That was when Rita's eyes met that challenge from the field, that gaze bearing the weight of the world. There was something about the kid that Rita liked. She started walking toward him.
She strode with purpose, each step a perfect movement designed to propel a Jacket across a battlefield with total efficiency. She advanced across the field effortlessly and without a sound. To get 100 percent out of a Jacket, a soldier had to be able to walk across a room full of eggs without cracking a single one. That meant being able to perfectly distribute their body weight with every step.
The soldier was still staring at Rita. She walked right to him, then made a ninety—degree turn and headed toward the tent where the brigadier general was sitting. She gave him one regulation salute.
The brigadier general cast a doubtful glance at Rita. Rita was a sergeant major by rank, but she was also in the U.S. corps, so their actual relative places in military hierarchy were a little muddy.
Rita remembered this man. He had been attached at the hip to the general who had made a beeline to shake Rita's hand at the start of the frivolous reception held to welcome the Special Forces. There were plenty of officers who had climbed the ranks without ever fighting on the front lines, but this one seemed to have a special love for grandstanding and ass—kissing.
They spoke briefly, the general seemingly bemused and Rita's stance and body language well—practiced. Then Rita returned to the field, walking past the ranks of men who seemed to bow before her. She chose a spot beside the soldier who'd been staring daggers at her and started her iso push—up. She could feel the heat of his body radiating through the chill air between them.
The soldier didn't move. Rita didn't move. The sun hung high in the sky, slowly roasting their skin. Rita spoke in a low voice only the soldier beside her could hear:
"Do I have something on my face?"
"Not that I can see."
Other than a slightly odd intonation, the soldier's Burst was clear and easy to understand. Nothing like back in North Africa. People from the former French colonies couldn't speak Burst to save their lives.
Burst English, or simply Burst, was a language created to deal with the problem of communication in an army comprised of soldiers from dozens of countries. It had a pared—down vocabulary and as few grammatical irregularities as possible. When they drafted the language, they deliberately struck all the profanities from the official vocabulary list, but you couldn't keep a bunch of soldiers from adding "fuck" in its various noun, verb, and adjective forms to everything anyway.
"You've been staring at me for a while now."
"I guess I have," he said.
"There something you want from me?"
"Nothing I want to discuss like this."
"Then let's wait until this is done."
"Shit—for—brains Kiriya! You're slipping!" the lieutenant barked. Rita, with the disinterested expression of someone who'd never had a need for human contact her entire life, continued her iso push—up.
Iso push—ups were a lot rougher than they looked. Beads of sweat formed along your hairline, streamed past your temples, ran into your eyes—making them burn from the salt—and traced the line of your neck before falling from your chest. Having to endure that itch as it makes its way down your body was a lot like what a soldier had to endure encased in a Jacket. This samurai training isn't completely worthless after all, Rita decided.
When things got too hard to bear, it was best to let your mind wander. Rita let her thoughts drift from her own body's screams of protest to the surroundings. The brigadier general from the General Staff Office looked baffled by the intruder in his proceedings. For him, a man who had never experienced a moment of real armed conflict, maybe this training field, with its gentle ocean breezes, was part of the war. To people who had never breathed in that mixture of blood, dust, and burning metal that pervaded a battlefield, it was easy to imagine that deployment was war, that training was war, that climbing some career ladder was war. There was only one person for whom the war extended to that tranquil day before the battle: a woman named Rita Vrataski and her time loops.
Rita had often dreamt that someday she would come across another person who experienced the loops. She'd even come up with a phrase they could use to identify themselves to each other. A phrase only Rita knew. A phrase the two of them would share.
For another person to be caught in a time loop, it would mean that someone other than Rita had destroyed a Mimic server by accident. Just as Rita was forced to leave people outside the time loop behind, this person would have no choice but to leave her behind. He would be alone.
She might not be able to travel through the time loop with him—though she also might be able to, and the thought terrified her—but she could give him advice either way. Share his solitude. Tell him how to break out of the loop, knowledge it had taken Rita 211 deaths to learn. He would fight through his doubts, the way Rita had. He would become a great warrior.
Deep in a quiet corner of Rita's heart, she was sure no one would ever come to tell her the words only she knew.
The Mimic tachyon signal was the pinnacle of an alien technology, a technology that had enabled them to conquer the vastness of space. Rita's entrapment in the time loop during the battle to recapture Florida had been an impossible stroke of luck for humanity. If not for that chance occurrence, the earth would have fallen to xenoforming. Not just humans, but virtually every species on the planet, would already be extinct.
Rita's fame grew with each battle, and her loneliness with it. She had broken out of the time loop, but she felt as though she were still reliving the same day. Her one hope was that humanity's victory, the day when every last Mimic had been blasted to extinction, would somehow rid her of her terrible isolation. Until then, she would continue to play her unique role in the conflict.
Rita didn't mind the battles. She didn't have to think to fight. When she climbed into her red Jacket, the sadness, the laughter, the memory that haunted her more than the rest—it all slipped away. The battlefield, swirling with smoke and gunpowder, was Rita's home.
PT ended less than an hour later. The general, the bile in his mouth forgotten, hurried off to the barracks.
As Rita stood, the man beside her staggered to his feet. He wasn't particularly tall for a Jacket jockey. He was young, but he wore his fatigues as though he'd been born in them. His clothes looked as though they'd just come from the factory, so there was something strangely jarring about his appearance. His lips were twisted in a Mona Lisa smile that did a good job of concealing his age.
The number 157 was scrawled in Arabic numerals on the back of his hand. Rita didn't know what it meant, but it was an odd thing to do. Odd enough that Rita didn't think she'd be forgetting him anytime soon. She had heard of soldiers taping their blood type to the soles of their feet in the days before Jackets were standard—issue, but she'd never heard of a soldier who kept notes in ballpoint pen on the back of his hand.
"So you wanted to talk. What is it?"
"Ah, right," he said.
"Well? Get on with it, soldier. I'm a patient girl, but there's a battle tomorrow, and I have things to do."
"I, uh, have an answer to your question." He hesitated like a high school drama student reading from a bad script. "Japanese restaurants don't charge for green tea."
Rita Vrataski, the savior of humanity, the Valkyrie, the nineteen—year—old girl, let her mask slip.
The Full Metal Bitch began to cry.
Chapter 4
