server. But the network between me and the server had already been established the instant I killed it, meaning I was the one trapped in the loop, and that Rita had been freed.
The Mimics used the loop to alter the future to their advantage. The javelin that missed Yonabaru in the second battle had been meant for me. My chance encounter with a Mimic when I ran from the base hadn’t had anything to do with chance. They’d been hunting me all along. If it hadn’t been for Rita, they would have had me for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The fighting continued. Chaos stalked the battlefield.
I slid into a crater with the rest of my squad to avoid getting ventilated by a sniper javelin shot. The squad had moved a hundred meters nearer to the coast since the start of battle. The conical hole we had taken cover in was courtesy of the previous night’s GPS-guided bombardment. A stray round landed near my feet, spraying sand into the air.
“Just like Okinawa,” remarked Ferrell, his back pressed against the wall of earth.
Yonabaru squeezed off another round. “Musta been a helluva fight.”
“We were surrounded, just like now. Ran out of ammo and things got ugly.”
“You’re gonna jinx us.”
“I don’t know-” Ferrell sprang up from the cover of the crater, fired his rifle, then sank back against the wall. “I got it in my head that this battle’s going somewhere. Just a feeling.”
“Shit, Sarge is talkin’ happy talk. Better watch out we don’t get struck by lightning.”
“You have any doubts, just watch our newest recruit in action,” Ferrell said. “Wouldn’t surprise me to see him get up and dance the jitterbug just to piss the Mimics off.”
“I don’t know the jitterbug,” I said.
“No shit.”
“Maybe I’ll give that pretty battle axe of yours a try.” Yonabaru nodded at the gleaming slab of tungsten carbide in my Jacket’s grip.
“You’d just hurt yourself.”
“That’s discrimination is what that is.”
