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.”