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.