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scenario, the Accord was going to be outnumbered five to two. Joe had never accepted best case scenarios. Reality always seemed to favor the opposite.
    The best he could say for the drop zone was that it looked too rough for enemy armor to operate in it. From above, it looked as if coarse stone had been laid in a bed of cement. Using the ranging sights in his visor, Joe estimated that the rocks ran from forty centimeters to two meters in diameter, mostly with half to two-thirds embedded below the surface. The rocks covered an area perhaps twenty kilometers in diameter.
    In the last hundred meters, Joe started adjusting the angle of his drop to set down on a low, relatively flat, space he had spotted. The belt was not infinitely adjustable. The direction of thrust could only be altered by five degrees from vertical. For a second, Joe tried spreading his arms to present more surface to the light breeze, working to get more lateral distance than he could with the belt alone. Not enough work had been done with the belts for there to be any "official" doctrine on that.
    It worked well enough that Joe almost overshot the target he had set for himself. For the last second, he pulled himself almost into a ball, drawing up his legs and holding his arms close to his body. He worked the thrust of his belt, feathering in to a perfectly gentle landing. Hitting the ground was softer than stepping from one stair down to the next.
    Joe's perfect landing was spoiled when his feet slid out from under him and he fell—heavily—on his ass. The rocks were covered by a thin mossy growth that was more slippery than water-covered ice. The fall knocked the breath from Joe's lungs. He banged the back of his helmet on the rock. The padding in his helmet was enough to prevent injury, but there were still a few seconds of confusion, enough time for virtually all of the first drop team to hit the ground. Nearly everyone fell, some with more force than Joe had.
    "Watch it," he said, belatedly. "This moss is murder."
    Joe didn't try to get to his feet. Standing up was the wrong posture for an infantryman in most cases anyway. He slid a little more as he rolled over onto his stomach, all of the way to the bottom of the slight depression. This stuff is going to be a real pain, he thought. At least there was no incoming fire yet, no apparent reaction to the landing.
    "Talk to me," Joe said over his link to his squad leaders. He tried crawling on all fours, looking to get to the top of the depression. It was slow going. It was almost impossible to get any traction on the moss.
    "Who greased the ground?" Ezra Frain asked. "How the hell we supposed to move on this?"
    "Carefully," Joe replied. "You have any jump casualties?"
    There was only a short pause before Ezra said, "Nothing that'll slow anybody down. We've all got bruises, though."
    "I've got one man with a badly twisted ankle," Sergeant Low Gerrent of second squad reported. "Medic's patching him now."
    "Third squad's okay," Sauv Degtree said.
    "So's fourth," Frank Symes added. "Nothing serious, anyway."
    "Pull the men in around me," Joe said. "Try to find an efficient way to move over this moss." Then he switched channels.
    "Second platoon's mostly okay," he reported to the first sergeant.
    "Mostly?" Izzy Walker asked.
    "One twisted ankle, being attended to. Other than that, nothing but minor stuff from slipping on this carpet. Didn't anybody know about that?"
    "Guess not," Walker said. "I'm hearing about it now, though, from all over."
    "What next?" Joe asked.
    "Just get your men together until we sort things out. Nobody's shooting at us yet. I'll be back to you in a couple of minutes."
    Joe pulled out his belt knife then and started scraping at the moss. It was no more than a centimeter thick, with bare rock beneath it. Before First Sergeant Walker called back, Joe had cleared enough moss to get to the top of the depression so that he could look out toward the enemy buildings to the east. He didn't see