She'd boarded in last, and taken the only available seat. It was a small price to pay for not showing her back to anybody as she walked in. The inside of the helicopter smelled of sand and camel piss, but then again so did everywhere else, it was hardly a massive change. She didn't meet anyone's gaze, quickly grabbing the smallest box in the pile of goodies that wouldn't have looked out of place under a christmas tree, and opened it up quick to see what the good little boys and girls had been given.

Her excitement drained a little once she'd looked inside. Just one gun. And a clunky overweight action movie prop from the eighties based on a clunky and overweight gun from the thirties, too. She picked it up in one hand, noting the weight of the thing, dumped the magazine into her off hand and pushed the slide off in one, clean motion. The spring seemed new. So did the locking block, as far as she could make out in the helicopter's half-lit interior. She reassembled it and dropped the thing back into the box, looking for anything else. Four little grenades all lined up like ducks, two little bottles of pepper-spray, a set of binoculars, and right at the bottom like it almost wanted to slip by unnoticed, a full uniform.

She pulled it out and rested it on the crate. Greyish-green, with barest hints of other colours, it seemed to give off the impression that it had heard of MultiCam and OctoCamo and wanted nothing to do with such modern and unsporting inventions. If it was good enough for the trenches, it's good enough for Foxhound, it seemed to say. Well, it was at least dark. Wouldn't show up in shadows, which was some comfort. And freshly ironed, too. Luna looked up. She didn't want to be the first to start stripping in here, but it seemed like one of them would have to. Until then, she could take a peek at some of her comrades in arms.

Somebody in a human resources department must have smiled on them, since the entire team was gender-balanced. Three girls, three boys. All of them in their late twenties, and with the racial diversity of an episode of Scooby Doo. A shy asian woman, a black man, two vaguely Germanic white men with the beginnings of neckbeards, and a white woman with features so haughty they could have been superimposed onto a Sphinx without anybody batting an eye. Luna almost felt embarrassed about trying to speak up, in case everybody put her down as the chatty latina before they'd even gotten around to speaking. But somebody would have to break the silence left by the pilot turning back to his job. 

It would just have to be somebody else, though.