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chute opened no more than 10 metres above the ground.
    Then the image changed to a different film sequence shot from a cybersuit helmet. The camera stabiliser technology worked well, but the person filming was running over rough terrain and the image wobbled slightly before the screen was filled with a man lying twisted on the floor. One severed leg dangled from a thread of suit fabric, the other was twisted and shattered under his body.
    â€˜Stop, Sybil.’
    The screen flicked off and Pete suddenly felt the stillness of the room, the silence broken only by his own steady breathing. The doctors had offered him antidepressants, and Stephanie Jacobs, the team’s medical expert, had talked to him about the psychological impact of what had happened. But he had decided against taking the drugs. Right now though, he wondered if this had been a wise decision. Instead, he seemed to have developed an obsession with watching the accident over and over again. A part of him kept insisting that the more he saw it happen, the better he could assimilate the reality of it.
    The same thoughts kept going around inside his head. How on earth had he ended up in this position? A year ago he had put the action-hero life behind him. He had served his time in the British Army, given it eight years of his youth. He had faced death many times as a bomb disposal expert and had come through the first E-Force mission seven months earlier after surviving a powerful explosion that no one would have thought it possible to walk away from. Now, here he was, six weeks after another near-death experience.
    Using the most advanced surgical techniques on the planet, his body had been repaired. When they found him – unconscious, thankfully – he was as close to death as it was possible to be and still survive. Both his legs had been so badly damaged nothing other than E-Force technology could have saved them. As well, one arm had fractured in six places, he had a punctured lung, a skewered spleen and his heart had stopped. But somehow, the team’s medics had kept him alive and he had been placed in an induced coma for two weeks. In that time, he had undergone 15 separate operations. All of those had been conducted by nanobots supervised by a medical group led by Stephanie Jacobs. The bots had repaired his internal organs and some of his bones. Tissue had been cloned from his own cells and blood vessels, and severed nerves had been knitted together by billions of bacteria-sized nanobots all working in unison.
    Following the surgery, he had gone through three weeks of intense physiotherapy while he adjusted to his new body. He had hated every minute of it. The therapy was repetitive, painful and boring, but Mark, Tom, Josh, Mai and Steph had been incredibly supportive. The lowest point had come when he had been forced to quell his natural impatience a week into physio. The team had been called out to avert a potential disaster when part of a subway in New York had caved in. Seeing the team live on the big screen in Cyber Control had given him a perspective he had never experienced before. Beside his chair were his crutches. He glanced over at Tom Erickson, the 20-year-old cyber genius confined to a wheelchair since childhood. Tom was at a nearby console, lost in concentration as he relayed detailed data to the Big Mac hovering over the East River. Tom had turned, seen Pete staring, and given him the thumbs up.
    It had made him feel terrible, adding to his depression. After a catastrophic accident, he was on the mend. He would soon be back in action, but a similar medical miracle was still a long way off for young Tom. He had talked about it with Steph – it was one of the first things to occur to him when she had explained what they had achieved in surgery. Sure, they could clone new tissue for Tom and they could reroute some of his nerves, but his spinal cord had been severed in the childhood accident that had led him being wheelchair bound