"I hear the Norbon are something new in the way of Sangaree."
"You think it's them?"
"Who else?"
"This's what Father and Cassius wanted, then. To draw that Deeth out of hiding."
Frieda sniffed. "He wasn't terribly cooperative about timing his appearance."
"Uhm." Mouse found himself a chair. He did not move, except to use the toilet, till the engagement reached its bloody conclusion.
"Astounding," he murmured, rising at last. "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. I'm going to get some sleep."
He awoke to the insistent scream of the general alarm.
For a moment he could not understand what it was. He had heard it only twice before, long ago, during drills.
A booming voice echoed through the hallways: "Action stations. All personnel to action stations. We are about to be attacked. All personnel to action stations. We are about to be attacked."
"Holy Christ!" He grabbed clothing and ran.
He burst into Combat. "What the hell is going on?"
The senior watchstander indicated a display globe. His face was pallid. He gasped, "We got about two minutes' warning from the Fishers. They snuck past them somehow."
Red blips surrounded the Fortress in the tank. Tiny wires of fire lanced across the globe. Little stars sparkled. Diminutive sub-blips swarmed and danced like clouds of gnats on a still spring day.
"Eighty-two of them, sir," someone said. "There were eighty-five to start. Mostly light stuff. Sangaree."
"But... " He did not understand. It made no sense at all.
"They range from singleships to light battle, sir. Computer's still trying to project their assault plan."
Somewhere else, a computer voice murmured, "Kill. Bogey Forty-Six. Five thousand tons."
Frieda arrived. She had been asleep too. She was groggy and disheveled.
Mouse kept trying to make sense of the ship movements in the display globe. He could detect no pattern but an inexorable inward pressure.
"Just a raid?" he asked. "Or are they serious?"
The senior watchstander gave him a funny look. "Damned serious. Suicidally serious. They said so." He punched up something on his comm screen. A face appeared. The man said he was going to do to the Fortress what had been done to Prefactlas.
Mouse asked Frieda, "You think that's him?"
"Probably. Nobody's ever seen him, as far as I know."
"I've seen him before," Mouse said, suddenly remembering a moment on The Mountain. "He was there when that old man tried to kill us. In the crowd."
"Sir," the senior watchstander said, "the computer says they're running a randomed assault pattern. Some sort of command battle computer is controlling their ships. It looks like the ships' commanders have free manueuver any direction but backward. They've got to come after us whether they want to or not."
"Then it's a kamikaze attack."
"Sir?"
"A suicide thing."
"Definitely. Until whoever controls the battle computer turns them loose."
Mouse glanced at the display. An additional two enemy ships had been neutralized. "Are they going to break through?"
The watchstander sighed. "I think so. Unless we get a little more efficiency out of the automatic defenses."
"How long before they touch down?"
"Too early to predict."
"Tell the Fishers to contact Ceislak. Tell them to pass the word to Navy. Then have them get ahold of my father."
He could take only two hours of watching the claws of doom creep closer. The enemy kept coming and coming, despite one of the most sophisticated and deadly automatic defense systems ever devised. A third of their number had been destroyed, and still they came on with a dreadful, almost machinelike determination. Plainly, a madman was in charge out there.
He walked the silent halls of the office level, in some way making tentative good-byes to the Legion and everything he had known. He visited his father's study again, thinking it would be a crime against history to destroy the collections gathered there. So many beautiful things...
He returned to Combat. "What's it look like?"
"Still bad, sir."
"We going to hold till Hittite gets here?"
"Yes, sir. You think they'll commit her by herself?"
"I couldn't say. There's nothing out there that can stand up to her."
"Empire Class could take on any ten, sir. But there're fifty-some still."
"When you get signals from her, you give her everything we know. Especially about their combat lock. They'll have to break it to engage her, won't they? Maybe some of the individual ships' commanders will make a run for it."
"Will do, sir."
An elderly officer, retired from Legion service, said, "Some figures, sir."
Mouse scanned them. They predicted that the Sangaree would overwhelm the outer defenses and land at least fifteen vessels on the planetoid's surface. "Not good. This makes Hittite our only hope."
"Yes, sir."
"Sir," said the senior watchstander. "We've just picked up another group of them moving in."
"What?"
"Easy, sir. They aren't fighting ships. Here. Five of them. Four big ones that scan out as transports of some kind, and one medium one that might be the command ship."
"Transports. Of course. So they can send troops inside."
Frieda eased up on the senior watchstander's far side. She studied the data momentarily, then stalked out of Combat. It was the first she had moved in hours.
"Pass the word to the Armory to stand by to issue small arms," Mouse said. "And tell them to run a check on all internal defense systems. You computation people. I want some kind of parameters on best and worst times we can expect them to reach the surface." More to himself than anyone, he added, "Father thought the Fortress could stand up to anything. I guess he never considered being attacked by a madman."
"Uhm. Sir, there never has been a perfect defense against someone who doesn't care what happens to himself."
Next evening Mouse mustered the entire population of the Fortress in the gymnasium. He explained the situation. He asked for suggestions and received none. There was little that could be suggested. They could but try to hang on till Navy arrived. He bid them do what they could, and before he finished decided he had screwed up by bringing them together. It only rubbed everyone's nose in the fact that there were hundreds of children who would share the Fortress's fate.
Mouse's comm roused him from a troubled sleep. "Storm here."
"Contact with Hittite, sir. She's coming in."
"I'll be right down."
When he reached Combat, the senior watchstander told him, "We've fed them our data, sir. We've established a continuous instel link. She's got a couple of Provincials with her, for what they're worth. They're going to go for the command ship and transports first."
"How soon?"
The man checked the time. "They drop hyper in two hours and eight minutes, sir. They'll be coming in with a big inherent and only a couple degrees out of the slot to target."
"How much warning will our Sangaree friends have?" Mouse nodded at the red blips on the display.
"Depends on how good their detection gear is. Anywhere from five minutes to an hour."
It came up closer to an hour. "Damn!" Mouse spat. "Look. They're pulling back."