Weapons like you and me. All of Central America, from Belize to Panama, has gone to hell. The area, unstable for too long, is a cockpit of warring factions, destroyed economies and refugee populations. We fit right into the madness.

"Sarge, is it true that you were once a normo, like Saunders?" Travis nodded.

"Did you really have your arm and eyes changed to make you more like us?"

Travis laughed bitterly. "Shut the hell up will you, Stef? You're making my head hurt with all these questions."

Stef retreated diffidently away. Like kids, Travis thought. Like kids. He shook his head and tried not to think about his daughter.

Marianne was twelve now, living with her mother in Oregon. Lisa had left him four years ago, called into the hospital where he lay with an amputated leg and a face like a halloween mask to tell him she was leaving. She was crying as she told him she couldn't take it anymore. She took little Man with her. At the time it was just one more thing the world had taken from him. Like his arm and his sight.

When the army had asked him to volunteer for cyborgisation he had nodded numbly. They thought they were doing him a favour. He shook his head. I died when that mine ripped me apart in Beirut. It's just taken me a little while to know I was dead.

He laughed softly as he got up from the stump and gestured for the Greens to get moving. That was his answer. Keep moving. Never give up. Don't let the fear take over.

Man was twelve, same age as the girl soldier they had left unburied down the trail. He shook his head and tried not to think about it.

6. The Power Station.

They lay on the rocks and looked down on a field of metal flowers. When the Soviets had started to build this power station it had been far from the frontline. The frontline had moved but the Russians had kept building.

This was what they had come to destroy. The dishes picked up power beamed down by the infra-red lasers of the Soviet solar power satellites. It was not to be allowed, quite literally soviet power in America's backyard.

Travis looked at it. The power station could return this area to stability, keep hospitals running, let civilisation return. For a brief second he entertained the fantasy of disobeying his orders. In the end it was not respect for regulations that decided him.