Mouse sat in his father’s chair, behind his father’s
desk. His eyes were closed. He felt much as his father looked the
day he had returned from Academy. How long ago? Just a few
months . . . It seemed like half a
lifetime.
So much had happened. So much had changed. The Fortress had
slipped quietly over some unseen boundary into a foreign universe,
a hateful, actively hostile universe.
He had changed with his home. He had seen things. He had helped
do things. None of them left him proud. He had turned a sharp
corner on the yellow-brick road and had caught a corner-of-the-eye
glimpse of a side of his family he had not known existed when he
had gone off to Academy.
“I was a child then,” he murmured. “This is
just growing-up pain. Just reaction to a head-on with
reality.”
With reality. With a special reality unique to the family and
Legion, with their bizarre array of problems and enemies.
He opened his father’s comm drawer, punched for Combat.
“Anything new?” he asked.
“Ah, negative, sir. Situations appear static.”
“Keep me informed.”
“Will do, sir.”
“You’re very good,” Mouse whispered after
breaking the connection. “If I were you I would’ve lost
patience with me last week.” He rose and began prowling the
study.
He could not shake a subtle conviction that something dreadful
was about to happen. He was restless all day. He had been unable to
sleep well the past several nights.
“If there was just something to do around here.”
He began strolling from cabinet to cabinet, looking into each,
re-examining his father’s collections. He did the rounds at
least once a day. The circuit had a curiously calming effect.
He wondered if his father used them for the same talismanic
purpose.
The coins, the dolls, the china, the books—they were all
evidence of a past, of a connection with and a part in a vast,
ongoing process. You could reach out and touch them and feel that
you were touching part of something larger than yourself. You
pulled in endless, invisible strands of humanity and spun yourself
a chrysalis . . . It was all very subjective
and emotional.
Still restless, he quit the study and went up to Cassius’s
office. He met no one along the way.
The tiny, empty world of the Iron Legion made him think of
still, abandoned cities, deserted for no reason history bothered to
remember. Take twenty thousand people out of the Fortress and it
became a self-contained desolation almost timidly murmuring to
itself.
These days he heard sounds he had never noticed before, all the
background noises of supportive machines that had been drowned in
the chatter and clatter of human presence. The sounds left him with
an eerie, spooky feeling. Sometimes, as he strolled the empty
hallways of the office levels, he would freeze suddenly, for a
fraction of a second completely convinced that he was alone,
trapped in an empty structure seven light-years from the nearest
human being.
In those instants he staggered with the impact of a very vacant,
very hollow feeling, inevitably followed by an instant of panic.
Alienation was not the same as being alone. The alienated man moved
in a bubble, but could see other human beings outside. The soul of
him knew they were there, accessible if he could find the enchanted
key. The separation was emotional, not physical. The truly alone
man was barred from human intercourse by insuperable physical
barriers . . .
Mouse would never forget the look on Fearchild’s face when
he had entered the torture chamber in that asteroid—such
pathetic joy at the appearance of another being, an almost eager
anticipation of torment that would reaffirm his membership in a
fundamentally gregarious species.
Mouse decided that he had had an insight into the human animal.
The bad marriages that went on, the cruel relationships that
persevered beyond all logic—most people preferred pain to
being alone. Even pain was an affirmation of belonging.
“The beast isn’t really a solipsist,” he
muttered. Cassius’s toy purchases from The Mountain were
still in their shipping packs. He considered unwrapping them,
setting them up, abandoned the idea. They were Cassius’s
private pleasure. He had no right to interfere.
He spent an hour playing with an ancient electric train, just
running it around and around its track, making switches, stopping
at stations, restacking the boxcars, wondering how the original
owner had differed from people of his own age.
Beliefs and values made him think of his Academy classmates.
Drawn from Confederation’s farthest reaches, they had brought
with them an incredible range of ideas and attitudes, some of which
he had found wholly alien.
Tommy McClennon, with whom he had crewed and miraculously won in
the Crab Nebula Sunjam Regatta two years
ago . . . Tommy was Old Earther and more alien
than most of the racial aliens attending Academy. Those aliens were
of the same caste, the warrior, as the Storms. Tommy’s
ancestors had been nonproductive wards of the state for centuries.
Tommy’s different ideas went right to the bone.
A beep-beep-beep sounded from a silver button on the breast of
his tunic. An elf’s voice repeated a number three times.
Mouse opened Cassius’s desk and punched it on Walters’s
comm. “Masato Storm.”
“Sir, word from Ceislak. He’s just had a Sangaree
raidfleet drop hyper . . . ”
“I’ll be right down.” He ran to the nearest
elevator, feeling foolish as he did. What could he do, really?
Nothing but listen while this Helga’s World disaster
developed.
“I was right about something bad coming on,” he
told himself.
Frieda Storm stepped from another elevator as he left his.
“You got the word?” she asked.
“The Sangaree? Yes.”
“What the hell happened to that nitwit admiral who said he
was going to help?”
Two big boards had been set up in Combat. One tried to follow
operations on Blackworld, the other Ceislak’s Helga’s
World action. They were not fully computerized, nor were they
up-to-date. A mob of old folks and youngsters did their best with
sketchy information.
“What’s happened?” Mouse demanded.
“Donninger’s trying to hold them off, but he’s
going to have to run. There’s way too many of
them.”
Mouse glared at a newly activated display globe. At its heart
lay a cue-ball-looking orb which represented Helga’s World.
Combat was receiving a data relay from Legion ships orbiting the
planet. Mouse watched the blips a while.
“What’s our real-time lag?”
“Five minutes and some seconds. Pretty good, considering.
Your father’s Fisher friends must be right in on top of it.
Close enough to risk getting shot at.”
Mouse considered the trend. “Tell Donninger to get the
hell out. Ten more minutes and he won’t be able to.” A
Legion ship winked out of existence while he spoke.
“They brought in some heavy stuff,” someone said.
“Bigger than anything on the ID lists.”
Mouse tried to watch several screens at once as specs came
through and the computers tried to build images of the enemy
warships. “They are big,” he told Frieda.
“Something new in the way of raidships.”
“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.”
Within a half-hour it was obvious the raidships were being moved
to protect the command ship and transports, and that they were
still under that relentless outside control.
“I guess we’ll see just how mean one of those
big-assed Empire babies is,” Mouse said.
“I suppose we will, sir.” Hittite dropped hyper and went into action in an awesome blaze
of weaponry. She and her escort settled into a quiet, deadly
routine of systematic destruction. The Sangaree seemed unable to
touch her. But invincibility proved an illusion.
“Hello, Iron Legion. Hittite here. Boys, I don’t
want to tell you this, but I have to. We’ve taken some drive
damage. We’ll have to pull out or lose our screens.
Sorry.”
“Sorry?” Mouse snarled. “Sorry don’t
help nothing.”
“At least we softened them up a little for you.”
Hittite’s Communications Officer had not heard Mouse.
“We make it eleven solid scratches and a whole lot of bloody
noses. Good luck, guys. Hittite out.”
“Run the numbers,” Mouse snapped.
“They’re still going to get through, sir. Unless
those bloody noses are worse than they look.”
“Bloody hell! I didn’t want to hear that.”
Frieda made her first appearance of the new day.
“What’s going on?”
Mouse explained.
“Damn it all, anyway!” She flew out of Combat.
Mouse was returning to his quarters when he saw the body lying
on the stretcher in the corridor. A girl of about fifteen. He did
not recognize her. She had to be a daughter of one of the enlisted
men.
“What the hell?” He knelt, felt her pulse. She was
alive. Just unconscious. Or sleeping.
A sound startled him. He glanced up, saw two old men go into a
cross corridor carrying a youngster on a stretcher. The one to the
rear gave him a furtive look.
He started to run after them, became distracted when he passed
an open dormitory door. The lights were on. A half-dozen retirees
were lifting children onto stretchers.
“What the hell is going on here?” he demanded.
They stared at him. Nobody said anything. Nobody smiled or
frowned. Two hunkered down, lifted a stretcher, came toward
him.
He grabbed an arm. “I asked a question,
soldier.”
“Mouse.”
He turned. Frieda stood framed in the doorway, not a meter away.
She held a weapon and it was aimed at him.
“What the hell are you up to, Mother?”
She half smiled. “We’re loading you youngsters
aboard the Ehrhardt. We’re sending you to your father. The
Fishers will give you covering fire.”
His thoughts zigged and zagged. That was a good idea. It should
have occurred to him. Gets the children out. It would be risky, but
Ehrhardt was one of the fastest ships ever
built . . . But Frieda seemed to be including
him in this Noah’s Ark venture. He would not have any of
that.
“I’ve got a job here.”
She smiled weakly. “I relieve you of command, Mouse. Bring
a stretcher, men.”
“Don’t try to pull anything on
me . . . ”
“Take your father a kiss for me, Mouse.” Her finger
tightened on the trigger.
Mouse tried to jump aside. He was not quick enough. The stun
bolt scrambled his thoughts. He was falling, falling,
falling . . . He never reached the floor.
Mouse sat in his father’s chair, behind his father’s
desk. His eyes were closed. He felt much as his father looked the
day he had returned from Academy. How long ago? Just a few
months . . . It seemed like half a
lifetime.
So much had happened. So much had changed. The Fortress had
slipped quietly over some unseen boundary into a foreign universe,
a hateful, actively hostile universe.
He had changed with his home. He had seen things. He had helped
do things. None of them left him proud. He had turned a sharp
corner on the yellow-brick road and had caught a corner-of-the-eye
glimpse of a side of his family he had not known existed when he
had gone off to Academy.
“I was a child then,” he murmured. “This is
just growing-up pain. Just reaction to a head-on with
reality.”
With reality. With a special reality unique to the family and
Legion, with their bizarre array of problems and enemies.
He opened his father’s comm drawer, punched for Combat.
“Anything new?” he asked.
“Ah, negative, sir. Situations appear static.”
“Keep me informed.”
“Will do, sir.”
“You’re very good,” Mouse whispered after
breaking the connection. “If I were you I would’ve lost
patience with me last week.” He rose and began prowling the
study.
He could not shake a subtle conviction that something dreadful
was about to happen. He was restless all day. He had been unable to
sleep well the past several nights.
“If there was just something to do around here.”
He began strolling from cabinet to cabinet, looking into each,
re-examining his father’s collections. He did the rounds at
least once a day. The circuit had a curiously calming effect.
He wondered if his father used them for the same talismanic
purpose.
The coins, the dolls, the china, the books—they were all
evidence of a past, of a connection with and a part in a vast,
ongoing process. You could reach out and touch them and feel that
you were touching part of something larger than yourself. You
pulled in endless, invisible strands of humanity and spun yourself
a chrysalis . . . It was all very subjective
and emotional.
Still restless, he quit the study and went up to Cassius’s
office. He met no one along the way.
The tiny, empty world of the Iron Legion made him think of
still, abandoned cities, deserted for no reason history bothered to
remember. Take twenty thousand people out of the Fortress and it
became a self-contained desolation almost timidly murmuring to
itself.
These days he heard sounds he had never noticed before, all the
background noises of supportive machines that had been drowned in
the chatter and clatter of human presence. The sounds left him with
an eerie, spooky feeling. Sometimes, as he strolled the empty
hallways of the office levels, he would freeze suddenly, for a
fraction of a second completely convinced that he was alone,
trapped in an empty structure seven light-years from the nearest
human being.
In those instants he staggered with the impact of a very vacant,
very hollow feeling, inevitably followed by an instant of panic.
Alienation was not the same as being alone. The alienated man moved
in a bubble, but could see other human beings outside. The soul of
him knew they were there, accessible if he could find the enchanted
key. The separation was emotional, not physical. The truly alone
man was barred from human intercourse by insuperable physical
barriers . . .
Mouse would never forget the look on Fearchild’s face when
he had entered the torture chamber in that asteroid—such
pathetic joy at the appearance of another being, an almost eager
anticipation of torment that would reaffirm his membership in a
fundamentally gregarious species.
Mouse decided that he had had an insight into the human animal.
The bad marriages that went on, the cruel relationships that
persevered beyond all logic—most people preferred pain to
being alone. Even pain was an affirmation of belonging.
“The beast isn’t really a solipsist,” he
muttered. Cassius’s toy purchases from The Mountain were
still in their shipping packs. He considered unwrapping them,
setting them up, abandoned the idea. They were Cassius’s
private pleasure. He had no right to interfere.
He spent an hour playing with an ancient electric train, just
running it around and around its track, making switches, stopping
at stations, restacking the boxcars, wondering how the original
owner had differed from people of his own age.
Beliefs and values made him think of his Academy classmates.
Drawn from Confederation’s farthest reaches, they had brought
with them an incredible range of ideas and attitudes, some of which
he had found wholly alien.
Tommy McClennon, with whom he had crewed and miraculously won in
the Crab Nebula Sunjam Regatta two years
ago . . . Tommy was Old Earther and more alien
than most of the racial aliens attending Academy. Those aliens were
of the same caste, the warrior, as the Storms. Tommy’s
ancestors had been nonproductive wards of the state for centuries.
Tommy’s different ideas went right to the bone.
A beep-beep-beep sounded from a silver button on the breast of
his tunic. An elf’s voice repeated a number three times.
Mouse opened Cassius’s desk and punched it on Walters’s
comm. “Masato Storm.”
“Sir, word from Ceislak. He’s just had a Sangaree
raidfleet drop hyper . . . ”
“I’ll be right down.” He ran to the nearest
elevator, feeling foolish as he did. What could he do, really?
Nothing but listen while this Helga’s World disaster
developed.
“I was right about something bad coming on,” he
told himself.
Frieda Storm stepped from another elevator as he left his.
“You got the word?” she asked.
“The Sangaree? Yes.”
“What the hell happened to that nitwit admiral who said he
was going to help?”
Two big boards had been set up in Combat. One tried to follow
operations on Blackworld, the other Ceislak’s Helga’s
World action. They were not fully computerized, nor were they
up-to-date. A mob of old folks and youngsters did their best with
sketchy information.
“What’s happened?” Mouse demanded.
“Donninger’s trying to hold them off, but he’s
going to have to run. There’s way too many of
them.”
Mouse glared at a newly activated display globe. At its heart
lay a cue-ball-looking orb which represented Helga’s World.
Combat was receiving a data relay from Legion ships orbiting the
planet. Mouse watched the blips a while.
“What’s our real-time lag?”
“Five minutes and some seconds. Pretty good, considering.
Your father’s Fisher friends must be right in on top of it.
Close enough to risk getting shot at.”
Mouse considered the trend. “Tell Donninger to get the
hell out. Ten more minutes and he won’t be able to.” A
Legion ship winked out of existence while he spoke.
“They brought in some heavy stuff,” someone said.
“Bigger than anything on the ID lists.”
Mouse tried to watch several screens at once as specs came
through and the computers tried to build images of the enemy
warships. “They are big,” he told Frieda.
“Something new in the way of raidships.”
“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.”
Within a half-hour it was obvious the raidships were being moved
to protect the command ship and transports, and that they were
still under that relentless outside control.
“I guess we’ll see just how mean one of those
big-assed Empire babies is,” Mouse said.
“I suppose we will, sir.” Hittite dropped hyper and went into action in an awesome blaze
of weaponry. She and her escort settled into a quiet, deadly
routine of systematic destruction. The Sangaree seemed unable to
touch her. But invincibility proved an illusion.
“Hello, Iron Legion. Hittite here. Boys, I don’t
want to tell you this, but I have to. We’ve taken some drive
damage. We’ll have to pull out or lose our screens.
Sorry.”
“Sorry?” Mouse snarled. “Sorry don’t
help nothing.”
“At least we softened them up a little for you.”
Hittite’s Communications Officer had not heard Mouse.
“We make it eleven solid scratches and a whole lot of bloody
noses. Good luck, guys. Hittite out.”
“Run the numbers,” Mouse snapped.
“They’re still going to get through, sir. Unless
those bloody noses are worse than they look.”
“Bloody hell! I didn’t want to hear that.”
Frieda made her first appearance of the new day.
“What’s going on?”
Mouse explained.
“Damn it all, anyway!” She flew out of Combat.
Mouse was returning to his quarters when he saw the body lying
on the stretcher in the corridor. A girl of about fifteen. He did
not recognize her. She had to be a daughter of one of the enlisted
men.
“What the hell?” He knelt, felt her pulse. She was
alive. Just unconscious. Or sleeping.
A sound startled him. He glanced up, saw two old men go into a
cross corridor carrying a youngster on a stretcher. The one to the
rear gave him a furtive look.
He started to run after them, became distracted when he passed
an open dormitory door. The lights were on. A half-dozen retirees
were lifting children onto stretchers.
“What the hell is going on here?” he demanded.
They stared at him. Nobody said anything. Nobody smiled or
frowned. Two hunkered down, lifted a stretcher, came toward
him.
He grabbed an arm. “I asked a question,
soldier.”
“Mouse.”
He turned. Frieda stood framed in the doorway, not a meter away.
She held a weapon and it was aimed at him.
“What the hell are you up to, Mother?”
She half smiled. “We’re loading you youngsters
aboard the Ehrhardt. We’re sending you to your father. The
Fishers will give you covering fire.”
His thoughts zigged and zagged. That was a good idea. It should
have occurred to him. Gets the children out. It would be risky, but
Ehrhardt was one of the fastest ships ever
built . . . But Frieda seemed to be including
him in this Noah’s Ark venture. He would not have any of
that.
“I’ve got a job here.”
She smiled weakly. “I relieve you of command, Mouse. Bring
a stretcher, men.”
“Don’t try to pull anything on
me . . . ”
“Take your father a kiss for me, Mouse.” Her finger
tightened on the trigger.
Mouse tried to jump aside. He was not quick enough. The stun
bolt scrambled his thoughts. He was falling, falling,
falling . . . He never reached the floor.