Butterfly of War

I don't really like the ending, but I've been working on it on and off for almost a year...enough is enough. Besides, it's depressing.

Sgt. Morris ducked back into the foxhole as a shell exploded nearby. She felt the ground shake under her; that had been a close one. Yet even the sudden pulse of adrenaline seemed oddly muted, its effect blunted by familiarity, terror become an old, comfortable friend.
How long had this war been going on? She couldn’t remember. It seemed a lifetime - an endless blur of years whipping past in these trenches, in those bunkers, in the other foxholes. She remembered pauses, brief respites in one or another identical field hospital, poked and prodded by interchangeable medical personnel until she was declared fit to fight again and sent off to another front. It could have been the same one; she didn’t care. The faces were always different, but they might as well have been identical. Sooner or later, they, too, would be blown to pieces or carried off by the interchangeable medics.
She vaguely remembered the occasional “pep talks” they were required to attend. Most of them she had managed to doze through, but she had a couple faint memories of the officers calling the soldiers on the other side of no-man’s-land different names. It didn’t matter; to her they were simply “the enemy”, the faceless mob trying to blow her up and that she tried to blow up in turn.
The fresh-faced, overeager young private next to her poked his head up, presumably to try to get a shot. Reflexively, almost habitually, she turned away enough to avoid getting splattered with his brains when the enemy snipers caught him. Turning back, she picked up the weapon which had fallen from his still-warm hand, made a futile attempt to wipe a little of the mess off on his uniform, and made a quick check of the battery. Still full; he hadn’t even gotten off a shot. Shrugging, she ejected it and added it to her collection of spares.
She wondered briefly why the boy had had to die, but quickly dropped that train of thought. The politicians talked about “technological advances” and “making the world safe for freedom”, but the politicians were always yammering about something. Their excuses for the endless war didn’t matter. None of it mattered. All that mattered was staying alive, surviving for one more day, one more night.
She suddenly noticed the shells hadn’t been pounding the ground for a while. She pulled the pin on a grenade and tossed it out - no need to risk getting her brains blown out if the enemy had been sneaking up on her position.
They had. She stared dumbly at the grenade for a moment as it bounced back in, her numbed brain unable to comprehend for precious seconds. By the time she turned to dive the other way, it was too late. Her last thought was “Finally…rest at last…”

She gasped and sat bolt upright in bed, heart hammering. As her pulse slowed, she looked around.
She was in another of the endless hospital wards. She must have had some serious damage; she had her own room - admittedly small, but better than the mass wards for normal injuries. There was just enough room for a cot, an IV stand, and a small table. It was a real building, too, not a tent; she must have been out quite a while this time.
She wondered what had happened. She had a vague, fading memory of a grenade, but that had been too close to survive…it occurred to her that she had been fighting too long when the war even invaded her dreams. Exhausted, she sank back into sleep.
When she woke up a second time - more peacefully - nothing had changed. She was still alone. The room had no windows, so she couldn’t even tell what time of day it was. She did, however, discover that she needed to use the bathroom.
She pulled the IV line from her arm, wincing. Standing up, she almost fell over - she felt fifty pounds heavier than usual. She cautiously crossed to the door and pulled on the handle.
It ripped out of the door.
She was too startled even to notice the door that swung open in its wake, bouncing off her toes before swinging back to hit the doorframe. She glared suspiciously at the metal in her hand.
It looked like an ordinary handle, only slightly twisted by its abrupt dislocation. There was, however, a large, ragged hole in the solid pseudowood of the door. There was a smaller one in the doorframe; apparently the door had been locked. Experimentally, she squeezed the edge of the door; a shower of wooden flakes drifted down, then a medium-sized chunk of door came off in her hand.
Huh. They were really skimping, to use such shoddy materials in hospital construction.
She stepped out into the corridor and glanced around, mentally cataloguing details. Institutional whitewashed walls, rows of closed wooden doors identical to the one that had just broken, cheap fluorescent bulbs spaced far enough apart to leave shadows between the pools of light. It stretched into the distance in either direction; about ten doors to her left was a sign with the universal male/female stick figure “restroom” symbol, to her right was nothing but empty hallway.
She headed to the restroom - about the same size as the room she had just left, with scarcely room for a sink, toilet, and hand dryer. Glancing at the mirror above the sink, she paused, arrested by the unexpectedly unfamiliar sight of her own face.
For a moment she stared uncomprehending, trying to make sense of the slightly different contours. Only then did the metallic sheen over the upper half of her face, masklike, sink in.
Fully half her face was made of some kind of metal, a blindingly bright alloy she couldn’t identify. The sculpted features were stern and forbidding, with her own natural eyes set incongruously in the sockets. She hesitantly reached up to touch her face; the metal was cool, unyielding and unfeeling. She moved down to the skin of the lower half - warm and pliant, but with a hint of that same stubborn resistance underneath, hinting at metal where bones used to be.
Tearing her gaze away from the mirror, she took stock of herself. As far as she could tell, all her bones had been replaced, as well as large patches of what used to be skin. Her hands were still covered in skin - probably fortunate, since the metal appeared to be entirely nerveless. Most of the major muscles in her body responded with a faint hesitancy that made her suspect something had been done to them as well.
She almost jumped through the roof at the sound of a brisk knock on the door - probably not just a figure of speech now, she thought with a trace of wry amusement. The knock was immediately followed by an equally brisk nurse, who ordered, “Follow me,” and strode out again without waiting for a reply.
Like a good soldier, she followed in silence. They were going to tell her whatever they told her, and in their own good time. She knew how the system worked.
Ahead, the nurse had stopped by another unmarked door. Turning around, she stated: “In here,” and hurried off in the opposite direction without a backward glance.
The room inside was furnished in standard military décor - functional and utterly boring. It appeared to be an office; the most prominent piece of furniture was a desk piled high with papers. At the sound of her entrance, a head rose up from behind the pile, revealing a harassed-looking young man sporting a captain’s bars. She wondered briefly how old he was; he looked barely into adulthood. Officers of every rank were young these days, so young…
She shook herself out of her musings and saluted, briefly wondering what would happen if her new, unruly muscles had slammed the hand into her head too hard. After a moment, the captain returned it, then gestured her to stand at ease and began rummaging through various piles. She briefly caught sight of a nameplate declaring this to be the office of Captain Stanton before it got shuffled behind a stack of papers again.
Abandoning his search, the captain turned his attention back to her. He began, “Well - ah - Sergeant Morris, I presume.”
She nodded. She had met some officers who would have demanded a properly respectful verbal response, but this one merely nodded back to himself and continued.
“No doubt you are wondering how you have come to be here. This is - ah - an excellent question. There is, however, a - ah - simple explanation.”
He paused, as if expecting an answer, or possibly collecting his thoughts. She waited.
“Some time ago, as you may remember - it was, ah, some years after you were drafted - you were assigned to a squad which was sent to the Fredericksburg hospital for a - ah - very special procedure. The details are - ah - classified, but the essential fact is that there is a, for lack of a better word, recorder at the base of your skull. When you were - ah - killed two years ago, the surgeons were able to freeze your remains until they could repair the damage and use the recorder to - ah - restore you.”
He cleared his throat and began rummaging again as she digested the information. Finally she said, “Sir?”
“Hmmm?”
“May I infer from this that wh - if I die again, the doctors will be able to repeat the procedure?”
“As long as the device is intact, yes, you will be able to continue fighting. You will be reassigned after two weeks’ recuperation. For family and freedom!”
“For family and freedom!” she managed to say through clenched teeth, with the ritual salute.
Alone in her uncomfortable military-issue cot that night, she thought. She saw the future - an endless wave of identical battles against faceless enemies, once again waiting for death. But this time even death would be no relief. There was nothing, no faith, no hope.
She would fight, of course. What else could she do?

“Recuperation”, he called it. “Training from hell” was more like it. Two weeks of twenty-hour days, learning her new abilities - learning to move again, to compensate for the unexpected weight; learning to work around the more limited range of motion on her joints; learning to use built-in weapons. Apparently someone in charge had decided new, unlimited physical strength equated to no need for sleep. By the time she got the orders to ship out, her only thought was that she’d better be able to rest on the way, or she’d fall asleep in the trenches.
Her new foxhole-mates were green recruits fresh from Basic, who regarded her with unmitigated awe. She was theoretically in charge of them; in practice, she could only tolerate their ineptitude - ignorance, she corrected herself, when she was feeling generous - for so long before she had to go shoot things to relieve the stress.
They discovered very quickly that she was a lot tougher than they were, and tended to hide behind her if they had to leave the trenches. This did not protect them when they were ordered to make a frontal assault on an enemy weapons storage hole. She survived, projectiles and energy bouncing off her metal skin and bones, leaving painful scars on the human skin covering those bones. No more than two of her flock of ducklings made it. They were promptly replaced by a new flock.
She estimated they had gone through at least a hundred identical fresh-faced recruits by the end of three months, when she was sent on a raid to destroy a new weapon the enemy had supposedly made. They had. Whatever it was, it emitted a golden beam that carved straight through her metal. She blacked out.

When she woke up again, it took her a few minutes to remember she shouldn’t have. She groaned, throwing an arm up to cover her eyes. She jumped at the feel of her skin.
Eying the golden fur that appeared to be covering her arm, she hauled herself out of bed. Once again, she was in a military-issue hospital, so she found the restroom quickly. No problems with smashing doors this time; her strength seemed to be about what it was before.
She examined her face critically in the mirror. The metal was gone, replaced by a pelt somewhere between sparse fur and thick, if ordinary, human hair. Her pupils were oddly shaped, her facial structure seemed subtly off, and there was a distinctly mane-like appearance to her hair. She examined her fingers, but no such luck; though her nails were narrow and unusually curved, there was nothing under them. She rolled her eyes and turned away.
This form only lasted a month before a land mine took her out. After that, she lost track of the time that passed and the number of changes they put her through. There were cyborgs with an incredible variety of weaponry built into them. There were hybrids with varying degrees of animal genes. There were animals with mechanical augmentations. There were monstrous creatures that were part computer, part insect, part mammalian, part aquatic, part plant, and all horrifying. There was even an insubstantial ghost-like form. (It turned out to be remarkably vulnerable to electricity.) She didn’t know how they managed to attach her recorder, or how they ever managed to retrieve it from some of the situations that killed her. But they did.

The morning of the last day of her life, she woke up on an uncomfortable cot just like all the others. But for the first time, she was not alone. An older man with an impressive number of stars on his uniform was seated by her bed.
As soon as he saw her eyes open, he said without preamble, “Your country needs you.”
Oh no, not again.
Ignoring the way her head fell back onto the pillow with a barely-suppressed groan, he continued, “We have an urgent mission. We have discovered that an enemy commander will be staying in a certain hotel tonight, almost completely unprotected. We need someone to move in and take him out. You have a long and stellar record with stealth missions, so we feel you would be best for the job. The helicopter leaves in an hour. Good luck.”
He saluted and marched out without waiting for an acknowledgment, or any other kind of response. This was probably a good thing, as her first response was unprintable and would probably have gotten her severely reprimanded if the officer had heard it.
Her current form was so normal, it felt strange. She seemed to be an older woman, mid-50s maybe, with dark brown hair plentifully sprinkled with silver. She was dressed in what she guessed was a hotel uniform - soothing blue jacket and skirt, with a nametag pinned neatly to one side of the jacket. She supposed she should feel uncomfortable that someone had dressed her while she was unconscious. She didn’t. It didn’t feel like her body.
Testing nerve combinations that in other bodies had produced hidden blades or other fun toys, she was startled when her right index finger began leaking a clear fluid from under the nail. Cautiously, she touched a drop to her tongue. It didn’t taste like anything in particular. She guessed it was poison. There seemed to be no other hidden secrets to this form.
Shortly a bored young private came to lead her to the plane and give her a folder. During the ride, she browsed the few sheets of paper it contained - a layout of the hotel, a picture of her target, and precise instructions on where to go and when. The final paper contained the specs of her new form. As she suspected, it was completely ordinary aside from the clear poison, which seemed to be a fast-acting neurotoxin. She was mildly interested to note they’d made her immune to it.

Her entry went exactly as planned. She walked into the staff entrance, found a cart bearing covered plates which emitted a tantalizing odor, and pushed it through the hallways to the target’s room. The two guards he had were flanking the door. As she approached, the smaller one - only the size of a wall - curtly motioned her to stop, then waved a wand of some sort over her while his companion tested the food. He pulled an official-looking badge from her pocket and ran it through a scanner. Apparently everything was clean, because they both stepped back to their places and motioned to her to proceed.
The room’s sole occupant, the target, looked up as she entered, with an alert expression that turned rapidly to interest as he noticed her cart. He was younger than she’d thought, early 20’s at most. As she began to put plates on the table, he put aside the screen he’d been studying and came to sit down. He smiled as she handed him a clean plate and silverware, saying, “Thank you.”
She started removing the covers from the dishes. “Would you like something to drink with that?”
“What? Oh yeah, sure. Just grab a bottle from the fridge.”
She found a bottle of what appeared to be wine, opened it, and poured out a glass. As she carried it back to the table, she concentrated, and three drops fell from her finger into the glass.
He smiled as she placed it in front of him. “Thanks!”
“No problem. Anything else?”
“No, I’m good.” He paused, then added, “You know, you remind me of my grandmother.”
“Thank you.” And thank you, scientists, for engineering this form to hit a weak spot. “That is, assuming you liked her.”
He laughed. “Mostly, yeah.”
He lifted the cup to his lips, and a ring on his right hand started blinking red and producing a high-pitched squeal. Instantly he dashed the cup to the ground, pulled a gun from some unseen pocket, and pointed it at her.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?”
She gave him a level look. “I was sent to kill you. Wait!” she added as his finger tightened. “I have one last request.”
He tilted his head slightly, but the gun did not fire.
She carefully knelt in front of him. “There’s something in the back of my head. Once you’ve killed me...please take it out and destroy it.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Something?”
“A recorder. I’ve had it for...what year is this?”
“2538.”
“Since 2349.” More softly, she continued, “Almost two centuries I’ve been fighting...I’m so tired." She looked up, directly into his eyes. “Save me. Please.”
He bowed his head in assent. There was something like compassion in his own eyes as his finger tightened again.
The gun fired. Everything went black for the last time.