The New Soldier
The New Soldier
By Jeff Vanderslice
Even though the heat of the alien sun blazed down on Private Immanuel Bedford and heated the air around him to 123°F, the soldier was completely comfortable, at least as far as his body was concerned. His state of mind was completely another matter. The squad had been assigned the unenvious task of clearing the enemy from the village that commanded the pass over the Huegar Mountains. Unfortunately the rebels were dug in, using hardened posts for their defense. But that was no excuse, the generals back in the capitol wanted that pass taken and the insurgents uprooted.
Bedford constantly scanned the heads-up display in front of his eyes for any new information that his sensors picked up. The system’s brain had already been loaded with all the information the skirmisher drones, satellites, and human spies could provide. The squad approached what had been assumed was the command bunker’s entrance, a former grain silo that led to a series of tunnels under the ground dug into the mountain.
With a flick of an eyebrow, Bedford cycled through all of the scans his sensor equipment could provide, but no new information was forthcoming. All looked quiet on the hillside. Then his external cameras automatically dimmed when a white-hot flashed erupted to his right. His squadmate, Eugene Hendricks had been vaporized by a stealth anti-personnel mine that had lain dormant and undetectable until the presence of the soldier activated it to fulfill its only purpose.
Immediately rounds of spent uranium began to fly through the air at the soldiers from the hillside as automatic defense gun arrays sprang to life after lying hidden under the turf. Every fourth or fifth round was a tracer like a white hot ribbon of fire arcing across the sun-drenched sky.
“Take cover!” the sergeant shouted uselessly through the squad-level communications network.
Everyone, even the rookie recruits, were already doing so, finding whatever protection was at hand. Bedford dropped behind a low wall of native adobe, but the automatic tracking system of the remotely fired guns had already located him. The wall behind which he squatted began to disintegrate under the relentless pounding of the 13mm rifled batteries. As the wall was chewed up, Bedford rolled to the right to seek shelter in the lee of a villager’s home, also made of adobe. The thicker walls of the house, built to withstand the extreme heat of the local summer as well as cold of winter, offered better protection.
“Return fire! Take out those guns!” the lieutenant in charge of the operation shouted into the comm net.
The communication was splotchy as enemy jammers sought out the transmission frequencies of the squad. The comm network automatically changed into a frequency-shifting paradigm already programmed into each fighting and auxiliary unit to defeat the rebel efforts and soon remote command and control functions were restored to their smoothly flowing state despite the fact that each byte of the transmission was broken up and spread throughout several alternating frequencies to be picked up in proper order and placed back into intelligible form by the brain of each combat unit.
Without exposing his entire body, Bedford reached an arm around the corner of the building. The automatic sights on the gun arm gave Bedford a good view of what the cameras mounted on the body could not see, projected onto the screen in front of his eyes. They also scanned and locked on the nearest and most dangerous gun array to Bedford. With no more than a flick of a gloved finger, Bedford activated his arm cannon and sent round after round of explosive tipped mini-warheads that detonated on impact. On the heads-up display Bedford watched his load of cannon shot steadily decrease until the nearest gun battery was mangled and fell silent. But there were many more still active, seeking out him and his companions.
“EMP pulse in fifteen seconds, batten down and shut down, set auto-wake for seven seconds after burst,” the lieutenant ordered.
With barely a twitch of his left wrist, Bedford entered the command. His armor completely sealed itself, drawing all essential equipment carried on the outside into internal bays before closing off the surface. All onboard electronics, including the entire brain, shut down, save for a single, hardwired, mechanical timing circuit safely encased in a Faraday cage. For Bedford, his world went dark and dead, with no sensory input or information relayed to his eyes, nerves, or head. In the heat of battle the seven seconds seemed like several lifetimes before the timer awoke the sleeping circuits one by one in a prescribed order, starting with the most basic functions first, each one tested for any failures or malfunctions before it could be brought online and integrated with the rest of the unit. Even though all this took place in a few milliseconds, to the soldiers it seemed like slowly awakening from a deep, dream-filled sleep.
Bedford found himself still crouched behind the wall of the adobe farmer’s house, his weapons, cameras, sensors, and other exterior gear already extending from the holes where they had been withdrawn before the EMP bomb had been released. Using his eyes, Bedford manually checked all systems to be sure they were online and functioning properly, not that he didn’t trust the brain, but because he had known of other soldiers who had been unintentionally damaged by a friendly EMP burst and didn’t find out about it until it was too late and their units were fried. All of Bedford’s systems aligned in the green save for a small glitch in the motors that supplied power to his right leg, which in Bedford’s experience probably was the result of some sort of mechanical problem instead of an electronics system failure. It was nothing that should slow him down but would have to be repaired once the unit could get back to a base or field maintenance facility.
The EMP pulse had silenced most but not all of the defensive perimeter around the rebel’s hardened command center, suggesting they had hardwired the controls to the underground bunker using mirrors or fiber optics.
“Report,” the sergeant ordered.
“Blue two online,” the corporal replied.
The rest of the squad on down the line answered the required roll call, although the sergeant and lieutenant could see for themselves on their own command data displays that all of the remaining units had survived the burst relatively intact.
“Sergeant, shut those guns down and advance on the silo!” the lieutenant commanded.
“Aye, sir,” the sergeant acknowledged. “Squad concentrate fire on remaining guns, acquire and locate on my command, three, two, one, now!”
As one, the entire platoon rose from their concealed positions, the integrated command circuits automatically assigning the nearest soldier to the best target, so that all of the guns were targeted with enough fire power to disable them.
Bedford used the gatling rifle in his right arm to lay down fire at a damaged but still firing gun array that was rotating and gyrating wildly, sending rounds in nearly every direction as it spun on its base and its barrels raced up and down in their tracks.
At the same time, in the lower right corner of his heads-up, Bedford noticed the external temperature of his titanium-alloy armor rise under the direct assault of unseen microwave broadcasters. This was accompanied by an increasing drain on the power supply unit to compensate and keep the internal temperature within toleration limits, using the internal cooling system. The miniature chillers located throughout the body of the exoskeleton were designed to counteract the effect of tremendous external heat in violent and inhospitable conditions and though they could not withstand a nearby thermal blast, they could withstand a barrage of microwaves or other radiation for hours before failure.
As the big guns were silenced by return fire from the squad, a second layer of defense that had lain sealed and protected from the expected EMP bomb rose from their concealed hiding places.
“Lasers!” someone on the squad’s net shouted.
Piercing beams of red light shot from helium cooled barrels. In one of the side cameras mounted on his shoulder, Bedford saw one of his squadmates take a hit in the abdomen area. The searing charge of superheated gases ignited the grenades held in the central cavity and though initially the blast was held inside by the unit’s armor, eventually it blew up, sending bits and pieces flying all over the battlefield.
“Blue four’s down!” someone shouted unnecessarily, because even if they weren’t near enough to see it in person, they saw the dead soldier’s position on their area grid go from green to red.
“Lieutenant, we can’t take this, you’ve got to call in an airstrike!” the sergeant pleaded.
“Okay,” the officer agreed. “Done. ETA five minutes and change.”
“Withdraw to safety perimeter,” the sergeant ordered.
Bedford used the cover of the farmer’s house to shield him from the enemy lasers as he retraced his steps and sought deeper cover within the abandoned village until the system told him he was safe. Then he sat and waited.
That was the hard part of the job. Several seconds of extremely intense activity, followed by prolonged bouts of inactivity.
“Here she comes,” someone said, and then Bedford could see the drone on his outboard sensors before he could see the sleek shape high in the sky coming in at supersonic speed to thwart any surface-to-air missiles that might be launched at her.
This too was over in a fraction of a second, one instant the drone was flying in overhead at an impossible speed, the next it was gone already, far on its way to the other horizon. All Bedford saw in its passing was what looked like a small ball of light that dropped from the belly of the bird and zeroed in precisely on the top of the silo. It penetrated the roof of the structure with a small cloud of dust and then there was nothing but silence.
Bedford waited for what he knew was to come. First, through the sensors in the soles of his feet he could feel the ground beneath begin to tremble. Then an area roughly thirty feet in diameter around the silo erupted in a geyser of superheated rock and soil thrown skyward to come rocketing back down like charred, black hail.
Even where he was, deep back in the town, bits of rock and fused soil rained down on Bedford, though the impacts on his titanium-alloy armor were nothing more than minor sensory input. Through the external audio inputs he heard a high-pitched screaming and raised the cameras atop his head to gaze at the sky. He saw a car-sized chunk of rock fall from the heavens to demolish a hovertruck belonging to a farmer or a transporter.
His attention temporarily distracted by that, Bedford was brought back to the battle by the voice in his ear from the comm net.
“Holy cow, look at that, they’re boiling out like fire ants.”
Checking the area grid on his heads-up, Bedford saw purple tagged enemy units rising from the impact crater of the drone’s bomb using short-range jumpjets, automatically targeting and firing as they came in clumsy but controlled leaps.
“Hold your ground, the cavalry’s coming,” the lieutenant assured them.
Small pings began to ring off the armored exo-skeleton of Bedford’s unit as he was targeted by two rebels who landed in the town square near him. He used both right and left arms, sending out his own hail of both cannon and rifle fire to defend himself, watching his store of cannon rounds slowly diminish towards nothing.
One of the rounds, however, found its mark and slammed into chest of one of the insurgents, buckling the armor inward and sending the unit flying backwards into the wall of a store on the town’s main square, demolishing it.
Too late he saw a shoulder-mounted weapon on the second rebel’s unit fire out a small homing missile trailing a fine wire. He knew what was coming and using all the power he could coax out of his servo-motors prepared to jump himself. That was when the nagging problem in his right leg failed him. He could almost feel it in his own leg as something snapped deep inside the armor of the combat unit’s leg. The series of motors, transformers, and power-boosters shut down as a safety precaution when the affected unit shut itself down, leaving Bedford helpless and unable to move.
He continued to fire his right arm gatling gun at the enemy unit, knowing it was ineffective but hoping for some sort of miracle or fluke that would disable his opponent just as he had been disabled by a faulty motor or routing unit. But it didn’t happen.
Precisely two feet from him, the small, bird-like missile sprung open with a net. Small weights on its perimeter spread the net out to its full diameter, and like a thin spider web, the fabric attached itself to his chest. An electric shock circulated throughout his entire being and then everything went black as all systems short-circuited and died.
With a start, Bedford found himself back in the waking world as all connections automatically shut down and disengaged with the death of his unit. With his gloved hands, he removed the visor over his eyes and looked at the quiet, sterile, white room. Under harsh overhead lighting, the rest of his squad still rested in their couches, only slight, subtle movements of their arms, hands, feet, and legs betraying the fact that they were still fighting while Bedford had been knocked out of the action like the other two members of the squad before him. Cool air blew over him from the air-conditioning vent overhead.
As per protocol, a medical attendant rushed over to him to see if everything was okay. Bedford brushed the man off, after all he was only a civilian under contract to the Republic, not a soldier.
“Give me another unit!” Bedford shouted to one of the technicians who monitored the equipment.
“There’s no more in reserve,” the tech told him harshly. He himself had his hands full carefully scrutinizing the readouts on all of the other units located miles away doing the actual fighting under waldo-control of the soldiers in the command ship. He and his crew continually made minute adjustments to their own control boards to keep the fighting units operational at a distance.
Bedford knew the only way he could get back in the fight was if one of his squadmates physically took ill on one of the control couches and needed to be replaced, in which case, with a flip of a technician’s switch, control of that man’s fighting unit could be switched over to any other couch not already occupied with an active participant. That was very unlikely. Soldiers never got hurt anymore, although some went mad or had breakdowns. Only their remotely controlled, robotic, fighting units got damaged, put out of action, or destroyed. The soldiers themselves rarely died except in direct attacks upon their command bunker or station by similar enemy robotic units.
“What happened to my unit?” Bedford demanded, as he began to strip away the command wires still attached to his muscles that controlled the movements of his now disabled assault unit.
One of the techs deigned to answer him without even looking up from his board. “Lost a server in your articulation and locomotion band.”
“Welcome to the walking wounded,” said one of the other soldiers whose unit had been lost. He returned from the refreshment dispenser with a cup of coffee and sat back down on his couch, completely relaxed. “There ain’t nothing you can do.”
Bedford wanted to be back in the fight, but without another able unit to patch in to his control couch, the other soldier was right, there was nothing he could do. So he followed the example of the second disabled soldier, the one whose unit had been vaporized with the first mine. Reaching for the visor resting in his lap where he had dropped it to demand reassignment to a different, undamaged unit, Bedford put the eye-blinder back on his head and rejoined the battle. Although all he could do was observe through the squad’s intact command net, instead of actively participate.
By Jeff Vanderslice
Even though the heat of the alien sun blazed down on Private Immanuel Bedford and heated the air around him to 123°F, the soldier was completely comfortable, at least as far as his body was concerned. His state of mind was completely another matter. The squad had been assigned the unenvious task of clearing the enemy from the village that commanded the pass over the Huegar Mountains. Unfortunately the rebels were dug in, using hardened posts for their defense. But that was no excuse, the generals back in the capitol wanted that pass taken and the insurgents uprooted.
Bedford constantly scanned the heads-up display in front of his eyes for any new information that his sensors picked up. The system’s brain had already been loaded with all the information the skirmisher drones, satellites, and human spies could provide. The squad approached what had been assumed was the command bunker’s entrance, a former grain silo that led to a series of tunnels under the ground dug into the mountain.
With a flick of an eyebrow, Bedford cycled through all of the scans his sensor equipment could provide, but no new information was forthcoming. All looked quiet on the hillside. Then his external cameras automatically dimmed when a white-hot flashed erupted to his right. His squadmate, Eugene Hendricks had been vaporized by a stealth anti-personnel mine that had lain dormant and undetectable until the presence of the soldier activated it to fulfill its only purpose.
Immediately rounds of spent uranium began to fly through the air at the soldiers from the hillside as automatic defense gun arrays sprang to life after lying hidden under the turf. Every fourth or fifth round was a tracer like a white hot ribbon of fire arcing across the sun-drenched sky.
“Take cover!” the sergeant shouted uselessly through the squad-level communications network.
Everyone, even the rookie recruits, were already doing so, finding whatever protection was at hand. Bedford dropped behind a low wall of native adobe, but the automatic tracking system of the remotely fired guns had already located him. The wall behind which he squatted began to disintegrate under the relentless pounding of the 13mm rifled batteries. As the wall was chewed up, Bedford rolled to the right to seek shelter in the lee of a villager’s home, also made of adobe. The thicker walls of the house, built to withstand the extreme heat of the local summer as well as cold of winter, offered better protection.
“Return fire! Take out those guns!” the lieutenant in charge of the operation shouted into the comm net.
The communication was splotchy as enemy jammers sought out the transmission frequencies of the squad. The comm network automatically changed into a frequency-shifting paradigm already programmed into each fighting and auxiliary unit to defeat the rebel efforts and soon remote command and control functions were restored to their smoothly flowing state despite the fact that each byte of the transmission was broken up and spread throughout several alternating frequencies to be picked up in proper order and placed back into intelligible form by the brain of each combat unit.
Without exposing his entire body, Bedford reached an arm around the corner of the building. The automatic sights on the gun arm gave Bedford a good view of what the cameras mounted on the body could not see, projected onto the screen in front of his eyes. They also scanned and locked on the nearest and most dangerous gun array to Bedford. With no more than a flick of a gloved finger, Bedford activated his arm cannon and sent round after round of explosive tipped mini-warheads that detonated on impact. On the heads-up display Bedford watched his load of cannon shot steadily decrease until the nearest gun battery was mangled and fell silent. But there were many more still active, seeking out him and his companions.
“EMP pulse in fifteen seconds, batten down and shut down, set auto-wake for seven seconds after burst,” the lieutenant ordered.
With barely a twitch of his left wrist, Bedford entered the command. His armor completely sealed itself, drawing all essential equipment carried on the outside into internal bays before closing off the surface. All onboard electronics, including the entire brain, shut down, save for a single, hardwired, mechanical timing circuit safely encased in a Faraday cage. For Bedford, his world went dark and dead, with no sensory input or information relayed to his eyes, nerves, or head. In the heat of battle the seven seconds seemed like several lifetimes before the timer awoke the sleeping circuits one by one in a prescribed order, starting with the most basic functions first, each one tested for any failures or malfunctions before it could be brought online and integrated with the rest of the unit. Even though all this took place in a few milliseconds, to the soldiers it seemed like slowly awakening from a deep, dream-filled sleep.
Bedford found himself still crouched behind the wall of the adobe farmer’s house, his weapons, cameras, sensors, and other exterior gear already extending from the holes where they had been withdrawn before the EMP bomb had been released. Using his eyes, Bedford manually checked all systems to be sure they were online and functioning properly, not that he didn’t trust the brain, but because he had known of other soldiers who had been unintentionally damaged by a friendly EMP burst and didn’t find out about it until it was too late and their units were fried. All of Bedford’s systems aligned in the green save for a small glitch in the motors that supplied power to his right leg, which in Bedford’s experience probably was the result of some sort of mechanical problem instead of an electronics system failure. It was nothing that should slow him down but would have to be repaired once the unit could get back to a base or field maintenance facility.
The EMP pulse had silenced most but not all of the defensive perimeter around the rebel’s hardened command center, suggesting they had hardwired the controls to the underground bunker using mirrors or fiber optics.
“Report,” the sergeant ordered.
“Blue two online,” the corporal replied.
The rest of the squad on down the line answered the required roll call, although the sergeant and lieutenant could see for themselves on their own command data displays that all of the remaining units had survived the burst relatively intact.
“Sergeant, shut those guns down and advance on the silo!” the lieutenant commanded.
“Aye, sir,” the sergeant acknowledged. “Squad concentrate fire on remaining guns, acquire and locate on my command, three, two, one, now!”
As one, the entire platoon rose from their concealed positions, the integrated command circuits automatically assigning the nearest soldier to the best target, so that all of the guns were targeted with enough fire power to disable them.
Bedford used the gatling rifle in his right arm to lay down fire at a damaged but still firing gun array that was rotating and gyrating wildly, sending rounds in nearly every direction as it spun on its base and its barrels raced up and down in their tracks.
At the same time, in the lower right corner of his heads-up, Bedford noticed the external temperature of his titanium-alloy armor rise under the direct assault of unseen microwave broadcasters. This was accompanied by an increasing drain on the power supply unit to compensate and keep the internal temperature within toleration limits, using the internal cooling system. The miniature chillers located throughout the body of the exoskeleton were designed to counteract the effect of tremendous external heat in violent and inhospitable conditions and though they could not withstand a nearby thermal blast, they could withstand a barrage of microwaves or other radiation for hours before failure.
As the big guns were silenced by return fire from the squad, a second layer of defense that had lain sealed and protected from the expected EMP bomb rose from their concealed hiding places.
“Lasers!” someone on the squad’s net shouted.
Piercing beams of red light shot from helium cooled barrels. In one of the side cameras mounted on his shoulder, Bedford saw one of his squadmates take a hit in the abdomen area. The searing charge of superheated gases ignited the grenades held in the central cavity and though initially the blast was held inside by the unit’s armor, eventually it blew up, sending bits and pieces flying all over the battlefield.
“Blue four’s down!” someone shouted unnecessarily, because even if they weren’t near enough to see it in person, they saw the dead soldier’s position on their area grid go from green to red.
“Lieutenant, we can’t take this, you’ve got to call in an airstrike!” the sergeant pleaded.
“Okay,” the officer agreed. “Done. ETA five minutes and change.”
“Withdraw to safety perimeter,” the sergeant ordered.
Bedford used the cover of the farmer’s house to shield him from the enemy lasers as he retraced his steps and sought deeper cover within the abandoned village until the system told him he was safe. Then he sat and waited.
That was the hard part of the job. Several seconds of extremely intense activity, followed by prolonged bouts of inactivity.
“Here she comes,” someone said, and then Bedford could see the drone on his outboard sensors before he could see the sleek shape high in the sky coming in at supersonic speed to thwart any surface-to-air missiles that might be launched at her.
This too was over in a fraction of a second, one instant the drone was flying in overhead at an impossible speed, the next it was gone already, far on its way to the other horizon. All Bedford saw in its passing was what looked like a small ball of light that dropped from the belly of the bird and zeroed in precisely on the top of the silo. It penetrated the roof of the structure with a small cloud of dust and then there was nothing but silence.
Bedford waited for what he knew was to come. First, through the sensors in the soles of his feet he could feel the ground beneath begin to tremble. Then an area roughly thirty feet in diameter around the silo erupted in a geyser of superheated rock and soil thrown skyward to come rocketing back down like charred, black hail.
Even where he was, deep back in the town, bits of rock and fused soil rained down on Bedford, though the impacts on his titanium-alloy armor were nothing more than minor sensory input. Through the external audio inputs he heard a high-pitched screaming and raised the cameras atop his head to gaze at the sky. He saw a car-sized chunk of rock fall from the heavens to demolish a hovertruck belonging to a farmer or a transporter.
His attention temporarily distracted by that, Bedford was brought back to the battle by the voice in his ear from the comm net.
“Holy cow, look at that, they’re boiling out like fire ants.”
Checking the area grid on his heads-up, Bedford saw purple tagged enemy units rising from the impact crater of the drone’s bomb using short-range jumpjets, automatically targeting and firing as they came in clumsy but controlled leaps.
“Hold your ground, the cavalry’s coming,” the lieutenant assured them.
Small pings began to ring off the armored exo-skeleton of Bedford’s unit as he was targeted by two rebels who landed in the town square near him. He used both right and left arms, sending out his own hail of both cannon and rifle fire to defend himself, watching his store of cannon rounds slowly diminish towards nothing.
One of the rounds, however, found its mark and slammed into chest of one of the insurgents, buckling the armor inward and sending the unit flying backwards into the wall of a store on the town’s main square, demolishing it.
Too late he saw a shoulder-mounted weapon on the second rebel’s unit fire out a small homing missile trailing a fine wire. He knew what was coming and using all the power he could coax out of his servo-motors prepared to jump himself. That was when the nagging problem in his right leg failed him. He could almost feel it in his own leg as something snapped deep inside the armor of the combat unit’s leg. The series of motors, transformers, and power-boosters shut down as a safety precaution when the affected unit shut itself down, leaving Bedford helpless and unable to move.
He continued to fire his right arm gatling gun at the enemy unit, knowing it was ineffective but hoping for some sort of miracle or fluke that would disable his opponent just as he had been disabled by a faulty motor or routing unit. But it didn’t happen.
Precisely two feet from him, the small, bird-like missile sprung open with a net. Small weights on its perimeter spread the net out to its full diameter, and like a thin spider web, the fabric attached itself to his chest. An electric shock circulated throughout his entire being and then everything went black as all systems short-circuited and died.
With a start, Bedford found himself back in the waking world as all connections automatically shut down and disengaged with the death of his unit. With his gloved hands, he removed the visor over his eyes and looked at the quiet, sterile, white room. Under harsh overhead lighting, the rest of his squad still rested in their couches, only slight, subtle movements of their arms, hands, feet, and legs betraying the fact that they were still fighting while Bedford had been knocked out of the action like the other two members of the squad before him. Cool air blew over him from the air-conditioning vent overhead.
As per protocol, a medical attendant rushed over to him to see if everything was okay. Bedford brushed the man off, after all he was only a civilian under contract to the Republic, not a soldier.
“Give me another unit!” Bedford shouted to one of the technicians who monitored the equipment.
“There’s no more in reserve,” the tech told him harshly. He himself had his hands full carefully scrutinizing the readouts on all of the other units located miles away doing the actual fighting under waldo-control of the soldiers in the command ship. He and his crew continually made minute adjustments to their own control boards to keep the fighting units operational at a distance.
Bedford knew the only way he could get back in the fight was if one of his squadmates physically took ill on one of the control couches and needed to be replaced, in which case, with a flip of a technician’s switch, control of that man’s fighting unit could be switched over to any other couch not already occupied with an active participant. That was very unlikely. Soldiers never got hurt anymore, although some went mad or had breakdowns. Only their remotely controlled, robotic, fighting units got damaged, put out of action, or destroyed. The soldiers themselves rarely died except in direct attacks upon their command bunker or station by similar enemy robotic units.
“What happened to my unit?” Bedford demanded, as he began to strip away the command wires still attached to his muscles that controlled the movements of his now disabled assault unit.
One of the techs deigned to answer him without even looking up from his board. “Lost a server in your articulation and locomotion band.”
“Welcome to the walking wounded,” said one of the other soldiers whose unit had been lost. He returned from the refreshment dispenser with a cup of coffee and sat back down on his couch, completely relaxed. “There ain’t nothing you can do.”
Bedford wanted to be back in the fight, but without another able unit to patch in to his control couch, the other soldier was right, there was nothing he could do. So he followed the example of the second disabled soldier, the one whose unit had been vaporized with the first mine. Reaching for the visor resting in his lap where he had dropped it to demand reassignment to a different, undamaged unit, Bedford put the eye-blinder back on his head and rejoined the battle. Although all he could do was observe through the squad’s intact command net, instead of actively participate.
