The Bug Wars by Robert Asprin

That question surprised me, though I could see where, as a Technician, he would be eager to know the answer. I glanced at Zur, who indicated no desire to respond.

“No,” I said for the two of us, “we don’t.”

“I had simply noted that both of you wear only the old hand weapons,” Or-Sah explained.

He lapsed into silence, apparently unable to bring himself to ask why.

He had given me food for thought, however. In hindsight, I realized that all five strike team leaders…in fact all the Warriors I had recently encountered, wore blasters either in addition to or to the exclusion of the old hand weapons. I made a mental note to add a blaster to my personal armament again. It would not do to have it appear a Planetary Commander was not staying abreast of new developments.

CHAPTER FOUR

I was performing one of my scheduled reviews of the force in training. Although these were normally one of my less distasteful duties as Commander, I was finding more and more that I had to schedule these reviews or they would be overlooked in my numerous other tasks in preparing for the upcoming campaign.

As prescribed by the High Command, the Warriors were all training in the new echo helmets. Unfortunately, this made it impossible to distinguish among individuals. During training, the echo helmets had extra face plates to obscure the vision, simulating total darkness and forcing the Warrior to rely solely on the data provided by the helmets’ sensors. The difficulty was that the face plate also obscured the individual’s features, making casual identification difficult if not impossible, save in cases where radical physical differences such as height or an amputated tail marked the Warrior.