It must have taken only a few seconds, but it seemed like hours to me. And then I saw the edge of the clearing, where the trees abruptly stopped and the ground was a relatively smooth carpet of grass.

Turning onto my back, I looked up into the starry sky and counted twenty-five silhouettes tumbling through the air. And behind them, the bulkier shapes of the transceiver’s components and our supplies and equipment. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of our lander, wings tucking back now for supersonic climb, banking steeply away from us and lighting off its main engines, heading back to the cruiser in orbit.

I rolled over again and prepared to land in the clearing, working the flight-pack controls on my belt to bring me to a gentle touchdown on the grass. My boots touched the grass, all right, and then kept right on going. I splashed and started sinking.

“It’s a swamp!” I yelled into my helmet mike. “Don’t touch down. Hover and look for solid ground.”

I tried to lift out of the quicksand-thick swamp but my left leg had caught on something. I could hear Sergeant Manfred and some of the troopers calling back and forth:

“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.