My shoulders still hurt a bit from the sudden deceleration, but when you’re Spec Ops, you have to deal with that kind of crap.

I take in the IR views given by my suit, open a bulkhead door, and venture inside. My fellow Spec Ops team is invisible to me in pure IR; microwave transponders inside the suits project simple location data which my HUD displays as ghostly translucent outlines. The suits are invisible in the radio and visible frequencies too. Metamaterials have been around for over twelve hundred years, but it is only recently that they’ve been made into suit-ready form. I, being in Spec Ops, am one of the privileged few to be able to use this technology.

I pause for a second as I sweep the room. I could see them but they couldn’t see me. Death could come at any time for a man and he wouldn’t even know it. But is that right? Does a man have a right to know how and when death comes for him?

As I push open another bulkhead door, I push this matter of conscience to the side and enter the next area.