"Yah!" said Lil sharply. "You just like to talk. Why should the Officers want us killed off anyhow?"
Kirk looked at the thin fuzzy baby curled tight in the skins.
"There aren’t enough heat-stones to go around any more. Why should they let their young ones cry with the cold?"
*
There was silence in the room again. Kirk felt it, thick and choky. His heart kicked against his ribs. He was scared, suddenly. He’d never talked that much before. It was the baby, crying in the cold, that set him off. Suppose someone had heard him. Suppose he was reported for a mutineer. That meant the sucking-plant....
"Listen!" said Ma Kirk.
Nerves crackled icily all over Kirk’s skin. But there wasn’t any need to listen. The noise rolled in over them. It hit rock faces polished by the wind, and the drifts of crystalline pebbles, and it splintered into a tangle of echoes that came from everywhere at once, but there was no mistaking it. No need even to use sensitive earcups to locate its source.
The great alarm gong by the Captain’s hut.
Kirk began to move, very swiftly and quietly. Before the third gong stroke hit them he had his spear and his sling and was already lifting aside the door curtain.
Ma Kirk said stiffly, "Which way are they coming?"
Kirk’s ears twitched. He sorted the gong sounds, and the wind, and found a whisper underneath them, rushing up out of the gullied plain.
Kirk pointed. "From the west. Piruts, I think."
Ma Kirk sucked in her breath. Her voice had no tone in it. "Your Pa went hunting that way."
"Yeah," said Kirk. "I’ll watch out for him."
He glanced back just before he let the curtain drop. The pale glow of the heat-stones picked dots of luminous blackness out of the gloom, where the still breathless faces were, watching him. He saw the blurred shapes of clay cooking pots, of low bed frames, of huddled bodies. The baby began to whimper again.
Kirk shivered in the cold wind. "Lil," he said. "I would, too, kill the Captain’s yellow daughter."
"Yah," said Lil. "Go chase the beetles away."
There was no conviction in her voice. The wind was freezing on Kirk’s bare feet. He dropped the curtain and went across the plain.
Men and youths like himself, old enough to fight, were spilling out of low doorways and forming companies on the flat ground. Kirk spotted Jakk Randl and fell in beside him. They stood with their backs to the wind, stamping and shivering, their head-hair and scant fur clouts blown straight out.
Randl nudged Kirk’s elbow. "Look at ‘em," he said, and coughed. He was always coughing, jerking his thin sharp face back and forth. Kirk could have broken his brittle light-furred body in two. All Randl’s strength was in his eyes. The pupils were always spread, always hot with some bitter force, always probing. He wasn’t much older than Kirk.
Kirk looked up the hill. Officers were running from the huts below the gaunt, dead Ship. They didn’t look so different from the Hans, only they were built a little taller and lighter, less bowed and bunchy in the shoulders, quicker on their feet.
Kirk stepped behind Randl to shield him from the wind. His voice was only a whisper, but it had a hard edge. The baby’s thin, terrible wail was still in his ears.
"Is it true, Jakk? Do you know? Because if they are...."
Randl laughed and shuddered with a secret, ugly triumph. "I crawled up on the peak during the last darkness. The guards were cold and the wind made them blind and deaf. I lay in the rocks and watched. And I saw...."
He coughed. The Officers’ voices rang sharp through the wind. Compact groups of men began to run, off toward the west. The whisper of sound had grown louder in Kirk’s ears. He could hear men yelling and the ringing of metal on stone.
He started to run, holding Randl’s elbow. Grey dust blew under their feet. The drifts of crystal stones sent their sound shivering back at them in splinters. Kirk said fiercely:
"What did you see?"
They were passing under the hill now. Randl jerked his head. "Up there, Wes."
Kirk looked up. Someone was standing at the doorway of the Captain’s hut. Someone tall and slender and the color of the Sunstar from head to foot.
"I saw her," said Randl hoarsely. "She was carrying heat-stones into the Ship."
Kirk’s pupils shrank to points no warmer nor softer than the tip of his knife. He smiled, almost gently, looking up the hill.
The captain’s yellow daughter, taking life into the Ship.
*
It was a big raid. Kirk saw that when he scrambled up out of the last gully, half-carrying the wheezing Randl. The Piruts had come up the tongue of rock between two deep cuts and tackled the guards’ pillbox head on. They hadn’t taken it, not yet. But they were still trying, piling up their dead on the swept grey stone.
They were using shags again. They drove the lumbering beasts on into the hail of stones and thrown spears from the pillbox, keeping low behind them, and then climbing on the round hairy bodies. It took courage, because sometimes the shags turned and clawed the men who drove them, and sometimes the dead ones weren’t quite dead and it was too bad for the man who climbed on them.
It looked to Kirk as though the pillbox was pretty far gone.
He ran down the slope with the others, slipping in the crystal drifts. Randl was spent. Kirk kept him going, thinking of the huts back there on the plain, and Ma and Lil and the little ones, and the baby. You had to fight the Piruts, no matter what you thought about the Officers. You had to keep them from getting onto the plain.
He wondered about Pa. Hunting shags in the outer gullies was mean work any time, but when the Piruts were raiding....
No time to think about that. Wite, the second son of the First Officer, was signalling for double time. Kirk ran faster, his ears twitching furiously as they sifted the flying echoes into some kind of order.
Pa hadn’t been alone, of course. Frank and Russ went with him. The three of them would have sense enough to keep safe. Maybe they were in the pillbox.
A big raid. More Piruts than he’d ever seen before. He wondered why. He wondered how so many of them had been able to get so close to the pillbox all at once, walking two or three abreast on the narrow tongue of rock under the spears and slingstones.
They poured in through the gates of the stone-walled building, scattering up onto the parapet. There were slits in the rooms below and rusty metal things crouching behind them, but they weren’t any good for fighting. A man needed shoulder room for spear and sling.
It was pretty hot up there. The wall of bodies had built up so high, mostly with shags, that the Piruts were coming right over the wall. Kirk’s nose wrinkled at the smell of blood. He avoided the biggest puddles and found a place to stand between the dead.
Randl went down on his knees. He was coughing horribly, but his hot black eyes saw everything. He tried three times to lift his sling and gave it up.
"I’ll cover you," said Kirk. He began taking crystal pebbles out of a big pile that was kept there and hurling them at the Piruts. They made a singing noise in the air, and they didn’t stop going when they hit. They were heavy for their size, very heavy, with sharp edges.
Randl said, "Something funny, Wes. Too many Piruts. They couldn’t risk ‘em on an ordinary raid."
Kirk grunted.