“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.