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uniform kicked into life, counteracting the frigid conditions engulfing him. The display in his visor lit up, detailing altitude, wind speed, rate of descent, temperature, and Aidan’s location in relation to the rest of the team. Other than those fluctuating symbols, he was dropping into a featureless black abyss.
    “Headcount,” Merit said through the implant, the free fallers still close enough for the limited range of the communications devices implanted in each man’s jaw. The operation anticipated them maintaining that proximity, but each man carried radios for greater distances and could of course link the implants to their personal wrist mounted datapads for globe spanning (but only poorly encrypted) communication. Sergeant Sinclair was burdened with the secure coms, just as SFC Massey was toting medical supplies, and Aidan the SAW.
    Guided by the display in his visor, and occasional, unnecessary instructions from Captain Merit, Aidan dove earthward, headfirst. On command, at 2,500 feet, he flattened out, slowing his fall, then opened his chute. A few lights– very few lights–interrupted the darkness below. Another nearly unpopulated backwater, another hidey-hole for the dirtbags. This particular hidey-hole was somewhere in central Africa, so he’d get to add wild animals to his list of things to watch out for on this op. Aidan drifted down, adjusting the lines to direct his descent, steering toward the destination blinking on the map overlay in his visor.
    The visor informed him of his impending rendezvous with the ground, and he caught just a dim view of a less dark mass rushing up at him. Then Aidan hit with a five-point landing that would have gotten him at least a grudging “go” from his instructors at Fort Benning. He checked himself for broken bones, then collected his chute. He thumbed the stud on his helmet that retracted the ear flaps, taking in the night sounds. He retrieved his night vision goggles and strapped them on over his helmet. The darkness took on shape: a dim greenish landscape appeared before him, computer modeling enhancing the imagery and displaying a virtual depth across the inside of his visor. The map overlay led him to the rest of the team, scattered over no more than two kilometers.
    Aidan called up a picture of his mother and father as he walked, slipped it to the upper right hand corner of the visor. He glanced at it periodically for a minute, then dismissed it before linking up with the team. Nothing. The image didn’t change anything.
    The team had come down within the planned drop zone, ten klicks from the target. “Listen up,” Captain Merit was saying as Aidan joined the gathered team. “The target is Farouq ibn Farouq, the terrorist so nice they named him twice.” A portrait briefly occupied the upper left quadrant of Aidan’s visor, showing him the visage he’d already memorized the previous day: a bearded, aquiline face, skin the color of toasted almonds. “He’s head of operations for the local Western Civilization Fan Club. Nothing fancy here: we go in, kill him, snap a picture, get bio-samples, grab any readily available intel, then scoot. Questions?”
    “How many hostiles?” Aidan asked. “Any noncombatants?” They’d been over the operation on the station, but Captain Merit had been receiving updates until they’d actually leapt from the shuttle.
    “Last intelligence estimate: twenty fighters plus about fifty women and children. So, we’re a scalpel, not a hammer. Got it?”
    Four variations of “yes, sir” answered him. They spread out, roughly ten-meters separating one man from another, and moved, so many dots on Aidan’s visor. Six dots, to be precise: five widely separated, the sixth, the Mule trotting along like a dog behind the dot representing Sinclair, the Mule’s electric engine a faint background whine, audible only to one listening for it.
    It was a ghostly landscape, this eerie scrub land, portrayed in shades of green, and oddly