him, and I knew without being told that this one was mine to take care of. I struck, and the Mimic fell. Quickly, I put myself between the Mimic’s corpse and the man to protect him from the conductive sand spilling out of its body. Without a Jacket to filter the nanobots, the sand was deadly.
Rita secured a perimeter around the wounded man. Smoke billowed from the car, reducing visibility to next to nothing. Ten meters away, at about six o’clock, lay a steel tower that had fallen on its side. Beyond that, our Doppler was swarming with white points of light. If we stayed here we’d be overrun by Mimics.
The man’s leg was pinned beneath the overturned vehicle. He was well-muscled, and an old film camera hung from a neck which was much thicker than my own. It was Murdoch, the journalist who’d been snapping pictures at Rita’s side during PT.
Rita kneeled and examined his leg. “I thought you tried to stay out of battle.”
“It was a good shot, Sergeant Major. A Pulitzer for sure, if I’d managed to take it. Didn’t count on the explosion, though.” Soot and grime fouled the corners of his mouth.
“I don’t know whether that makes you lucky or unlucky.”
“Meeting a goddess in Hell must mean I still have some luck,” he said.
“This armor plate is dug into your leg pretty deep. It’ll take too long to get you out.”
“What are my options?”
“You can stay here shooting pictures until the Mimics crush you to death, or I can cut off your leg and carry you to the infirmary. Take your pick.”
“Rita, wait!”
“You have one minute to think it over. The Mimics are coming.” She rose her axe, not really interested in offering him the full sixty seconds.
Murdoch took a deep breath. “Can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“If I live-will you let me take a proper picture of you? No tongues sticking out, no middle fingers?”
The Japanese and U.S. troops met up just over two hours after the attack had begun. In the time it had taken the sun to climb out of the eastern sky and shine down from directly overhead, the soldiers on the ground had cobbled together something you could actually call a front. It was an ugly battle, but it wasn’t a rout. There were plenty of men still alive, still moving, still fighting.
Rita and I ran across the remains of the base.
5
The front ran down the middle of Flower Line Base, cutting a bulging half-circle that faced the shoreline. U.S. Special Forces anchored the center of the ragged arc where the enemy attacks were most fierce. Soldiers piled sandbags, hid among the rubble, and showered the enemy with bullets, rockets, and harsh language when they could.
If you drew an imaginary line from the U.S. soldiers to Kotoiushi Island, the No. 3 Training Field would be smack dab in the middle. That’s where the Mimics had come ashore. Generally, Mimics behaved with all the intellect of a piece of gardening equipment. Surprise attacks weren’t in their military repertoire. And you could be sure that their weak point-the server calling the shots-would be heavily defended, surrounded by the bulk of the Mimic force. Missiles that dug under and shattered bedrock, cluster bombs that fragmented into a thousand bomblets, vaporized fuel-air bombs that incinerated anything near them. All of mankind’s tools of technological destruction were useless on their own. Defeating the Mimics was like defusing a bomb; you had to disarm each piece in the proper order or it would blow up in your face.
Rita’s Jacket and mine were a perfect match, blood and sand. One axe covering the other’s back. We dodged javelins, sliced through Mimics, blasted holes in concrete with tungsten carbide spikes. All in search of the Mimic whose death could end this.
I knew the routine well enough: destroy the antenna and the backups to prevent the Mimics from sending a signal into the past. I thought I’d gotten it right on my 159th loop, and it wasn’t likely Rita had screwed things up. But somehow everything had reset again. Getting to know Rita a little more intimately on this 160th loop had been nice, but in exchange Flower Line had taken it on the chin. There would be heavy noncombat personnel casualties and a lot of dead when the dust had finally settled.
I could tell that Rita had an idea. She’d been through more loops than I had, so maybe she saw something I didn’t. I thought I’d turned myself into a veteran, but next to her I was still a greenhorn fresh out of Basic.
We were standing on the No. 3 Training Field, barbed wire barricade overturned to one side, chain link fence trampled flat along the other three. Mimics packed into the area, shoulder to shoulder-as if they had shoulders. Unable to support the massive weight of the Mimics, the concrete had buckled and cracked. The sun had begun to sink lower in the sky, casting complex shadows across the uneven ground. The wind was as strong as it had been the day before, but the Jacket’s filter removed all trace of the ocean from its smell.
Then there it was, the Mimic server. Rita and I spotted it at the same time. I don’t know how we knew it was the one, but we knew.
“I can’t raise my support squad on comm. We won’t have any air support.”
“Nothing new for me.”
“You remember what to do?”
I nodded inside my Jacket.
“Then let’s do this.”
The field was packed with ten thousand square meters of Mimics waiting for our axes to send them into death’s oblivion. We advanced to meet them.
Four stubby legs and a tail. No matter how many times I saw a Mimic, I’d never be able to think of anything but a dead and bloated frog. To look at them, there was no telling the server from its clients, but Rita and I knew the difference.
They ate earth and shat out poison, leaving behind a lifeless wasteland. The alien intelligence that had created them had mastered space travel and learned to send information through time. Now they were taking our world and turning it into a facsimile of their own, every last tree, flower, insect, animal, and human be damned.
This time we had to destroy the server. No more mistakes. If we didn’t, this battle might never end. I put all the inertia I dared behind my axe-a clean hit on the antenna. “Got it!”
The attack came from behind.
My body reacted before I had time to think. On the battlefield, I left my conscious mind out of the business of running my body. The cool, impartial calculations of my subliminal operating system were far more precise than I could ever be.
The concrete at my feet split in two, sending gray dust shooting into the air as though the ground had exploded. My right leg rolled to maintain balance. I still couldn’t see what was attacking me. There was no time to swing my massive battle axe into play.
My arms and legs moved to keep pace with my shifting center of gravity. Shudders coursed through my nerves, straining to provide the necessary evasive response in time. If my spine had been hardwired to the armor plating on my back, it would have been clattering up a storm.
I thrust with the butt of my axe. Done right, it would pack a punch similar to that of a pile driver. With the possible exception of the front armor plating on a tank, there weren’t many things that could withstand a square hit with 370 kilograms of piercing force.
The blow glanced off. Fuck!
A shadow moved at the edge of my vision. No time to get out of the way. I held in the breath I’d taken before the jab with the axe. The hit was coming. There. For an instant my body lifted off the ground, then I was rolling, my vision alternating between sky and ground, sky and ground. I came out of the roll and regained my feet in a single, fluid motion. My axe was at the ready.
There, with one leg still lifted in the air, stood a gunmetal red Jacket. Rita!
Maybe she had knocked me out of the way of an attack I hadn’t seen coming, or maybe I’d gotten in her
