ers, and was meeting resistance. He
formed his column, his jeep and one of the lorries in front, the scows
next, and the second lorry behind, and started around the gallery
counterclockwise, the snoopers and the three remaining bomb-robots
ahead. They began running into resistance almost at once.

Bullets spatted on the armor glass in front of him, spalling it and
blotching it with metal until he found that he could steer better by
the show-back of his view-pickup. He used that until the pickup was
shot out. Then his father began wanting to know, from the
communication screen, what was going on and where he was. A bomb or
something went off directly under the jeep, bouncing it almost to the
ceiling; he found that it was impossible to lift it again after it
settled to the floor of the gallery, and they all piled out to fight
on foot. Sommers and his gang from the number one lorry were also
afoot; their vehicle had been disabled. He saw them lifting wounded
into one of the scows.

They blew up the light-service robot to clear a nest of pirates who
had taken cover ahead of them. They sent the robo-janitor up a side
passage and exploded it in a missile-launching position on the outside
of the mountain; that produced a tremendous explosion. They began
running out of cartridges, and had to stop and glean more from enemy
casualties. They expended their last bomb-robot, the restaurant
server, to break up another pirate resistance point.

At length he found himself, with Sylvie and her father and one of the
Home Guardsmen from Sommers' lorry, lying behind an aircar somebody
had knocked out with a bazooka, with two dead pirates for company and
a dozen distressingly live ones ahead behind an improvised barricade.
Behind, there was frantic firing; the rear-guard seemed to have run
into trouble, probably from some gang that had come down from the
upper level. He wondered what his father was doing with the gunboats;
since abandoning the jeep, he had lost his only means of contact.

Suddenly, the men in front jumped up from their barricade and came
running toward him. Been reinforced, now they're counterattacking. His
rifle was empty; he drew his pistol and shot one of them, and then he
saw that they were throwing up their hands and yelling for quarter.
This was something new.

He looked around quickly, to make sure none of the liberated prisoners
except Jacquemont and his daughter were around, and then called to a
couple of his