thewreckage Dalla's bullet had made of it.
The rooms Dirzed and Sarnax entered were all quiet; nobody seemed tobe attempting to cut through the ceiling, fifteen feet above. Theydragged furniture from a couple of rooms, blocking the openings of thelifter tubes, and continued around the well until they had reached thegun room again.
Dirzed suggested that they move some of the weapons and ammunitionstored there to Prince Jirzyn's private apartment, halfway around tothe lifter tubes, so that another place of refuge would be stockedwith munitions in event of their being driven from the gun room.
Leaving him on guard outside, Verkan Vall, Dalla and Sarnax enteredthe gun room and began gathering weapons and boxes of ammunition.Dalla finished packing her game bag with the recorded data and notesof her experiments. Verkan Vall selected four more of the heavyhunting pistols, more accurate than his shoulder-holster weapon or thedead Olirzon's belt arm, and capable of either full or semi-automaticfire. Sarnax chose a couple more boar rifles. Dalla slung her bag ofrecorded notes, and another bag of ammunition, and secured anotherdeer rifle. They carried this accumulation of munitions to the privateapartments of Prince Jirzyn, dumping everything in the middle of thedrawing room, except the bag of notes, from which Dalla refused toseparate herself.
"Maybe we'd better put some stuff over in one of the rooms on theother side of the well," Dirzed suggested. "They haven't really begunto come after us; when they do, we'll probably be attacked from twoor three directions at once."
They returned to the gun room, casting anxious glances at the edge ofthe balcony above and at the barricade they had erected across theopenings to the lifter tubes. Verkan Vall was not satisfied with thislast; it looked to him as though they had provided a breastwork forsomebody to fire on them from, more than anything else.
He was about to step around the cabinet which partially blocked thegun-room door when he glanced up, and saw a six-foot circle on theceiling turning slowly brown. There was a smell of scorched plastic.He grabbed Sarnax by the arm and pointed.
"Thermite," the Assassin whispered. "The ceiling's got six inches ofspaceship-insulation between it and the floor above; it'll take them afew minutes to burn through it." He stooped and pushed on thebarricade, shoving it into the room. "Keep back; they'll probably dropa grenade or so through, first, before they jump down. If we're quick,we can get a couple of them."
Dirzed and Sarnax crouched, one at either side of the door, withweapons ready. Verkan Vall and Dalla had been ordered, ratherperemptorily, to stay behind them; in a place of danger, an Assassinwas obliged to shield his client. Verkan Vall, unable to see what wasgoing on inside the room, kept his eyes and his gun muzzle on thebarricade across the openings to the lifter tubes, the erection ofwhich he was now regretting as a major tactical error.
Inside the gun room, there was a sudden crash, as the circle ofthermite burned through and a section of ceiling dropped out and hitthe floor. Instantly, Dirzed flung himself back against Verkan Vall,and there was a tremendous explosion inside, followed by another andanother. A second or so passed, then Dirzed, leaning around the cornerof the door, began firing rapidly into the room. From the other sideof the door, Sarnax began blazing away with his rifle. Verkan Vallkept his position, covering the lifter tubes.
Suddenly, from behind the barricade, a blue-white gun flash leapedinto being, and a pistol banged. He sprayed the opening between acouch and a section of bookcase from whence it had come, releasing histrigger as the gun rose with the recoil, squeezing and releasing andsqueezing again. Then he jumped to his feet.
"Come on, the other place; hurry!" he ordered.
Sarnax swore in exasperation. "Help me with her, Dirzed!" he implored.
Verkan Vall turned his head, to see the two Assassins drag Dalla toher feet and hustle her away from the gun room; she was quitesenseless, and they had to drag her between them. Verkan Vall gave aquick glance into the gun room; two of the Starpha servants and a manin rather flashy civil dress were lying on the floor, where they hadbeen shot as they had jumped down from above. He saw a movement at theedge of the irregular, smoking, hole in the ceiling, and gave it ashort burst, then fired another at the exit from the descent tube.Then he took to his heels and followed the Assassins and Hadron Dallainto Prince Jirzyn's apartment.
As he ran through the open door, the Assassins were letting Dalla downinto a chair; they instantly threw themselves into the work ofbarricading the doorway so as to provide cover and at the same timeallow them to fire out into the central well.
]
For an instant, as he bent over her, he thought Dalla had been killed,an assumption justified by his knowledge of the deadliness of Akor-Nebbullets. Then he saw her eye-lids flicker. A moment later, he had theexplanation of her escape. The bullet had hit the game bag at herside; it was full of spools of metal tape, in metal cases, and notesin written form, pyrographed upon sheets of plastic ring fastened intometal binders. Because of their extreme velocity, Akor-Neb bulletswere sure killers when they struck animal tissue, but for the samereason, they had very poor penetration on hard objects. Thealloy-steel tape, and the steel spools and spool cases, and thenotebook binders, had been enough to shatter the little bullet intosplinters of magnesium-nickel alloy, and the stout leather back of thegame bag had stopped all of these. But the impact, even distributed asit had been through the contents of the bag, had been enough to knockthe girl unconscious.
He found a bottle of some sort of brandy and a glass on a servingtable nearby and poured her a drink, holding it to her lips. Shespluttered over the first mouthful, then took the glass from him andsipped the rest.
"What happened?" she asked. "I thought those bullets were sure death."
"Your notes. The bullet hit the bag. Are you all right, now?"
She finished the brandy. "I think so." She put a hand into the gamebag and brought out a snarled and tangled mess of steel tape. "Oh,_blast_! That stuff was important; all the records on the preliminaryauto-recall experiments." She shrugged. "Well, it wouldn't have beenworth much more if I'd stopped that bullet, myself." She slipped thestrap over her shoulder and started to rise.
As she did, a bedlam of firing broke out, both from the two Assassinsat the door and from outside. They both hit the floor and crawled outof line of the partly-open door; Verkan Vall recovered hissubmachine-gun, which he had set down beside Dalla's chair. Sarnax wasfiring with his rifle at some target in the direction of the liftertubes; Dirzed lay slumped over the barricade, and one glance at hiscrumpled figure was enough to tell Verkan Vall that he was dead.
"You fill magazines for us," he told Dalla, then crawled to Dirzed'splace at the door. "What happened, Sarnax?"
"They shoved over the barricade at the lifter tubes and came out intothe well. I got a couple, they got Dirzed, and now they're holed up inrooms all around the circle. They--Aah!" He fired three shots,quickly, around the edge of the door. "That stopped that." TheAssassin crouched to insert a fresh magazine into his rifle.
]
Verkan Vall risked one eye around the corner of the doorway, and as hedid, there was a red flash and a dull roar, unlike the blue flashesand sharp cracking reports of the pistols and rifles, from the doorwayof the gun room. He wondered, for a split second, if it might be oneof the fowling pieces he had seen there, and then something whizzedpast his head and exploded with a soft _plop_ behind him. Turning, hesaw a pool of gray vapor beginning to spread in the middle of theroom. Dalla must have got a breath of it, for she was slumped over thechair from which she had just risen.
Dropping the submachine-gun and gulping a lungful of fresh air fromoutside, Verkan Vall rushed to her, caught her by the heels, anddragged her into Prince Jirzyn's bedroom, beyond. Leaving her in themiddle of the floor, he took another deep breath and returned to thedrawing room, where Sarnax was already overcome by the sleep-gas.
He saw the serving table from which he had got the brandy, and draggedit over to the bedroom door, overturning it and laying it across thedoorway, its legs in the air
. Like most Akor-Neb serving tables, ithad a gravity-counteraction unit under it; he set this for doubleminus-gravitation and snapped it on. As it was now above the invertedtable, the table did not rise, but a tendril, of sleep-gas, curlingtoward it, bent upward and drifted away from the doorway. Satisfiedthat he had made a temporary barrier against the sleep-gas, VerkanVall secured Dalla's hunting pistol and spare magazines and lay downat the bedroom door.
For some time, there was silence outside. Then the besiegers evidentlydecided that the sleep-gas attack had been a success. An Assassin,wearing a gas mask and carrying a submachine-gun, appeared in thedoorway, and behind him came a tall man in a tan tunic, similarlymasked. They stepped into the room and looked around.
Knowing that he would be shooting over a two hundred percent negativegravitation-field, Verkan