Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

Cole tried the up-left command. This one was really disconcerting—it put a circular picture in the middle of his vision. After a moment, he realized that what he was seeing was himself—from Load's point of view.

"You can cycle through the field of vision of all seven members of your team," said Mingo. "But we don't use the click command. It's jaw movement—sharp downward movement, but without opening the mouth. So as commander, at any time you can see exactly what each man on your team is seeing."

"Meanwhile, I get shot because I'm not watching out for myself."

"Like I said, there's a learning curve," said Mingo. "But it doesn't take long before your brain lets you watch both things at once. Like focused vision and peripheral vision."

Cole passed his hand through the air in front of his face. The other guys laughed. "Come on," Cole said, "where's the display I'm seeing?"

Mingo reached up and touched the two flexible rods that extended forward from the helmet at cheekbone level. Instantly the display disappeared. When Mingo removed his fingers, the display returned.

"I figured those were the projectors," said Cole, "but what are they projecting onto?"

"Your corneas," said Mingo. "It even adjusts for contact lenses, if you wear them. For a while they tried to project directly onto the retina, but then the projectors really did interfere with your normal range of vision. Plus they were worried about side effects from projecting directly into the eye. So they project from the sides onto the cornea directly over the lens of each eye. It does both eyes at once so you'll have depth perception. But also if one of them is damaged, the other can do it alone. It only projects onto the one eye, so it's not as clear, but it'll do."

Down left and down right didn't do anything at all. Mingo explained. "The down-left command puts you in contact with home base. Whatever they want to make available to you, it comes in on that display command. And the down-right command puts you in sync with your DCGS, so they can feed you information from any UASs you have, up to four drones—Pred or Reaper, view of ground or air, live camera or a data display. Only we aren't synced with any DCGS right now, and besides, it takes about a week of wearing the helmet before the drone display stops making you throw up."

Not being connected to any station of the DCGS—the distributed common ground system that relayed data from Unmanned Aerial Systems, or drones—meant that what they were doing here was definitely off the books. But that was par for the course with Rube's jeesh.

Cole took the helmet off. "This is a field commander's best dream. To know all the time what your guys are doing. How they're doing. But it scares me."

"Come on," said Mingo. "Afraid it'll fry your brains?"

"I'm afraid I'll get too dependent on it, and then it'll cut out on me in combat."

"It could happen," said Mingo, "but the only things that could do it would probably also blow up your head."

"What if there's a heavy concrete wall between us?"

"That's the beautiful thing," said Mingo. "It has two redundant transmission systems for you and your team. There's radio, but there's also an ultra-low-frequency digital sound system. If you get far enough apart and you're using the sound transmission system, the display gets a little blocky."

"Pixelated," said Arty helpfully.

"Twitterpated," said Load.

"Pixelated," insisted Arty.

"I do believe in pixies, I do, I do," said Load.

"This helmet is smarter than I am," said Cole.

"And the exoskeleton is stronger," said Mingo. "But you're the one telling them both what to do."

"So what's the mission?" asked Cole.

The men glanced at each other. "No mission," said Mingo. "I mean, you're the guy who has the President's ear. What if he had something special for you to do? You could say, 'I've been practicing with the boys and we've got some good tricks.'"

"So you can take these prototypes out of the country?" asked Cole.

"If we need to," said Mingo. "The helmets aren't a prototype, they're in production. And within two weeks, we'll have enough exos for the whole jeesh."

"I'm going to need to take the time to learn how to use all this. Get fluent with it."

"Well," said Mingo, "this is my day job."

"And one thing I'm not clear on," said Cole. "You want me to learn how to do this with you guys? With me as commander? Those days are over, guys."

"Not for us," said Cat. "Look, man, we followed Rube, and all of us got used to our own niche. You came in, you learned our niches fast, you used us right. None of us were trained to do Rube's job—and so you did it. That's your niche. You don't choose the target, you just lead us in acquiring it. Like point guard on a basketball team."