“Looks like some rocks up there.”
“Set down easy, see if it’s solid ground.”
“Boulders-yaargh!” A scream.
I was trying to pull free of the swamp, ratcheting up the power level of my flight pack slowly because my leg was caught and I did not want to wrench it or pop the tendons in my knee. At the same time I was searching across the open area, watching my troopers as they hovered, searching for a safe landing spot. One of them had screamed. Why?
“Look out! That thing’s moving!”
What in the seven levels of hell was going on? And what was my leg caught on? The equipment packs were coming down now, splashing into the swamp like rocks falling in slow motion; sinking out of sight.
“It’s alive!”
“Blast it! But don’t hit Jerron.”
I realized that my leg was not caught on anything. Something had grabbed the leg and was holding on to it. Tightly. Tight enough to bend the armor of my legging. I could feel it squeezing against my calf. Whatever it was, it was trying to pull me down into the grass-choked water.
I cranked the flight-pack power up higher and lifted up out of the swamp with something hanging on to my leg. I looked down and saw a nightmare tangle of tentacles and sharp snapping claws. It was climbing up my leg, trying to crack my armor and get at the meat inside.
Still rising slowly into the night sky, I pulled my pistol from its holster and took careful aim. Don’t shoot your own foot off, I warned myself. I thumbed the laser power to low and tried to convince my would-be devourer to let go. It snaked another tentacle toward my wrist, pincer snapping audibly despite the rush of wind whipping past my helmet.
“It’s you or me,” I said aloud, thumbing the pistol up to half power and slicing off the reaching tentacle. The creature made a growling sound and waved the severed end of its tentacle in the air, spewing dark blood.
Looking down again, I saw its face: a collection of clacking mandibles and glittering eyes, dozens of them. I fired at the eyes, raising the power of my pistol slowly, astounded that the beast-whatever it was-took the punishment for what seemed like an eternity to me. Just as I began to wonder if the laser beam was having any effect on it at all, it gave a howling shriek and dropped away from me.
Suddenly freed of its weight, I shot up even higher into the night sky. I gulped for breath and then started back down.
A full-scale battle was going on below me. I could see laser flashes and hear my troopers yelling and calling back and forth.
“The damned rocks are alive!”
“And hungry!”
“And friggin’ hard to kill!”
The entire swamp was filled with carnivorous creatures thrashing, slashing, grabbing at our bodies as if we had been sent by heaven to feed them. My troopers splashed through the soupy water, shooting at the swamp creatures while trying not to hit one another.
And our equipment packs, the components of the transceiver and all our supplies, had sunk out of sight to the bottom of the swamp.
“Full power on the pistols,” I called to them on the command frequency. “Whoever’s got two hands free, unlimber a rifle and go after them.”
Panting, battered, frightened, we finally fought free and made our way into the trees. The ground was firmer there and free of things that wanted to eat us. At least, it seemed that way.
We sprawled on the solid ground, massive trees rising in the darkness all around us, and caught our breaths.
“What the hell were they?”
“Think they come up onto dry land?” asked a worried voice in the darkness.
“They must have been figments of our imaginations,” one of the women said, sourly. “The briefing tapes specifically told us that no threatening carnivores have been identified on Lunga.”
“The highest form of living creature on planet Lunga,” quoted another soldier from the tapes, “is a harmless furry tree-dwelling mammalian about the size of a tree lemur.”
“So much for the scientific survey of this planet.”
“So much for Intelligence.”
“And the friggin’ scouts.”
“There’s no intelligence in Intelligence.”
“When’s the last time you saw one of those bald guys away from his computer?”
Another of the women grumbled, “But they’re so damnably smart about it. You notice they said no carnivores have been identified on the planet.”
“Well, I identified a few. My goddamned armor’s punched right through. Look at it!”
His chest plate was cracked where one of the tentacled claws had scratched across it. I looked down at my leg, surprised to see blood on my armor. My own, I realized. I had automatically shut down my pain receptors and clamped the blood vessels tight while I was struggling with the creature that had fastened itself to my leg.
“Sergeant,” I called, “set up a perimeter and establish guards. I’m going to raise the cargo packs out of that swamp and float them over here. We’ll rest here for one hour.”
“Yessir,” said Manfred.
I dialed the comm frequency of my helmet radio and called for the other squads. One by one they reported in, each of them telling a tale of swamp monsters. Two of the troopers had been killed on one squad. Several others injured.
I called up the map of the area and studied it in the view on my visor.
“We will rendezvous at point A-Six,” I told the other squad leaders, picking a spot that seemed high and dry on the contour map. “In two hours. Any questions?”
“One of my men is too banged up to be of any help to us,” said a lieutenant. “Can we call for an evacuation lift?”
“Negative,” I said. “We bring our wounded with us. And our dead, too.”
Chapter 3
While most of the rest of my squad grabbed a precious few minutes of sleep, I went to the edge of the swamp and worked the controls on my belt in an attempt to raise our equipment packs from the bottom of the bog.
One by one, slowly, reluctantly, they came up with big sucking sounds, like someone pulling his boots out of clinging mud. The flight packs worked even under water. I only hoped that their packaging was watertight. Dripping mud and slime, they hovered in the dark night air in response to my command. In the view of my visor’s sensors they looked hot red against an eerie yellow-green background.
One of the swamp creatures snaked a tentacle to the nearest of the packs, touched it, decided it was not food and sank back into the ooze. They live in the water, I told myself. They won’t come out of the swamp and up onto dry land. I fervently hoped so.
Then I wondered, If the planetary survey did not detect that this clearing was a swamp, if the scouts did not know that there are dangerous carnivores down here, how accurate is Intelligence’s estimate of the enemy’s strength and capabilities? It was not a pleasant rumination.
Sergeant Manfred rotated the perimeter guard every twenty minutes, giving each trooper about forty minutes’ rest. He did not seem to sleep much. I had been built to need hardly any sleep at all. Had he been given the same strength? Could he control every part of his body consciously, even the involuntary nervous system, as I can? Could he slow down his perception of time when the adrenaline flowed, so that in battle his enemies seemed to move in slow motion? Could any of them?
I wondered about that until I saw him finally grab a catnap after the third set of guards relieved the second shift. No, Manfred needs sleep as much as the rest of them. He does not have my talents. None of them do. They are simply ordinary men and women, bred from cloned cells and trained to be nothing but soldiers.
After an hour the whole squad assembled and we glided through the forest toward the rendezvous point I had selected, the bulky equipment packs bobbing behind us. The trek was pure hell. It was hot and sweaty inside our suits, but when some of the troopers took off their armor, biting insects swarmed all over them. They put the armor back on, but the insects stayed inside their clothing, feasting on their flesh. It would have been funny, watching them trying to scratch themselves inside their armor, if they had not been so miserable.
The wounded were even worse off. As they floated in their flight packs, they moaned endlessly. One of the sergeants bawled them out in a vicious, half-whispered snarl:
“You whining bunch of mutts, you’d think your guts had been pulled out the way you’re screeching. What are you, troopers or sniveling crybabies?”
“But Sarge,” I heard one of the troopers plead, “it’s like it’s on fire.”
“I’ve got four decorations for wounds, Sarge,” another said, “but this is killing me.”
Every centimeter of the way, as we groped through the dark forest, with the insects buzzing in angry clouds about our heads, the wounded troopers cried and begged for something to stop their pain.
Then we ran into the squad led by Lieutenant Frede, the unit’s medical officer. Her wounded were whimpering and groaning just as badly as my squad’s.
“I can’t really examine them on the move, sir,” she said to me. “Can we stop for ten minutes? And may I use a light to see their wounds properly?”
The enemy was supposed to be halfway around the planet. But what if there were other nasty surprises in this forest, like the swamp things that had tried to eat us? I glided among the trees in silence for a few moments, weighing the possibilities. Frede hovered at my side.
“All right,” I said, my mind made up. “Ten minutes. Keep the light shielded.”
I went with her as she examined the first trooper, a woman whose forearm had been cut when one of the swamp monsters punctured her armor.
The wound was crawling with tiny red ants feasting on her torn flesh. Frede jerked back with surprise as the ants, obviously bothered by the light, began burrowing into the woman’s skin. The trooper screamed, whether in pain or fright I could not tell.
I took off the armor from my own injured leg and saw that the ants were chewing away. One of the drawbacks of inhibiting pain signals is that your body can no longer warn your brain of its danger.
Frede swallowed hard, then went to work on the wounded troopers. She had to flush out the ants with liquid astringents that burned so badly the troopers yelped and howled with pain. I stayed silent when my turn came and received admiring glances in the darkness of that tortured night.
It took more than ten minutes, but not much more. Frede was quietly efficient, once she got over her first shock of discovery. But as we powered up the flight packs again and started to glide forward through the trees, she said to me, grim-faced, “I hope those ants haven’t laid their eggs under the skin.”
A pleasant thought.
“I’ll have to examine all of you once we set up base camp,” she said.
We pressed on to the rendezvous point. The giant trees rose all around us in the pitch-black night like the pillars of a colossal darkened cathedral, but their lowest limbs were dozens of meters above the hummocky, leaf-littered forest floor. There was hardly any vegetation on the ground, only an occasional low-lying bush or shrub and thin grass. The high canopy of the lofty trees blocked sunlight very effectively, I realized, preventing much foliage from growing at ground level.
So we drifted through the massive boles of the trees like two squads of ghosts gliding through the sinister night. Muttering, complaining ghosts; clouds of biting insects still hounded us. At least the wounded stopped their whimpering once Frede got rid of the vampire ants. Now and then one of the equipment packs bumped gently into a tree or got wedged between two trunks and some of us had to go back and move it away, then find a wider avenue for it. After nearly two hours of this stop-and-go we finally reached the rendezvous point.
One of the other squads was already there, and the fourth showed up shortly after we did. Once Frede attended to the other wounded, I called a meeting of my lieutenants, leaving the noncoms to direct the checkout of the equipment packs and to make certain we had not lost any. The rest of the troopers began setting up our tents.
All three of the officers shared an uncanny resemblance. They were all about chin-high to me, and had broad, high-cheeked faces with clear blue eyes; they looked enough alike to be brother and sisters. In the dim light of our field lamps I saw that they even had nearly identical sprinkles of freckles across their noses. The army must have cloned them from the same genetic stock.
Lieutenant Frede, my medical officer as well as a squad leader, seemed levelheaded and not given to panic. Yet she looked plainly worried.
“Two of my troopers died,” she said as she took off her helmet. The same short-cropped sandy brown hair as the other two lieutenants. “I haven’t been able to do much more than give them a superficial look-see while we were on the march here, but it seems to me that the wounds those monsters inflicted on them were not serious enough to be fatal.”
“Then what killed them?” I asked.
Swarms of insects whined all around us. She slapped at them. We were all scratching and trying to wave the bugs away.
“I think those swamp monsters must have injected a toxin into the wounds,” Frede said, scratching inside the collar of her tunic.
“Poison?”
She nodded. “Poison. Which means that our other wounded may have been poisoned, too.”
“Is there any indication-”
She did not let me finish my question. “The wounded are more sick than hurt. I think they’ve been injected with toxin. They seem to be getting sicker by the minute. Maybe those damned ants are poisonous, too.”
I thought about that for a moment.
“I notice, sir,” she added, “that you were wounded in the leg. How do you feel?”
“Fine,” I said. Then I added, “My immune system produces antibodies very quickly.”
Another nod. “Then may I recommend that we take a sample of your blood and use it to transfuse the antibodies into the wounded men?”
“Yes, of course. Good thinking.”
So while the troopers began to assemble our transceiver and the dawn slowly lightened the leafy canopy high above us, I lay down on a cot in Lieutenant Frede’s medical tent and let her draw blood from my arm.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, holding up the syringe filled with bright red blood.
I sat up and rolled down my sleeve. “If you need more, let me know.”
“This should be sufficient, sir.”
I got to my feet. The tent’s bubble shape was barely tall enough for me to stand without stooping in its center. Four cots with sleeping wounded in them filled most of the floor space; the lieutenant’s examination table and other medical equipment were arranged along the outer edge.
Frede stood up also and gave me a critical examination with her sky blue eyes. “You’re not one of us, are you?”
“One of who?”
“The regular officer corps. You’re from a different gene stock. You’re bigger, darker hair and eyes, even your skin coloration is more olive than ours. Are you a volunteer officer?”
I made a rueful smile. “No, Frede, I’m not a volunteer.”
She broke into a sly grin. “Then somebody at headquarters must be worrying about our sex lives.”
“What?”
“According to the duty roster, you and I are paired for the duration of this mission. It’ll be my first time with someone outside of our own clone group.”
I must have stared at her like an idiot. Nothing in my briefings or my memories told me about sexual duties.