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,
