*
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