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.