"Don't be a fool, Santane," Jerrold said softly. "The Tetrarchy is not afraid of you. It can't be. It hasn't the ability to fear you or anything else. Can't you see that?" He indicated the scanners. The Fleet was bearing ever closer to Kaidor V, slashing through the cordons of defensive craft doggedly, impervious to losses and dying ships and men.
Fear touched Santane's face ... but for just an instant. Aram knew with sinking heart that the man's madness would not let him believe the truth.
"No," said Santane tensely. "They are afraid of me—or you wouldn't have been sent here."
Aram was struck with a sudden, grotesque pity for the man. All the weeks he had spent in danger and in preparation for this mission that had failed, he had thought of Santane as the living incarnation of crafty evil. What he saw before him now was a insane man—frightened by the mighty forces he had unleashed and could not now turn or control. In that moment, Aram felt that Kant Mikal's injunction to save something from the ruins was truly impossible, for nothing could come right when a single madman could smash in days the work of millennia.
Santane's face was again rigid and cold. "Perhaps you have not seen what my biological weapons can do.... Guard! Bring in the others!"
Aram felt an icy hand closing about his heart. The others....
Kant Mikal ... the men and women of the Star Cluster....
"Santane ... you haven't...!" Jerrold broke off in horror as the guard returned, leading a line of five shambling beasts. The creatures fought the chains that bound them, howling with outrage.
"How," demanded Santane, "can Terminus attack me if they face that?" His eyes lit, kindled with some obscene pleasure at the spectacle. "First there are pains in the neck and head. Blinding—agonizing pains! Then comes unconsciousness, and memory goes ... then the glands alter, and men become ... beasts...."
Deve Jennet moaned. Her friends and comrades were in that line of disfigured subhuman things. She clutched at Aram for support.