quick glance into the gun room; two of the Starpha servants and a man
in rather flashy civil dress were lying on the floor, where they had
been shot as they had jumped down from above. He saw a movement at the
edge of the irregular, smoking, hole in the ceiling, and gave it a
short burst, then fired another at the exit from the descent tube.
Then he took to his heels and followed the Assassins and Hadron Dalla
into Prince Jirzyn's apartment.

As he ran through the open door, the Assassins were letting Dalla down
into a chair; they instantly threw themselves into the work of
barricading the doorway so as to provide cover and at the same time
allow them to fire out into the central well.

[Illustration: ]

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-Neb
bullets. Then he saw her eye-lids flicker. A moment later, he had the
explanation of her escape. The bullet had hit the game bag at her
side; it was full of spools of metal tape, in metal cases, and notes
in written form, pyrographed upon sheets of plastic ring fastened into
metal binders. Because of their extreme velocity, Akor-Neb bullets
were sure killers when they struck animal tissue, but for the same
reason, they had very poor penetration on hard objects. The
alloy-steel tape, and the steel spools and spool cases, and the
notebook binders, had been enough to shatter the little bullet into
splinters of magnesium-nickel alloy, and the stout leather back of the
game bag had stopped all of these. But the impact, even distributed as
it had been through the contents of the bag, had been enough to knock
the girl unconscious.