"… Lieutenant?"
"My little story boring you?"
"I'm all right now, Lieutenant. I'm sorry. It won't happen again."
"Hey, we all need a break sometimes. Especially in a marathon like this. Just a little more, it'll be time to hit the showers. I promise." He finished speaking and moved on to the next soldier. Rita rejoined the fray.
And then she saw it. One Mimic that stood out from the rest. It didn't look different from the others—another bloated dead frog in a sea of waterlogged amphibians. But there was something about this one that set it apart. Maybe spending so much time in such proximity to death had sharpened senses she didn't know she had, revealing secrets that lay hidden from normal sight.
When she killed that Mimic, the time loop began.
There was always one Mimic at the heart of the network, a queen of sorts. Its outward appearance was the same as the others. Just as all pigs looked alike to someone not in the business of raising pigs, the difference between that Mimic and the rest was one only Rita could see. Somehow, as she fought and slew countless Mimics, she began to tell them apart. It was something subliminal, bordering on instinct. She couldn't have explained the difference if she tried.
The easiest place to hide a tree was in the forest.
The easiest place to hide an officer was in among the grunts.
The Mimic at the heart of each pack was hiding in plain sight. Think of it as the server of the network.
When you kill the server, the Mimic network emits a specific type of signal. The scientists would later identify it as a tachyon pulse, or some other particle that could travel through time, but Rita didn't really understand any of that. The important part was that the signal emitted by Mimics that had lost their server traveled back in time to warn them of the imminent danger they faced.
The danger appeared in the memory of the Mimics as a portent, a window into the future. The Mimics that received this vision could modify their actions to safely navigate the pending danger. This was only one of many technologies discovered by that advanced race from a distant star. The process, built into the design of each crèche machine, served as a warning system to prevent some freak accident from upsetting a xenoforming plan that had taken so long to place in motion.
But the Mimics weren't the only ones who could benefit from these signals. Kill a Mimic server while in electrical contact with it, and a human would receive the same gift of foresight meant for the network. The tachyon signal sent into the past doesn't distinguish between Mimic and human, and when it came, humans perceived the portent as a hyperrealistic dream, accurate in every detail.
To truly defeat a Mimic strike force, you have to first destroy their network and all the backups it contains, then destroy the server Mimic. Otherwise, no matter how many different strategies you try, the Mimics will always develop a counterstrategy that ensures their survival.
1. Destroy the antenna.
2. Massacre every Mimic being used as backup for the network.
3. Once the possibility for transmissions to the past has been eliminated, destroy the server.
Three simple steps to escape to the future. It took Rita 211 passes through the loop to figure them out.
No one Rita told would believe her. The army was used to dealing in concrete facts. No one was interested in far—fetched stories involving time loops. When Rita finally broke out of the loop and reached the future, she learned that Arthur Hendricks had died. He was one of twenty—eight thousand killed in the battle.
In the two days Rita had spent in an endless circle of fighting, she'd managed to research the history of war, scour the feeds for information about the Mimics, and enlist a goofball engineer to make her a battle axe. She had succeeded in breaking the loop, in changing her own future, yet Hendricks' name still ended up with the letters KIA printed beside it.
Rita finally understood. This was what war really was. Every soldier who died in battle was nothing more than another figure in the calculus of estimated casualties. Their hardships, joys, and fears never entered into the equation. Some would live, others would die. It was all up to the impartial god of death called probability. With the benefit of her experience in the time loop, Rita would be able to beat the odds for some and save certain people in the future. But there would always be those she could not save. People with fathers, mothers, friends, maybe even brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, children. If she could only repeat the 211th loop, maybe she could find a way to save Hendricks—but at what cost? Rita Vrataski was alone in the time loop, and in order for her to make it out, someone would have to die.
Hendricks made one last phone call before that battle. He learned he had just become a father, and he was upset that the picture of his kid he'd printed out and taped inside his Jacket had gotten dirty. He wanted to go home, but he put the mission first. Rita had heard the phone conversation 212 times now. She knew it by heart.
Rita was awarded a medal for her distinguished service in the battle—the Order of the Valkyrie, given to soldiers who killed over one hundred Mimics in a single battle. They had created the honor just for her. And why not? The only soldier on the entire planet who could kill that many Mimics in a single battle was Rita Vrataski.
When the president pinned the gleaming medal on Rita's chest, he lauded her as an angel of vengeance on the battlefield and declared her a national treasure. She had paid for that medal with the blood of her brothers and sisters.
She didn't shed a tear. Angels don't cry.
5
Rita was redeployed. The name Full Metal Bitch and the awe it inspired rippled through the ranks. A top secret research team was created to study the time loop. After poking, prodding, and probing Rita, the lab coats drafted a report claiming it was possible that the loops had altered Rita's brain, that this was the cause of her headaches, and half a dozen other things that didn't actually answer any questions. If it meant wiping the Mimics off the face of the earth, she didn't care if their space—feeds split her skull in two.
The president had given Rita authority to act with total autonomy on the battlefield. She spoke less and less with the other members of her squad. She had a rental locker in New York where she stored the medals that kept pouring in.
6
Rita was stationed in Europe. The war went on.
7
North Africa.
When Rita heard their next assignment would be on some islands in the Far East, she was glad. Asian corpses would be a fresh change from the usual blacks and whites of the Western front. Of course, no matter how much raw fish they ate over there, the blood still came gushing out the same shade of red when a Mimic javelin ripped up a man and his Jacket. When all was said and done, she'd probably tire of seeing them, too.
8
Rita was familiar with cormorant fishing, a traditional Japanese technique. The fishermen tie a snare at the base of the trained cormorant's neck just tight enough to prevent it from swallowing any of the larger fish it catches, and then play out enough rope to enable the bird to dive into the water and fish. Once the cormorant has a fish, the fishermen pull the bird back and make it spit out its catch. Rita felt that her relationship to the army was a lot like a cormorant's relationship to a fisherman.
Rita was in the army because that was how she made her living. Her job was to go out and kill Mimics and bring their corpses back to her masters. In return, they provided her with everything she needed to live and took care of life's little annoyances without her ever having to know they were there. It was a give and take relationship, and in her mind it was fair.