I sighed. “He’s not gonna have us out there weaving baskets, is he?”

Yonabaru shook his head. “Maybe we can all do a group hug. Fucking asshole.”

I knew where this ended. I’d dreamed all this, too.

After their defeat a year and a half ago at the Battle of Okinawa Beach, the Japanese Corps made it a matter of honor to recapture a little island perched off the coast of the Boso Peninsula, a place named Kotoiushi. With a foothold there, the Mimics were only a stone’s throw away from Tokyo. The Imperial Palace and central government retreated and ruled from Nagano, but there wasn’t any way to relocate the economic engine that was Japan’s largest city.

The Defense Ministry knew that Japan’s future was riding on the outcome of this operation, so in addition to mustering twentyfive thousand Jackets, an endless stream of overeager generals had been pooling in this little base on the Flower Line that led down Boso Peninsula. They’d even decided to allow Americans, Special Operators, into the game; the U.S. hadn’t been invited to the party at Okinawa.

The Americans probably didn’t give a damn whether or not Tokyo was reduced to a smoking wasteland, but letting the industrial area responsible for producing the lightest, toughest, composite armor plating fall to the Mimics was out of the question. Seventy percent of the parts that went into a state-of-the-art Jacket came from China, but the suits still couldn’t be made without Japanese technology. So convincing the Americans to come hadn’t been difficult.

The catch was that with foreign troops came tighter security. Suddenly there were checks on things like missing alcohol that base security would have turned a blind eye to before. When the brass found out what had been going on, they were royally pissed.