Ten Fleet Rangers armed with beam rifles and dressed in active-camouflage armor pushed forward through the mass.
	(...)
	He and the other nine marksmen engaged their active camouflage, then dropped to their bellies and began to creep out onto the road. The light-bending technology made them almost invisible even from a few paces away, so crawling into position was probably an unnecessary precaution—especially given the image-blurring caused by N’ba’s incessant heat. But beam rifle marksmen had cautious natures—it was an important survival trait—and they were taking no chances.

Oblivion Ch 18

	“Why do they wait?” Roselle’s words were little more than a whisper, though it was unlikely anyone would hear. There was a hot, blistering wind coming upslope that would prevent her voice from carrying to anyone below. “It’s been fifty breaths since anyone moved.”
	Their nest—properly called a hide—was atop the plateau’s edge, half a kilometer above an almost indiscernible road that left the mouth of the canyon and descended across a thousand-meter talus field to a tight switchback turn. There, about fifty meters down the road past the switchback, the human crew of the Wheatley sat behind two idling Warthogs, trying to shade themselves with cloaks and tarps.
	Linda and Roselle had been in position for thirteen minutes, having climbed out of the gorge after Linda scouted ahead and realized the Covenant column had reached the gorge’s mouth and stopped to reconnoiter. Seven minutes ago, Linda had noticed the telltale refraction of active camouflage—and pointed out to Roselle the spectral blurs of three Elite marksmen crawling down the first leg of the talus-buried road. A trio of snipers was overkill in an area as small as the talus field, and Linda suspected the aliens were preparing to launch a shock attack against the Wheatley crew.
	If she was right, there were probably several more of them out there. She just hadn’t spotted them yet.
	(...)
	She saw a plume of dust rising near the switchback, then scanned the area with her sniper sight until she spotted the rippling blur of active camouflage. An Elite marksman was working his way into position behind the Wheatley crew.
	“And the end of life, that is just timing,” Linda said. She checked the range to her target—eleven hundred meters. “Ear protection.”
	“What?”
	“Now.”
	Without even waiting to see if Roselle had complied, Linda fired. Two heartbeats later, the Elite’s armor flickered into view as her sniper rifle’s large round blew the front out of the alien’s torso armor.
	Linda followed the priority arrow toward her next target and set the aiming reticle just to the right of a dodging blur. The range was only eight hundred meters this time, and it took the round only one heartbeat to arrive.

Oblivion Ch 19