The jury was still out on the camouflage. Other schemes had been tried. The blue-green mottled pattern on Connors' suit had worked as well as any of them, and not one whit better. The Posleen's yellow eyes were just different, different in their structure and different in what they saw.

Inside his suit, the lieutenant shrugged, unseen by any but the artificial intelligence device that ran the suit for him. He didn't know what camouflage would work (neither did the AID) and just followed the latest guidance from higher on the subject.

Around him, likewise mottled in the blue-green pattern and likewise struggling for an acceptable compromise between longevity and speed, Second Platoon, Company B-1^st of the 508^th Mobile Infantry (ACS), was spread out in a very sharp and narrow "V" to either side of a churned-muck trail.

Ordinarily, on Earth, the trail would have been superfluous as a means of control and orientation. The Global Positioning System was capable of telling a soldier, or a group of them, exactly where they were all the time. On Barwhon, however, there was no GPS. Moreover, while the suits were capable of inertial reckoning on their own, by and large the enemy Posleen were not. Thus, the Posleen followed the trail and, thus, the MI were led to battle them along it.

Besides, the trail was the shortest distance to an American light infantry company cut off some miles ahead on the wrong side of a river ford, their backs to the stream and no good way to cross back under fire.

Connors, like the men of Second Platoon, moved forward under radio listening silence. They could hear the commands of higher, when higher deigned to speak. They could also hear the heartbreakingly precise reports and orders emanating to and from one Captain Robert Thomas, commanding the company trapped at the ford. They'd been hearing them for hours.