“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.