The Vestoians passed the blue shrub. The breaker was red, with a foam of white-tipped spears.
Paul was swept into the open, not only by the howling drive of his own pygmy army, but by the machine within, relentless again, briefly free from the compromise of thought. He was firing with precision in the scant time available before the white-painted bodies crashed into the unpainted and churned up a froth of battle.
He had time to wonder why Nisana was here with him a few yards back of the hand-to-hand frenzy. She was not afraid; her spear was balanced. A break in the line of fighters let through a Vestoian soldier, dark mouth squared in a yell. Nisana's spear widened the mouth to a death mask and withdrew. Paul stepped into the breach and sent a few shots toward a trio of green-capped leaders. Something slapped and gouged at his chest—nothing serious. But his own fighters to the left of him were going down, outnumbered. He shouted at a brief gleam of Pakriaa's face, "West! Fight west!"
Golden Lisson was running back from her errand, her rifle waving, her lips straining in wild laughter. She passed him, trying to bring her rifle into use as she ran; it did not fire. A Vestoian was forcing Nisana away from Paul and beating down her spear. "Why, damn you!" The Vestoian face dissolved in pulp and strangeness under his rifle butt, and Paul reeled back, believing for an unbounded second that ghosts from a place only a few light-years away had swirled across this stinking battlefield to shriek at him: "Yes! Your people always fought that way—the ape picked up a stone...." But Nisana was alive; Nisana was unhurt and alive. He could look up again and see the girl Lisson also using her rifle as a flail.
She was between him and the beach. Three pygmies had caught the butt, and now she swung them absurdly high; she had almost shaken them off when a spear pierced her arm and hung there. The rifle dropped. She was down, under the leaping spears and red bodies. She did not even cry out again; the golden fur was reddened and defiled. Paul beat his way toward her, scarcely seeing what his swinging rifle hit, knowing it was too late, forgetting his own order to drive west. Aware too of another tawny shape flashing toward him.
Surok, who had loved Lisson, who would have been her playmate in the next Red-Moon-before-the Rains. Paul tried to stop him—but if any sound came out of his own throat it would have been lost against Surok's mindless crying. The giant tore into the press around Lisson's body and fell almost at once, crushing a few as he rolled....
"West! Stay behind my rifle, Nisana—-"
It had become a methodical insanity like Mijok's, a cutting of red hay that spouted blood. He noticed blood on his right hand too—nothing: front sights of the rifle gouging him. The Vestoians in this direction were thinning out and giving way. He caught up with a white-splashed back and bandaged thigh—Pakriaa, ploughing her way west. Abro Samiraa drove across his path in the wrong direction, chasing an isolated group of three; squat and heavy-faced, she looked happy and more than life-size in the moment of her death, as she took a spear thrust over her heart and lay down with the enemy to grin at the sky and cease hating.
A rifle barked ahead of him. That could only be Sears Oliphant: Wright would surely follow orders and keep Mijok and the giant women with him to protect the wounded.... Abro Brodaa was fighting through to aid Pakriaa, not yelling, not excited, keeping somehow an air of dreamy contemplation, as if the arms driving her spear and dagger were not quite hers. Nisana cried out, "They are not following! They go back——"
It was true. Partly true. Here in this patch of bloody meadow there was not much left to fight. The defenders had functioned like a single organism, forming a new semicircular line. Behind it was a quiet, where Pakriaa was gasping, pounding her foot into a body that felt nothing.