“Okay. First things first. I want you to take your Merge unit and throw it in the mud.”

No one moved.

“Is there a problem?”

Grayson was first to speak up. “We were told that these are incredibly expensive prototypes and that they were to come back without so much as a scratch.”

“Well, those orders have been revised. Now get them into the mud. And stomp on them until I tell you to stop.”

The four non-combat soldiers obeyed, but as delicately as possible. Grayson, understanding the point of the exercise, threw himself into the air and slammed his boot down on his unit so hard it completely disappeared into the soft ground.

Smith turned and contemplated their objective, looking for a sign of the enemy while the splashing and stomping went on behind him. It was really just a test of manufacturing consistency, since he’d already performed a much more stringent evaluation of his own unit.

“Okay,” he said, putting on an armband that designated him as an observer. “Saddle up.”

* * *

CORPORAL GRAYSON HAD TAKEN de facto command of the group and was doing a surprisingly good job of adjusting to the reality of his team’s dismal abilities. He kept them on easier terrain and spread out at five-meter intervals.

There was still more than a little bit of tripping, heavy breathing, and panicked drops to the ground, but they were managing to move in the general direction of their objective and no one had yet twisted an ankle or stroked out. A minor miracle as far as Smith was concerned.

He hung back a bit, focusing on a semi-transparent overlay of the battlefield in the right upper corner of his vision. His people were shown as dots in varying shades of green based on their military records—Grayson’s was predictably dark and rich, conveying his combat experience and other achievements. The others were significantly lighter, with his skinny programmer semi-translucent.

More interesting, though were the red dots that he was privy to as the leader of this exercise—a Delta ambush that his team was unwittingly strolling into. Smith switched to vision enhancement mode and let the computer automatically calculate the optimal mix of filters as he searched the trees ahead. The thermal imaging blinded him for a moment, confused by the rain, but it immediately faded and left him with primarily the chlorophyll overlay. Combined with outline enhancement and light amplification of the shadows, it allowed him to immediately spot the shape of an arm sticking out from beneath a fallen tree.

But he wasn’t the only one.

“Do you see that?” Stacy said quietly over her tooth mike. “What is it? One o’clock.”

Incredible. Despite being about as stealthy as a herd of buffalo, they had identified a highly trained, dug-in enemy before they themselves had been spotted.

“Everyone stop and get down,” Grayson said. “Nice job, Lieutenant. That’s an arm. And we’re gonna blow it off. But first we’re gonna get a little closer. Everybody move forward real quiet. This isn’t a race. There’s no such thing as too slow. We’re looking for additional targets.”