His fingers had been compromised by the cold but he still managed to get the unit off the man’s belt and crawl out of range of his head studs. He paused for a moment, trying to prepare himself before contacting the unit with his own skin and dropping onto his stomach in the mud.

As far as he knew, he was the only person who had any significant experience trying to use units set up for other people—experiments that had been necessary to see what would happen if the enemy gained access to one from a dead or injured soldier.

The research had been done only in an effort to be thorough—a U.S. Merge would be unusable by the enemy due to the fact that, beyond being indescribably unpleasant, the military network wouldn’t recognize their brain wave signature and would therefore deny access. He was on the army grid, though. In fact, he more or less controlled it.

The nausea started immediately, growing in strength as the Merge tried to link up with an unfamiliar mind. He knew from experience that this imperfect connection was possible. It would cause a momentary hesitation on the man’s teammates’ units and then somewhat garbled data that would look like a network issue.

After fifteen seconds, his vision swam sickeningly and the only thing keeping him from throwing up was the near hypothermia. His record for staying connected like this was thirty-nine seconds and it had involved some of the worst suffering he’d ever endured. This time, though, that wasn’t going to be anywhere near long enough.

Something flickered in his peripheral vision and a moment later distorted lettering confirmed his identity as “Lt. Col. Jon Smith” and gave him a level of access that only he and perhaps Dresner had.

Two distorted green dots appeared on an overhead of the battlefield, displaying the position of the paralyzed man’s teammates. There was a flash from one of them that represented rounds fired, but he could barely hear the shots over the metallic screech caused by the computer trying to funnel improperly encoded signals to his auditory cortex.

Using the menus was incredibly difficult, but he managed to shut down the voice port and press a hand to his throat mike.

“Randi…Are you…Are you still alive?”

“Barely,” came the nearly unintelligible response. “If I show so much as a thumbnail, these sons of bitches damn near shoot it off.”

Another flash came from one of the dots on his overhead and he heard her swear angrily.

“Are you hit?”

“Just a graze. But next time they’re going to kill me. I can’t see shit and they see everything. If you’ve got a plan, sometime in the next ten seconds would be good.”