vital in ensuring the successful coordination and execution of tomorrow’s joint operation.”
The general was at a loss for words. The U.S. Special Forces around the field started to whoop and cheer.
“Request permission to participate in the PT, sir,” she said.
“Granted.”
“Sir, thank you, sir!”
She flashed a quick salute. Doing an about-face, she slipped among the rows of men staring intently into the ground.
She chose a spot beside me and started her iso push-up. I could feel the heat coming off her body through the chilly air between us.
I didn’t move. Rita didn’t move. The sun hung high in the sky, showering its rays over us, slowly roasting our skin. A drop of sweat formed in my armpit, then traced its way slowly to the ground. Sweat had started to bead on Rita’s skin too. Fuck! I felt like a chicken crammed into the same oven as the Christmas turkey.
Rita’s lips made the subtlest of movements. A low voice only I could hear.
“Do I have something on my face?”
“What?”
“You’ve been staring at me for a while now.”
“Me? No.”
“I thought maybe there was a laser bead on my forehead.”
“Sorry. There wasn’t-it’s nothing.”
“Oh. All right.”
“Shit-for-brains Kiriya! You’re slipping!” the lieutenant barked. I quickly extended my arm back into position. Beside me, Rita Vrataski, with the disinterested expression of someone who’d never had a need for human contact her entire life, continued her iso push-up.
PT ended less than an hour later. The general, the taste of bile in his mouth forgotten, returned to the barracks without further instructions. The 17th Company had spent a productive pre-battle afternoon.
It hadn’t played out the way I remembered it. In my dream, I never made eye contact with Rita, and she hadn’t joined in the PT. Maybe I was reading too much into things, but I’d say she did it just to piss the general off. It took a Valkyrie reborn to throw a monkey wrench into a disciplinary training session planned with military precision and get away with it. Then again, her antenna may just have picked up something that made her want to see what this weird iso push-up thing was all about. Maybe she had just been curious.
One thing was for sure, though. Rita Vrataski wasn’t the bitch everyone made her out to be.
4
“How about last night, huh? That shit was tight.”
“You said it.”
“With reflexes like that, that girl must be hiding springs in that little body of hers. I could feel it all the way into my abs.”
“She hears you talkin’ like that, best watch out.”
“Who doesn’t like a compliment? I’m just sayin’ she was good.” As he spoke, Yonabaru thrust his hips.
Seeing someone move like that in a Jacket was pretty damn funny. An everyday gesture with enough power behind it to level a house.
Our platoon was on the northern tip of Kotoiushi Island, waiting to spring the ambush, Jackets in sleep mode. A screen about half a meter tall stood in front of us, projecting an image of the terrain behind. It’s what they called active camouflage. It was supposed to render us undetectable from an enemy looking at us head on. Of course, we could have just used a painting. The terrain had been bombed into oblivion, so any direction you looked, all you saw was the same charred wasteland.
Most of the time, the Mimics lurked in caves that twisted deep under the seabed. Before a ground assault, we fired bunker buster bombs that penetrated into the ground before detonating. Eat that. Each one of those babies cost more than I’d make in my entire lifetime. But the Mimics had an uncanny way of avoiding the bombs. It was enough to make you wonder if they were getting a copy of our attack plans in advance. On paper we may have had air superiority, but we ended up in a drawn-out land war anyhow.
Since our platoon was part of an ambush, we weren’t packing the large-bore cannons-massive weapons that were each the size of a small car fully assembled. What we did have were 20mm rifles, fuel-air grenades, pile drivers, and rocket launchers loaded with three rounds apiece. Since it was Ferrell’s platoon, we were all linked to him via comm. I glanced at my Jacket’s HUD. It was twenty-eight degrees Celsius. Pressure was 1014 millibars. The primary strike force would be on the move any minute.
Last night, after that endless hour of PT, I’d decided to go to the party. It wasn’t what I remembered doing from the dream, but I didn’t really feel like rereading that book. The part about helping Yonabaru up to his bunk after he stumbled back to the barracks stayed the same.
Word around the platoon was that Yonabaru’s girlfriend was a Jacket jockey too. With the exception of Special Forces, men and women fought in separate platoons, so we wouldn’t have run into her on the battlefield anyway.
“If-and I’m just talkin’-but if one of you got killed…” I ventured.
“I’d feel like shit.”
“But you still see each other anyway.”
“Heaven ain’t some Swiss bank. You can’t squirrel away money in some secret account up there and expect to make a withdrawal. You gotta do what you can before goin’ into battle. That’s the first rule of soldierin’.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“But I’m tellin’ ya, you gotta hook yourself up with some pussy. Carpe diem, brother.”
“Carpe something.”
“What about Mad Wargarita? Y’all were talkin’ during PT, right? You’d tap that, I know you would.”
“Don’t even go there.”
“Tiny girl like her-I bet she’s a wolverine in the sack. The smaller they are, the better they fuck, you know.”
“Show some respect.”
“Sex ain’t got nothin’ to do with respect. From the lowest peon to His Majesty the general, everybody wants to do a little poundin’ between the legs. All I’m sayin’ is that’s how we evolved-”
“Just shut the fuck up,” I said.
“That any way to talk to me in front of the sergeant? I’m hurt. I’ve got a very sensitive disposition. I’m just talkin’ trash to keep my mind off things. Same as everybody else.”
“He’s right,” someone else chipped in over the comm link.
“Hey, don’t I get a vote?”
It was like this was the excuse everyone in the platoon had been waiting for. Everyone started talking at once.
“I’m gonna have to cast my ballot for Yonabaru.”
“I’ve set this thing to filter out your jokes, so stop wastin’ your breath.”
“Sounds like Kiriya’s gonna have to step up his training if he doesn’t want Yonabaru to take the piss out of him so easy.”
“Sir! I think I need to reboot my Jacket, sir! I don’t want it crashing during the battle!”
“Aw man, I’d kill for a cigarette. Musta left ’em in my other Jacket.”
“I thought you quit smokin’?”
“Hey, keep it down! I’m tryin’ to get some sleep!”
And so it went. Back and forth through the comm link, like it was an Internet chat room. All Ferrell could do was sigh and shake his Jacketed head.
When you’re so nervous you’ve run out of nails to bite, thinking about something you enjoy helps take the
