the pro, the Mad Dog, and he was fast enough to catch his nephew by the arm and fling him out of the killing zone.
Beverly Dyson was still backed against the wall three meters away, but his hands no longer covered his face. He aimed a glass derringer, the only metal in it the atom's thickness which mirrored the interior of the barrel.
Not a military weapon at all, Slade thought fleetingly, but neither is a man a tank. Aloud, forgetting the link that threw his voice out over the speakers, he said, "Go ahead, Bev. I don't think you've got the guts."
Slade's last thought before the derringer fired was how the Hell had he mistaken Dyson for a handsome man. The face glaring over the muzzle could have come from deep wat—
The bolt made a light popping sound in the air and a crash like breaking glass when it struck the middle of Slade's chest. The big man staggered backward. There were screams from several points in the Hall, though why, one more shooting on this day . . .?
Dyson tossed the gun away like a man snapping a spider from his hand. The discharged piece was too hot to hold. It clattered against the wall and back to the podium.
A plate-sized patch had been burned from the center of Slade's tunic. Its edges were still asmolder. The breastplate of the ceramic armor beneath the tunic was blackened. Crinkle marks at the center of the pattern indicated that the plate would have to be replaced. It had been degraded to uselessness in absorbing the single bolt.
Guess I owe Danny for a chicken suit, Slade thought as he raised the President's chair in one hand. His laughter boomed out over the speakers and he added aloud, "And my life . . ." No one in the Hall understood the words, but by that point no one particularly expected to.
The chair was wooden, like the benches, and probably as uncomfortable for all its smooth curves. It weighed fifteen kilos, a clumsy bludgeon but a massive one. Slade poised it overhead. "Thirty years, Bev, hasn't it been?" he said.
Councilor Dyson turned ,