Cyclops One by Jim DeFelice

places if he could. Surely he’d trade with her; let her live.
    Carmen held the card out. Death: the grim reaper in a boat.
    “Not death—change,” she said. “Big change, but not death in a literal sense. Psychic change. Like love.”
    “Looking very good down here,” said Firenze. “Can we run over it again? Just the way you did it originally, turning the HUD back to standard setting at the right point.”
    “Roger that,” Howe told them. “Coming around for take two.”

Chapter 11

    When he was six, Amma Jalil had seen his mother set on fire by a Muslim madman.
    He had been playing at the other end of the dirt-strewn street in the small northern India town where he lived. He happened to look down the block as the man ran into the neighbor’s house where his mother was visiting. A second later something billowed from the window; at first it seemed to be an oversized red sheet inflated by the wind. As he stared, the edges of the sheet turned yellow and climbed upward along the roof.
    A figure encircled by a red robe, ran from the house. By the time he realized it was a person, she was rolling on the street. Even before he started to run toward her, he knew it was his mother. She jerked upright, then fell back like a sack of rice collapsing.
    In the twenty years since that day, Amma Jalil had run the thirty meters to his mother many times in his imagination. Never had he managed to arrive in time to hear her last words or receive her blessings.
    The Muslim died in the house, as did the neighbor and her two babies. Supposedly the terrorist had set it on fire because the land had once been in the shadow of a now long-gone Islamic temple, but such reasons were often given to justify groundless murder.
    The next day Amma Jalil’s father and many neighbors burned down a block of Muslim houses. Amma Jalil watched them burn. He was puzzled afterward. He thought from something that he had heard that his mother would reappear after these new houses were burned, but she did not.
    Several times since her death, he tried to feel the joy of revenge; perhaps it would come today.
    Captain Jalil sat on a web bench a few feet from the rear door of the Mil Mi-26 assault helicopter, hurtling through the mountains near India’s Kashmir border. The helicopter and its sister ship ran six or seven feet over the ground at nearly 290 kilometers an hour, rushing toward a concentration of vans and radar dishes parked beyond a mountain rift on a narrow plain about ten kilometers ahead.
    Each Russian-made helicopter carried seventy-three men armed with an array of weapons. But from Jalil’s point of view, the only important ones were Euromissile MILANs, man-carried antitank and bunker missiles that could take out a hardened target at three thousand meters. Six two-man teams carried the large, updated bazookas in each helicopter. The rest were simply there to make sure they found their targets.
    “Five klicks from LZ,” the pilot told Jalil, communicating through a wired headset with the assault team leader. They were a minute from touchdown. “I have the pathfinders.”
    “Yes,” said Jalil. He nodded almost imperceptibly to his senior NCO, sitting across from him. In the next ten seconds everyone in the helicopter seemed to catch on. The nervous rustling that had begun shortly after they boarded the helicopter at the base north of Srinagar ended. As the helicopter began to slow, every member of the assault team leaned forward in his seat.
    This was the most difficult moment of the mission. The eight massive blades that propelled the helicopters kicked up an enormous amount of dust, even at a hard-packed landing strip. Their LZ was a camel trail in the middle of a narrow wasteland filled with grit and pebbles. Send too much debris into the Lotarev D-136 engines and the mission would have to be scrubbed. Jalil’s instructions were very clear: If he could not take the target precisely on time, he must send word that he had failed. Even