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.