Between two files of guards, Deve and Jerrold walked into the city they had hoped to strip of its weapons. The bitterness of their failure rode hard on Jerrold's shoulders. He kept hearing again and again the phrase that Kant Mikal had used: "To save something from the wreckage...." It seemed impossible now. The giants and the furies were gathering. The might of the Thirty Suns would descend like a rain of fire on Kaidor V, and the mindless death nurtured here would sweep the inhabited worlds like a plague. The forces Jerrold had hoped to chain were free now, and threatening, like some ghastly cosmic storm. The teeming cities would crumble, the spaceways would be deserted. Night would fall on man's imperfect, but highest achievement, and he would return to the primeval muck. Aram searched the faces of the streams of workers they passed. They were sullen, whipped men. From the tyranny of the Tetrarchy they had slipped into the clutches of Santane. For them, there was no hope, no dignity, and only the release of death could change their lot. The black guards herded Deve and Jerrold onto a small air-sled, and the tiny craft nosed upward and into the streams of aerial traffic above the darkened city. Ahead lay the black bulk of a towering skylon. This, Aram realized, must be Santane's citadel. The air-sled was sinking slowly to a landing on one of the many landing platforms that marred the flanks of the mighty skylon when the first alarm sirens began to wail. Aram turned his eyes to the night sky automatically. He could not hope to see the Fleet, for they must still be beyond the orbit of Kaidor X, but he did see the red streaks of the first interceptor rockets taking off. The sky in the east was greying; the attack would come by day. The air-sled touched the landing stage, and the guards hurried Jerrold and Deve Jennet into the citadel. Through a maze of halls thronging with white-faced officers in new and unfamiliar uniforms they went, past guards and armored doorways. At last they stood in a vaulted, oblong room that hummed with activity. It was a Combat Center. In the center of the room lay a huge, three-dimensional chart of the Thirtieth Decant and the Kaidor system. Jerrold recognized the red blips that indicated the approaching Fleet, fully ten thousand strong ... and he recognized something else too. He had felt this kind of tension in ships of the Navy. It was fear--universal, jittery fear. These people, Aram knew suddenly, were terribly, desperately afraid of that advancing armada. Their leader had told them that it would not dare attack, yet it came on inexorably and they were afraid. Yellow streaks in the chart showed the track of interceptors, already fanning out from Kaidor V, seeking targets in the huge, onrushing formation of mighty battleships that spread across light-minutes of space. The tiny weapons had already taken a small toll of the slower Fleet vessels, but the rest continued sunward, their losses unfelt.