The Martian grinned and lay down beside him. His skin was wind-burned
like Tex's, his black eyes nested in wrinkles caused by squinting
against sun and blowing dust.
For a second they were silent, feeling the desert like a bond between
them. Then Breska, mastering his cough, grunted:
"They're an hour late now. What's the matter with 'em?"
Tex was worried, too. The regular dawn attack of the swamp-dwellers was
long overdue.
"Reckon they're thinking up some new tricks," he said. "I sure wish our
relief would get here. I could use a vacation."
Breska's teeth showed a cynical flash of white.
"If they don't come soon, it won't matter. At that, starving is
pleasanter than beetle-bombs, or green snakes. Hey, Tex. Here comes the
Skipper."
Captain John Smith--Smith was a common name in the Volunteer
Legion--crawled along the catwalk. There were new lines of strain on
the officer's gaunt face, and Tex's uneasiness grew.
He knew that supplies were running low. Repairs were urgently needed.
Wasn't the relief goin' to come at all?
But Captain Smith's pleasant English voice was as calm as though he
were discussing cricket-scores in a comfortable London club.
"Any sign of the beggars, Tex?"
"No, sir. But I got a feeling...."
"H'm. Yes. We all have. Well, keep a sharp...."
A scream cut him short. It came from below in the square compound. Tex
shivered, craning down through the rusty netting covering the well.
He'd heard screams like that before.
A man ran across the greasy stones, tearing at something on his wrist.
Other men ran to help him, the ragged remnant of the force that had
marched into new Fort Washington three months before, the first
garrison.
The tiny green snake on the man's wrist grew incredibly. By the time
the first men reached it, it had whipped a coil around its victim's
neck. Faster than the eye could follow, it shifted its fangs from
wrist to throat.
The man seemed suddenly to go mad. He drew his knife and slashed at his
comrades, screaming, keeping them at bay.
Then, abruptly, he collapsed. The green snake, now nearly ten feet
long, whipped free and darted toward a drainage tunnel. Shouting men
surrounded it, drawing rapid-fire pistols, but Captain Smith called out:
"Don't waste your ammunition, men!"
Startled faces looked up. And in that second of respite, the snake
coiled and butted its flat-nosed head against the grating.
In a shower of rust-flakes it fell outward, and the snake was gone like
a streak of green fire.
Tex heard Breska cursing in a low undertone. A sudden silence had
fallen on the compound. Men fingered the broken grating, white-faced as
they realized what it meant. There would be no metal for repairs until
the relief column came.
It was hard enough to bring bare necessities over the wild terrain. And
air travel was impracticable due to the miles-thick clouds and magnetic
vagaries. There would be no metal, no ammunition.
Tex swore. "Reckon I'll never get used to those varmints, Captain. The
rattlers back home was just kid's toys."
"Simple enough, really." Captain Smith spoke absently, his gray eyes
following the sag of the rusty netting below.
"The green snakes, like the planarians, decrease evenly in size with
starvation. They also have a vastly accelerated metabolism. When they
get food, which happens to be blood, they simply shoot out to their
normal size. An injected venom causes their victims to fight off help
until the snake has fed."
Breska snarled. "Cute trick the swamp men thought up, starving those
things and then slipping them in on us through the drain pipes. They're
so tiny you miss one, every once in a while."
"And then you get that." Tex nodded toward the corpse. "I wonder who
the war-chief is. I'd sure like to get a look at him."
"Yes," said Captain Smith. "So would I."
He turned to go, crawling below the parapet. You never knew what
might come out of the fog at you, if you showed a target. The body was
carried out to the incinerator as there was no ceremony about burials
in this heat. A blob of white caught Tex's eye as a face strained
upward, watching the officer through the rusty netting.
Tex grunted. "There's your countryman, Breska. I'd say he isn't so sold
on the idea of making Venus safe for colonists."
"Oh, lay off him, Tex." Breska was strangled briefly by a fit of
coughing. "He's just a kid, he's homesick, and he's got the wheezes,
like me. This lowland air isn't good for us. But just wait till we
knock sense into these white devils and settle the high plateaus."
If he finished, Tex didn't hear him. The red-haired Westerner was
staring stiffly upward, clawing for his gun.
* * * * *
He hadn't heard or seen a thing. And now the fog was full of thundering
wings and shrill screams of triumph. Below the walls, where the
ground-mist hung in stagnant whorls, a host of half-seen bodies crowded
out of the wilderness into which no civilized man had ever gone.
The rapid-fire pistol bucked and snarled in Tex's hand. Captain Smith,
lying on his belly, called orders in his crisp, unhurried voice. C
Battery on the northeast corner cut in with a chattering roar, spraying
explosive bullets upward, followed by the other three whose duty it was
to keep the air clear.
Tex's heart thumped. Powder-smoke bit his nostrils. Breska began to
whistle through his teeth, a song that Tex had taught him, called, "The
Lone Prairee."
The ground-strafing crews got their guns unlimbered, and mud began to
splash up from below. But it wasn't enough. The gun emplacements were
only half manned, the remainder of the depopulated garrison having been
off-duty down in the compound.
The Jupiterians were swarming up the incline on which the fort stood,
attacking from the front and fanning out along the sides when they
reached firm ground. The morasses to the east and west were absolutely
impassable even to the swamp-men, which was what made Fort Washington
a strategic and envied stronghold.
Tex watched the attackers with mingled admiration and hatred. They had
guts; the kind the Red Indians must have had, back in the old days in
America. They had cruelty, too, and a fiendish genius for thinking up
tricks.
If the relief column didn't come soon, there might be one trick too
many, and the way would be left open for a breakthrough. The thin,
hard-held line of frontier posts could be flanked, cut off, and
annihilated.
Tex shuddered to think what that would mean for the colonists, already
coming hopefully into the fertile plateaus.
A sluggish breeze rolled the mist south into the swamps, and Tex got
his first clear look at the enemy. His heart jolted sharply.
This was no mere raid. This was an attack.
Hordes of tall warriors swarmed toward the walls, pale skinned giants
from the Sunless Land with snow-white hair coiled in warclubs at the
base of the skull. They wore girdles of reptile skin, and carried bags
slung over their brawny shoulders. In their hands they carried clubs
and crude bows.
Beside them, roaring and hissing, came their war-dogs; semi-erect
reptiles with prehensile paws, their powerful tails armed with
artificial spikes of bone.
Scaling ladders banged against the walls. Men and beasts began to
climb, covered by companions on the ground who hurled grenades of baked
mud from their bags.
"Beetle-bombs!" yelled Tex. "Watch yourselves!"
He thrust one ladder outward, and fired point-blank into a dead-white
face. A flying clay ball burst beside the man who fired the nearest
ground gun, and in a split second every inch of bare flesh was covered
by a sheath of huge scarlet beetles.
Tex's freckled face hardened. The man's screams knifed upward through
the thunder of wings. Tex put a bullet carefully through his head and
tumbled the body over the parapet. Some of the beetles were shaken off,
and he glimpsed bone, already bare and gleaming.
Missiles rained down from above; beetle-bombs, green snakes made
worm-size by starvation. The men were swarming up from the compound
now, but the few seconds of delay almost proved fatal.
The aerial attackers were plain in the thinning mist--lightly-built men
mounted on huge things that were half bird, half lizard.
The rusty netting jerked, catching the heavy bodies of man and lizard
shot down by the guns. Tex held his breath. That net was all that
protected them from a concerted dive attack that would give the natives
a foot-hold inside the walls.
A gun in A Battery choked into silence. Rust, somewhere in the
mechanism. No amount of grease could keep it out.
Breska swore sulphurously and stamped a small green thing flat. Red
beetles crawled along the stones--thank God the things didn't fly. Men
fought and died with the snakes. Another gun suddenly cut out.
Tex fired steadily at fierce white heads thrust above the parapet. The
man next to him stumbled against the infested stones. The voracious
scarlet flood surged over him, and in forty seconds his uniform sagged
on naked bones.
Breska's shout warned Tex aside as a lizard fell on the catwalk. Its
rider pitched into the stream of beetles and began to die. Wings beat
close overhead, and Tex crouched, aiming upward.
His freckled face relaxed in a stare of utter unbelief.
* * * * *
She was beautiful. Pearl-white thighs circling the gray-green barrel
of her mount, silver hair streaming from under a snake-skin diadem
set with the horns of a swamp-rhino, a slim body clad in girdle and
breast-plates of irridescent scales.
Her face was beautiful, too, like a mask cut from pearl. But her eyes
were like pale-green flames, and the silver brows above them were drawn
into a straight bar of anger.
Tex had never seen such cold, fierce hate in any living creature, even
a rattler coiled to strike.
His gun was aimed, yet somehow he couldn't pull the trigger. When he
had collected his wits, she was gone, swooping like a stunting flyer
through the fire of the guns. She bore no weapons, only what looked
like an ancient hunting-horn.
Tex swore, very softly. He knew what that horned diadem meant.
This was the war chief!
The men had reached the parapet just in time. Tex blasted the head from
a miniature Tyrannosaurus, dodged the backlash of the spiked tail, and
threw down another ladder. Guns snarled steadily, and corpses were
piling up at the foot of the wall.
Tex saw the woman urge her flying mount over the pit of the compound,
saw her searching out the plan of the place--the living quarters, the
water tanks, the kitchen, the radio room.
Impelled by some inner warning that made him forget all reluctance to
war against a woman, Tex fired.
The bullet clipped a tress of her silver hair. Eyes like pale green
flames burned into his for a split second, and her lips drew back from
reptilian teeth, white, small, and pointed.
Then she whipped her mount into a swift spiral climb and was gone,
flashing through streamers of mist and powder-smoke.
A second later Tex heard the mellow notes of her horn, and the
attackers turned and vanished into the swamp.
As quickly as that, it was over. Yet Tex, panting and wiping the sticky
sweat from his forehead, wasn't happy.
He wished she hadn't smiled.
Men with blow-torches scoured the fort clean of beetles and green
snakes. One party sprayed oil on the heaps of bodies below and fired
them. The netting was cleared, their own dead burned.
Tex, who was a corporal, got his men together, and his heart sank as he
counted them. Thirty-two left to guard a fort that should be garrisoned
by seventy.
Another attack like that, and there might be none. Yet Tex had an
uneasy feeling that the attack had more behind it than the mere attempt
to carry the fort by storm. He thought of the woman whose brain had
evolved all these hideous schemes--the beetle-bombs, the green snakes.
She hadn't risked her neck for nothing, flying in the teeth of four
batteries.
He had salvaged the lock of silver hair his bullet had clipped. Now it
seemed almost to stir with malign life in his pocket.
Captain John Smith came out of the radio room. The officer's gaunt
face was oddly still, his gray eyes like chips of stone.
"At ease," he said. His pleasant English voice had that same quality of
dead stillness.
"Word has just come from Regional Headquarters. The swamp men have
attacked in force east of us, and have heavily beseiged Fort Nelson.
Our relief column had been sent to relieve them.
"More men are being readied, but it will take at least two weeks for
any help to reach us."
* * * * *
Tex heard the hard-caught breaths as the news took the men like a jolt
in the belly. And he saw eyes sliding furtively aside to the dense
black smoke pouring up from the incinerator, to the water tanks, and to
the broken grating.
Somebody whimpered. Tex heard Breska snarl, "Shut up!" The whimperer
was Kuna, the young Martian who had stared white-faced at the captain a
short while before.
Captain Smith went on.
"Our situation is serious. However, we can hold out another fortnight.
Supplies will have to be rationed still further, and we must conserve
ammunition and man-power as much as possible. But we must all remember
this.
"Help is coming. Headquarters are doing all they can."
"With the money they have," said Breska sourly, in Tex's ear. "Damn the
taxpayers!"
"... and we've only to hold out a few days longer. After all, we
volunteered for this job. Jupiter is a virgin planet. It's savage,
uncivilized, knowing no law but brute force. But it can be built into a
great new world.
"If we do our jobs well, some day these swamps will be drained, the
jungles cleared, the natives civilized. The people of Earth and Mars
will find new hope and freedom here. It's up to us."
The captain's grim, gaunt face relaxed, and his eyes twinkled.
"Pity we're none of us using our right names," he said. "Because I
think we're going to get them in the history books!"
The men laughed. The tension was broken. "Dismissed," said Captain
Smith, and strolled off to his quarters. Tex turned to Breska.
The Martian, his leathery dark face set, was gripping the arms of his
young countryman, the only other Martian in the fort.
"Listen," hissed Breska, his teeth showing white like a dog's fangs.
"Get hold of yourself! If you don't, you'll get into trouble."
Kuna trembled, his wide black eyes watching the smoke from the bodies
roll up into the fog. His skin lacked the leathery burn of Breska's.
Tex guessed that he came from one of the Canal cities, where things
were softer.
"I don't want to die," said Kuna softly. "I don't want to die in this
rotten fog."
"Take it easy, kid." Tex rubbed the sandy-red stubble on his chin and
grinned. "The Skipper'll get us through okay. He's aces."
"Maybe." Kuna's eyes wandered round to Tex. "But why should I take the
chance?"
He was shaken suddenly by a fit of coughing. When he spoke again, his
voice had risen and grown tight as a violin string.
"Why should I stay here and cough my guts out for something that will
never be anyway?"
"Because," said Breska grimly, "on Mars there are men and women
breaking their backs and their hearts, to get enough bread out of the
deserts. You're a city man, Kuna. Have you ever seen the famines that
sweep the drylands? Have you ever seen men with their ribs cutting
through the skin? Women and children with faces like skulls?
"That's why I'm here, coughing my guts out in this stinking fog.
Because people need land to grow food on, and water to grow it with."
Kuna's dark eyes rolled, and Tex frowned. He'd seen that same starry
look in the eyes of cattle on the verge of a stampede.
"What's the bellyache?" he said sharply. "You volunteered, didn't you?"
"I didn't know what it meant," Kuna whispered, and coughed. "I'll die
if I stay here. I don't want to die!"
"What," Breska said gently, "are you going to do about it?"