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He assumed that the bunker could be locked from within, but obviously someone wanted him inside. Else why all this? So the doors would open. The only tactical edge he could dredge up at this point would be to surprise them by opening some of the doors prematurely. If nothing else, it might confuse their field-of-fire assignments for an instant and give him a chance to get among them. He thought for a moment, then took the dagger in the insulating fold of his cap again, and traced the contacts for the two rightmost doors. He hesitated for a moment, thinking that his options had been narrowed with disturbing skill. But then he dismissed the notion. Why would Preall, whoever he was, be interested in Ruiz, who had no interest in Preall? And who else could have arranged this?

Then he put the dagger across the contacts.

Sparks flew, and Ruiz jerked the dagger away. At the other end of the foyer the two doors slammed up, shaking the wall as they hit their stops. Ruiz instantly jammed the dagger into the contact that operated the first door, pounding it in with the heel of his hand. He launched himself at the bottom of the door, and it responded just as he reached it. He rolled under the rising edge.

He saw a sight that should have frozen him with amazement, long enough for the Moc to freeze him with the ice gun it carried strapped to its exoskeleton. The Moc was braced against the thrust of the gun, firing a blinding burst through the first two doors Ruiz had opened. Motes of frozen gas glittered in the path of the ice gun, and then the air rushed in to fill the void with a thunderous crack.

But Ruiz’s momentum and expensive reflexes carried him behind a massive bank of launch monitors. He registered the impression that he was alone in the bunker with the Moc, just as the Moc’s second volley crashed into the monitor bank, causing an ear-splitting shattering of delicate components. Ruiz scurried for cover, but what hope was there? The Moc was so much faster and stronger, and Ruiz was armed with a ludicrously inadequate dagger. And he heard the rumble of the doors closing, locking him in with the Moc. Any physical contest between unamplified human and Moc was a ridiculous mismatch.

The Moc was a flicker of movement among the monitors, and the next volley missed Ruiz by inches, shattering an expanse of crystal that looked out at Preall’s launch ring. Ruiz had no time for reflection; all his capabilities were devoted to the task of avoiding the Moc. At some deeper level, however, Ruiz realized that this was the same Moc that had accompanied Corean, and Ruiz felt an ashamed amazement, that he had been so easily duped, so easily led to this hopeless confrontation by the beautiful slaver. And to what purpose?

The insectoid warrior was slightly hampered by the bulk of the ice gun, or it already would have been over.

But it soon would be over, no matter what Ruiz might do. He flipped, dodged the next blast, rolled frantically under a desk, only to confront the Moc in the next aisle. He whipped the nerve lash into the Moc’s mandibles, but though Corean’s bondwarrior vibrated and roared, the lash diverted the Moc only for the instant that Ruiz needed to roll back under the desk. Behind him, Ruiz heard a snap as the Moc bore down on the lash with its terrible jaws — and then the earsplitting crack of the ice gun again.

* * *

Corean stood, gripping the edges of the screen, as if it were a grave she was being pulled into. “Oh no, oh no,” she said, “what went wrong?”

Only instants had elapsed since Ruiz had entered the bunker and the Moc had fired in the wrong direction. Corean’s face was livid with rage and panic. “What happened?”

She was further enraged when she noticed that, despite the destruction of her safe world by this bizarre bad luck, Marmo was laughing loudly. She turned to him, murder in her eyes. He saw, and stopped abruptly. “Corean,” he said. “He’s not dead. If he carried the death net, he’d be dead.”

And so it seemed.

* * *

The ice gun had touched him lightly on the last shot, and now Ruiz wriggled desperately through a portion of the bunker where the consoles were so crowded that the Moc could not follow him directly, but could only bound over, firing down from the top of the arc. The warrior was remarkably accurate in that awkward moment, but Ruiz was devious, faking one way and rolling the other.

It was, however, almost over. The Moc got closer with each blast, and Ruiz’s cold muscles were responding more slowly. He felt the tug of the death net in the roots of his mind, as it prepared to send his obituary across the galaxy. In Dilvermoon, the gnomes of the League sat at their tachyon filters, waiting for his small field of data.

Oddly, the thought that filled his mind in that moment of extremity was of Nisa, the lost phoenix, the manner in which the sun had dappled her naked skin in the bathhouse, like the stroke of soft golden paws, the sun patting her body delicately.

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