“I’m sorry to bother you. But there was something I just had to show you. I’m really, really sorry.” Shasta lowered her head and bumped it against the door that still blocked half of the entryway. This time she hit the corner.
Thud.
“Ow.” Shasta squatted on the ground again.
“No need to apologize. You’re always welcome, Lieutenant. Without you, who would look after my Jacket?”
Shasta sprang to her feet, eyes moist with tears.
“You called me lieutenant again! Call me Shasta, please.”
“But, Lieutenant—”
“Shasta! I just want everyone to talk to me like a normal person.”
“All right, all right. Shasta.”
“That’s better.”
Rita smiled. “So … what was it you wanted to show me?”
“Right,” Shasta said. “Look at this. You won’t believe it.”
Shasta opened her hand. Rita looked intently at the strange object resting in her tiny palm. Only slightly larger than a 9mm bullet, it was intricately shaped and painted bright red. Rita had heard of people who painted the tips of their bullets a separate color to distinguish between types of ammunition, but never the entire casing.
She picked it up. It was shaped like a person.
Shasta raced on. “This is supposed to be secret, right? Someone on the base told me about them. I went all the way to Tateyama to get it. It took almost all the money I had on me to win it.”
“Win it?”
“You put money in the machine, turn the knob, and one of these figures pops out in a little plastic bubble.”
“Is it some kind of toy?”
“Oh no, it’s a valuable collector’s item. The rare ones can trade for over a hundred dollars each.”
“A hundred dollars for this?”
“That’s right.” Shasta nodded gravely.
Rita held the tiny figure up to the white lights of the room. Upon closer examination, it was clearly meant to resemble a soldier wearing a Jacket. That it was painted red and wielding a battle axe could only mean it was supposed to be Rita’s Jacket. “They did a good job. Even the fins look just like the real ones. I guess military secrets aren’t what they used to be.”
“They use professional modelers. All they need is a glimpse to make something almost exactly like the original. The models made in Japan are the best. They can auction for a lot of money.”
“What a waste of perfectly good talent.” Rita flipped the figure over in her hand. Etched across the feet were the words MADE IN CHINA. “China still has time to make toys? I heard they can’t even keep up with the production of the Jacket control chips.”
“They’ve got a bigger workforce to go around. Remember that senator who was forced to resign after he said China could afford to lose as many people as there are in the entire United States and still have over a billion left? Well, they actually have lost millions of people down in the south, but they’ve been able to throw enough resources at it to hold the line.”
“It’s hard to believe we come from the same planet.”
“America’s at war, and we still find the time to turn out terrible movies.”
Rita couldn’t argue with that.
The UDF existed to protect a world obsessed with creating worthless piles of crap, Rita thought. It was amazing how people could pour their hearts and souls into such trivial things. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing. No one appreciated that more than Rita, whose only skill was killing.
“I have lots more.” Shasta pulled a handful of figures from her overalls.
“What’s this? Some sort of pig-frog from the dark reaches of the Amazon?”
“That’s a Mimic.”
“So much for your professional modelers.”
“This is what they look like in the movies. So it is the real thing as far as the public’s concerned, anyway. Believe me, this is what’s in the movies, down to the last wrinkle.”
“What about this one?”
“You should know. It’s Rita Vrataski—you!”
The figure was lean, prodigiously endowed, and sported curly blonde hair. It was hard to find a single feature that even remotely resembled Rita. As it happened, Rita had actually met the actress cast to play her in the movies once. It was difficult to say she didn’t fit the role of a Jacket jockey, since Rita herself hardly did. But the woman they picked for the part was far too glamorous for a soldier fighting on the front lines.
Rita compared her figure with that of the Mimic. Suddenly, the Mimic modeler wasn’t looking so far off.
“Mind if I hold on to this?” Rita picked up the Full Metal Bitch figurine that bore her no resemblance.
“What?”
“You won’t miss one, will you?”
Shasta’s reaction was somewhere between that of a sleeping cat kicked out of its favorite spot in bed and a five-year-old whose aunt had denied her the last piece of chocolate macadamia nut toffee because she’d been saving it for herself. The look on her face would have sent applications to MIT plummeting if prospective students had known she was an alumna who had graduated at the top of her class.
Rita reconsidered her request. People like Shasta who went to hyper-competitive upper-crust universities were probably more likely than most to randomly explode if pushed. “Sorry, bad joke. I shouldn’t tease you like that.”
“No, I’m the one who should apologize,” Shasta said. “It’s just that it’s kind of, well, really rare. I mean, I bought every single bubble in the machine, and that was the only one that came out.”
“Don’t worry. I wouldn’t dream of taking it from you.”
“Thanks for understanding. I’m really sorry. Here, why don’t you take this one instead? It’s supposed to be pretty rare too.”
“What is it?”
“It’s the engineer assigned to Rita’s squad in the movie. So it’s basically … me.” A nervous laugh escaped Shasta’s lips.
It was the worst cliché of a female engineer Rita had ever seen. Rail thin, freckled, exaggerated facial features at the extreme edge of the probability curve. If there were ever a ten-millimeter-high perfectionist who would never misplace so much as a single screw or run the risk of kissing a member of the opposite sex, this was it. Of course the real, brilliant engineer it was supposedly based on probably hit her head on her own locker at least twice a day, so it just went to show that you never knew.
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.”