I lay flat, staring into the trees, straining to catch some sight of the enemy, some trace of movement. Nothing. I carefully clicked off the visible tracer beam of my pistol, then fired into the general area where the grenades had come from. Still nothing. I held the beam steady on a bit of shrubbery until it burst into flame, but still no sign of movement, no sight of the enemy.

“Captain?” I heard in my earphones. My second-in-command, Lieutenant Quint.

“Go ahead, Quint,” I whispered into my helmet mike.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Hit in the shoulder. A few scratches. Nothing serious.”

“They seem to have gone, sir.”

I ordered the security detail to report in, by the numbers. Four of my troopers had been killed, six more wounded. No further reports of enemy activity.

I waited for nearly an hour. Nothing. The rest of the hundred had dropped their construction chores, of course, and grabbed their weapons to come out and reinforce our perimeter. But the enemy had vanished as suddenly as they had struck.

Finally we trudged back into the still-unfinished camp. I doubled the perimeter guard while Lieutenant Frede looked after the wounded and a burial detail froze the dead. Frede seemed puzzled as she applied protein gel to my burned shoulder.

“Your wounds are halfway healed already.”

“It’s a capability that was built into me,” I said.

“But how? Biomedical science doesn’t know how to do that. If we did we’d make all our soldiers this way.”

I shrugged as she sprayed a bandage onto my lacerated hand. “I suppose I’m a new model. The first of a new breed.”

She gave me a suspicious stare.

“Well, the important thing is that we beat them off,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.