Death rushes forward, swifter than even a Mimic. A crimson leg kicks and I go flying.
My armor is crushed. I stop breathing. The sky becomes the ground. My display is drowning in red flashing warnings. I cough up blood, saving the rest of the warnings the trouble.
Then my pile driver fires. The blast throws me at least ten meters into the air. Bits of the armor plating from the back of my Jacket scatter across the ground. I land upside down.
Death swings his battle axe.
Metal screams as he cuts through the uncuttable. The axe cries out like a freight train screeching to a halt.
I see the Mimic’s carapace sailing through the air.
It only took one blow to reduce the Mimic to a motionless heap. Ashen sand poured from the gaping wound. The two halves of the creature shuddered and twitched, each keeping its own strange rhythm. A creature humanity’s greatest technological inventions could barely scratch, laid waste by a barbarian weapon from a thousand years past.
Death turned slowly to face me.
Amid the crush of red warning lights crowding my display, a sole green light winked on. An incoming friendly transmission. “… as a little … kay?” A woman’s voice. Impossible to make it out over the noise. I couldn’t stand. The Jacket was spent and so was I. It took everything I had left just to roll right side up.
Upon closer inspection, I was not, in fact, in the company of the Angel of Death. It was just another soldier in a Jacket. A Jacket not quite like my own, as it was outfitted with that massive battle axe where the regulation pile driver should have been. The insignia on the shoulder didn’t read JP but instead U.S. In place of the usual desert camouflage mix of sand and coffee grounds, the suit shone head-to-toe in metallic crimson.
The Full Metal Bitch.
I’d heard stories. A war junkie always chasing the action, no matter where it led her. Word had it she and her Special Forces squad from the U.S. Army had chalked up half of all confirmed Mimic kills ever. Maybe anyone who could see that much fighting and live to tell about it really was the Angel of Death.
Still carrying the battle axe, the blazing red Jacket started toward me. Its hand reached down and fumbled for the jack in my shoulder plate. A contact comm.
“There’s something I’ve been wantin’ to know.”
Her voice filled my suit, clear as crystal. A soft, light tone, at odds with the two-meter axe and carnage she’d just created with it.
“Is it true the green tea they serve in Japan at the end of your meal comes free?”
The conductive sand spilling out of the fallen Mimic danced away on the wind. I could hear the distant cry of shells as they flew. This was a battlefield, the scorched waste where Yonabaru, Captain Yuge, and the rest of my platoon had died. A forest of steel shells. A place where your suit fills with your own piss and shit. Where you drag yourself through a mire of blood and muck.
“I’ve gotten myself in trouble for believing everything I read. So I thought I’d play it safe, ask a local,” she continued.
Here I am, half dead, covered in shit, and you want to talk about tea?
Who walks up to someone, kicks them to the ground, and then asks about tea? What was going through her fucking head? I wanted to give her a piece of my mind, but the words wouldn’t come. I could think of the words I wanted to say, but my mouth had forgotten how to work—a litany of profanities stalled at the gate.
“That’s the thing with books. Half the time the author doesn’t know what the hell he’s writing about—especially not those war novelists. Now how about you ease your finger off the trigger and take a nice, deep breath.”
Good advice. It took a minute, but I started to see straight again. The sound of a woman’s voice always had a way of calming me down. The pain I’d left in battle returned to my gut. My Jacket misread the cramps in my muscles, sending the suit into a mild spasm. I thought of the dance Yonabaru’s suit did just before he died.
“Hurt much?”
“What do you think?” My reply wasn’t much more than a hoarse whisper.
The red Jacket kneeled down in front of me, examining the shredded armor plate over my stomach. I ventured a question. “How’s the battle going?”
“The 301st has been wiped out. Our main line fell back to the coast to regroup.”
“What about your squad?”
“No use worrying about them.”
“So … how do I look?”
“It pierced the front, but the back armor plate stopped it. It’s charred bad.”
“How bad?”
“Bad.”
“Fuck me.” I looked up at the sky. “Looks like it’s starting to clear.”
“Yeah. I like the sky here.”
“Why’s that?”
“It’s clear. Can’t beat islands for clear skies.”
“Am I going to die?”
“Yeah,” she told me.
I felt tears well up in my eyes. I was grateful then that the helmet hid my face from view. It kept my shame a private thing.
The red Jacket maneuvered to gently cradle my head. “What’s your name? Not your rank or your serial number. Your name.”
“Keiji. Keiji Kiriya.”
“I’m Rita Vrataski. I’ll stay with you until you die.”
She couldn’t have said anything I’d rather hear, but I wasn’t going to let her see that. “You’ll die too if you stay.”
“I have a reason. When you die, Keiji, I’m going to take your Jacket’s battery.”
“That’s cold.”
“No need to fight it. Relax. Let go.”
I heard an electronic squelch—an incoming comm signal in Rita’s helmet. It was a man’s voice. The link between our Jackets automatically relayed the voice to me.
“Calamity Dog, this is Chief Breeder.”
“I read you.” All business.
“Alpha Server and vicinity under control. Estimate we can hold for thirteen minutes, tops. Time to pick up that pizza.”
“Calamity Dog copies. Running silent from here in.”