The Dragon-Queen of Venus Rescaled



  The Dragon-Queen of Venus Rescaled

  Lee Brackett

  Copyright 2010 Lee Brackett

  Tex stirred uneasily where she lay on the parapet, staring into the heavy, Venusian fog. The greasy moisture ran down the fort wall, lay rank on her lips. With a sigh for the hot, dry air of Texas, and a curse for the adventure-thirst that made her leave it, she shifted her short, steel-hard body and wrinkled her sandy-red brows in the never-ending effort to see.

  A stifled cough turned her head. She whispered, 'Hi, Breska.'

  The Martian grinned and lay down beside her. Her skin was wind-burned like Tex's, her 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 her 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,' she 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 Joan 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.

  She 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 she 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 her short. It came from below in the square compound. Tex shivered, craning down through the rusty netting covering the well.

  She'd heard screams like that before.

  A woman ran across the greasy stones, tearing at something on her wrist. Other women ran to help her, 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 woman's wrist grew incredibly. By the time the first women 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 woman seemed suddenly to go mad. She drew her knife and slashed at her comrades, screaming, keeping them at bay.

  Then, abruptly, she collapsed. The green snake, now nearly ten feet long, whipped free and darted toward a drainage tunnel. Shouting, women surrounded it, drawing rapid-fire pistols, but Captain Smith called out:

  'Don't waste your ammunition, women!'

  Startled faces looked up. And in that second of respite, the snake coiled and butted its flat-nosed bead 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. Women 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, her 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 women thought up, starving those things and then slipping them in on us through the drain pipes. They're so tiny you mister 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 her.'

  'Yes,' said Captain Smith. 'So would I.'

  She 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 she isn't so sold on the idea of making Venus safe for colonists.'

  'Oh, lay off her, Tex.' Breska was strangled briefly by a fit of coughing. 'She's just a kid, she's homesick, and she'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 she finished, Tex didn't hear her. The red-haired Westerner was staring stiffly upward, clawing for her gun.

  * * *

  She 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 woman had ever gone.

  The rapid-fire pistol bucked and snarled in Tex's hand. Captain Smith, lying on her belly, called orders in her 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 her nostrils. Breska began to whistle through her teeth, a song that Tex had taught her, 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 Venusians 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 her first clear look at the enemy. Her 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 wall
s. Women 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!'

  She thrust one ladder outward, and fired point-blank into a dead-white face. A flying clay ball burst beside the woman 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 woman's screams knifed upward through the thunder of wings. Tex put a bullet carefully through her head and tumbled the body over the parapet. Some of the beetles were shaken off, and she glimpsed bone, already bare and gleaming.

  Missiles rained down from above; beetle-bombs, green snakes made worm-size by starvation. The women 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 women mounted on huge things that were half bird, half lizard.

  The rusty netting jerked, catching the heavy bodies of woman and lizard shot down by the guns. Tex held her 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. Women fought and died with the snakes. Another gun suddenly cut out.

  Tex fired steadily at fierce white heads thrust above the parapet. The woman next her stumbled against the infested stones. The voracious scarlet flood surged over her, and in forty seconds her 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.

  Her freckled face relaxed in a stare of utter unbelief.

  * * *

  He was beautiful. Pearl-white thighs circling the gray-green barrel of his 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 iridescent scales.

  His face was beautiful, too, like a mask cut from pearl. But his 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.

  Her gun was aimed, yet somehow she couldn't pull the trigger. When she had collected her wits, he was gone, swooping like a stunting flyer through the fire of the guns. He bore no weapons, only what looked like an ancient hunting-horn.

  Tex swore, very softly. She knew what that horned diadem meant.

  This was the war chief!

  The women 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 man urge his flying mount over the pit of the compound, saw his 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 her forget all reluctance to war against a man, Tex fired.

  The bullet clipped a tress of his silver hair. Eyes like pale green flames burned into her for a split second, and his lips drew back from reptilian teeth, white, small, and pointed.

  Then he whipped his 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 his 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 her forehead, wasn't happy.

  She wished he hadn't smiled.

  Women 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 her women together, and her heart sank as she 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. She thought of the man whose brain had evoked all these hideous schemes—the beetle-bombs, the green snakes. He hadn't risked his neck for nothing, flying in the teeth of four batteries.

  She had salvaged the lock of silver hair her bullet had clipped. Now it seemed almost to stir with malign life in her pocket.

  Captain Joan Smith came out of the radio room. The officer's gaunt face was oddly still, her gray eyes like chips of stone.

  'At ease,' she said. Her pleasant English voice had that same quality of dead stillness.

  'Word has just come from Regional Headquarters. The swamp women have attacked in force east of us, and have heavily besieged Fort Nelson. Our relief column had been sent to relieve them.

  'More women 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 women like a jolt in the belly. And she saw the 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. Venus 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 her eyes twinkled.

  'Pity we're none of us using our right names,' she said. 'Because I think we're going to get them in the history books!'

  The women laughed. The tension was broken. 'Dismissed,' said Captain Smith, and strolled off to her quarters. Tex turned to Breska.

  The Martian, her leathery dark face set, was gripping the arms of her young countryman, the only other Martian in the fort.

  'Listen,' hissed Breska, her teeth showing white like a dog's fangs. 'Get hold of yourself! If you don't, you'll get into trouble.'

  Kuna trembled, her wide black eyes watching the smoke from the bodies roll up into the fog. Her skin lacked the leathery burn of Breska's. Tex guessed that she 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 her chin and grinned. 'The Skipper'll get us through okay. She's aces.'

  'Maybe.' Kuna's eyes wandered round to Tex. 'But why should I take the chance?'

  She was shaken suddenly by a fit of coughing. When she spoke again, her 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 women and men breaking their backs and their hearts to get enough bread out of the deserts. You're a city woman, Kuna. Have you ever seen
the famines that sweep the drylands? Have you ever seen women with their ribs cutting through the skin? Men 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. She'd seen that same starry look in the eyes of cattle on the verge of a stampede.

  'What's the bellyache?' she 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?'

  Kuna smiled. 'He was beautiful, wasn't he, Tex?'

  The Texan started. 'I reckon he was, kid. What of it?'

  'You have a lock of his hair. I saw you pick it from the net. The net'll go out soon, like the grating did. Then there won't be anything to keep the snakes and beetles off of us. He'll sit up there and watch us die, and laugh.

  'But I won't die, I tell you! I won't!'

  She shuddered in Breska's hands, and began to laugh. The laugh rose to a thin, high scream like the wailing of a panther. Breska hit her accurately on the point of the jaw.

  'Cafard,' she grunted, as some of the women came running. 'She'll come round all right.'

  She dragged Kuna to the dormitory, and came back doubled up with coughing from the exertion. Tex saw the pain in her dark face.

  'Say,' she murmured, 'you'd better ask for leave when the relief gets here.'

  'If it gets here,' gasped the Martian. 'That attack at Fort Nelson was just a feint to draw off our reinforcements.'

  Tex nodded. 'Even if the varmints broke through there, they'd be stopped by French River and the broken hills beyond it.'

  A map of Fort Washington's position formed itself in her mind; the stone blockhouse commanding a narrow tongue of land between strips of impassable swamp, barring the way into the valley. The valley led back into the uplands, splitting so that one arm ran parallel to the swamps for many miles.

  To fierce and active women like the swamp-dwellers, it would be no trick to swarm down that valley, take Fort Albert and Fort George by surprise in a rear attack, and leave a gap in the frontier defenses that could never be closed in time.

  And then hordes of white-haired warriors would swarm out, led by that beautiful fury on the winged lizard, rouse the more lethargic pastoral tribes against the colonists, and sweep outland Peoples from the face of Venus.