Joyce felt free now to ask a question that had been in her mind ever since she first heard the word.
“You never really told us,” she said to Ben. “What is a mauki? We asked you before, but you didn’t say.”
“It’s so hard to explain,” Ben said. “Mauki isn’t just a word, and a mauki isn’t only a wife and a mother. My father once told me that he wasn’t sure but he thought the word itself was a corruption of an old Klickitat Indian word meaning ‘warrior who sings.’ There is something extra special about a mauki—it has to do with her singing and morale-building. I’m sorry, but this is the best I can do to answer your question, except that I might say without maukis our life would be empty indeed.”
“Then,” Tom said, “I take it that while all maukis are women, not all women are maukis.” Ben smiled. “Yes, that’s right.”
Ben would have been furious had anyone a few weeks before suggested that he might actually feel something akin to friendship with any Earthmen, but now he found himself liking this sandy-haired young couple whether he believed what they were saying or not, and could sense their own growing warmth toward him.
As he piloted the little ship on its grim reconnaissance of the ruined planet, he felt a pang of guilt. His companions, technically, were enemy aliens, and their own military forces were responsible for the dreadful wreckage spreading out below them. Yet after their long discussion the night before, Ben realized that he could not properly blame Tom and Joyce Barron for the work of the Earth raiders; he could only stare in heartsick horror at the ruin that ignorance and fear had already spread in its wake.
The Earth ships had done their work well. Hardly a square mile of the inhabited surface of Mars had escaped the furious bombardment. Most of the Spacer houses had been torn to rubble; the few that had been missed had been emptied of their inhabitants, their landing strips and hangars empty. Obviously, some had managed to escape into space before the destruction came. Yet in one place, far out in the desert along the rim of one of the southern rifts the tangled wreckage of a family cruiser, torn to fragments and scattered over a fifty-mile radius, gave mute evidence that even those trying to evacuate had not all escaped.
The dreary search took most of the day. Only once did they discover any sign of life. One of the oldest Spacer houses on Mars had escaped; built deep in the Martian catacombs in the wall of the Great Rift, the House of Wing still stood untouched, and on a second pass over the house Ben saw a small scout ship still snuggled under the protection of overhanging rock. As he dropped down for a landing, he saw a human figure moving out to wave to him.
He landed the ship on null-gravity. The figure was a woman. In one arm she carried an infant; in the other hand was a rifle, held at ready in the crook of her elbow. When Tom started pulling on his pressure suit, Ben shook his head. “Better not,” he said. “If she’s lost her family, she might lose control. There’s nothing you can do out there anyway.”
Suited up, Ben dropped down to the rocky landing strip and greeted the mauki by himself. The lines of grief were heavy on her face, but she recognized Ben and remembered traditional Spacer courtesy. Over coffee and crude Martian barley bread she told Ben the story of the raid.
There had been little warning, as Ben had suspected. A fleet of forty Earth ships, of cruiser size, had been detected by Communications at the Experimental Station, but quite naturally had been mistaken for returning Spacer raiders. Before the error was discovered, the ships were already sweeping the planet in pass after pass, unloading air-to-ground missiles in waves. There was no hope of defense; Spacer men had first tried to evacuate their maukis and children, seeking only to break free to the blackness of space, away from the holocaust. A few Spacer ships had mobilized enough to counterattack the bombers on their third pass. There had been a minor skirmish, with a couple of Earth ships shot out of the sky; then the rest of the fleet had drawn back and begun a scattered retreat into space with the few remaining Spacer ships in hot pursuit.
“What kind of ships were they?” Ben had wanted to know.
“Earth ships,” the mauki said scornfully. “Slow and crude, clumsily handled. There were just too many, and they came too suddenly. They must have had an orbit ship waiting for them out there somewhere; with ion drive, those ships could never have come straight from Earth by themselves.”
“Any word back from our own ships?”
The mauki shook her head sadly. “Nothing. The Earthmen hit and ran, moved out when their dirty work was done. Then after it was all over, the survivors here went on, in whatever ships were still spaceworthy.”
“What about you?” Ben asked gently.
“Someone had to stay, to pass the word to our own raiders coming back. There was no reason for me to go. My man was killed trying to reach the family ship, along with the two older boys. Why should I go now?”
“Then what are the orders?”
The woman shook her head, “No orders, just a vague plan. The men wanted to get to Asteroid Central as soon as they could; there’s bound to be murder out in the rings. They figured that some of our spies on Earth must have been broken somehow, or else we had traitors in our midst. How else could they have hit every house here, every farm? But in space, they can’t fight us. If enough ships can get to Central soon enough, they may be able to stop an attack there.” Ben thought it over, frowning. “Maybe,” he said. “But if all our ships start converging on Asteroid Central, wouldn’t that be painting it red for the enemy?”
“The men thought of that. They won’t be going directly to Central. Each one picked one of the outpost asteroids. They were hoping to draw the Earth fleet into a booby trap, thinking it was Asteroid Central, and then hit both flanks. Nobody seemed to think the Earth fleet could hold up for an hour in a real space attack.”
“I’m not so sure,” Ben said, thinking of the driving fear that the Barrons had spoken of. “They might try to fight their way through to Central no matter what their losses. How long ago did the last ship leave?”
“Twenty-four hours ago. The plan was for any of the raiders returning to head for Asteroid Central, and join forces with any major Spacer ship they could contact.”
“Then I’ll have to move,” Ben said. “Do you have food and water, enough for you and the baby?”
“We have plenty,” the woman said. “And we have fuel stores. You’d better load all you can carry.” For the next half-hour Ben loaded the lead-shielded fuel blocks into the ship’s hold, discarding the exhausted stores. Normally these would be picked up by a “scavenger” ship, carried to a roving tanker plying its route out to the asteroid rings, and ultimately reach the great nuclear fuel repositories in the breeder piles on Asteroid Central, for refilling. But now, he reflected, there was no telling when the empties would be refilled.
Once again aboard the ship, after a few words of encouragement to the desolated mauki, Ben activated the null-gravs and moved up into the thin Martian atmosphere. As briefly as he could, and without going into detail, he told the Barrens their destination: a swift trip out from the orbit of Mars into the barren “desert” of the asteroid rings, with sights set on a rendezvous and regrouping with Spacer forces somewhere in the vicinity of Asteroid Central. “There’s no choice but to take you along,” he told them. “You’d not be safe on Mars, not with her.”
“How many people escaped?” Joyce Barron asked.
“Only a handful. Probably ninety per cent of the people were destroyed in their houses.”
“It’s terrible,” Joyce said, “without any warning, and no quarter given to women and children. If that many were killed spread out all over a planet, think what could happen to your central city in the Rings…”