knife-arm, then chopped
down on the creature's neck. To one side, a native somewhat better
dressed than the others, to the extent of a couple of belts with gold
ornaments, drew a Terran automatic. Von Schlichten hurled his mace and
drew his pistol, thumbing off the safety as he swung it up, but before
he could fire, Hassan Bogdanoff had seen and swung his guns around;
the double burst caught the native in the chest and fairly tore him
apart.

Another of them closed with the girl, grabbing her right arm with all
four hands and biting at her; she screamed and kicked her attacker in
the groin, where an Ulleran is, if anything, even more vulnerable than
a Terran. The native howled hideously, and von Schlichten, jumping
over a couple of corpses, shoved the muzzle of his pistol into the
creature's open mouth and pulled the trigger, blowing its head apart
like a rotten pumpkin and splashing both himself and the girl with
yellow blood and rancid-looking gray-green brains.

Hideyoshi O'Leary, jumping forward after von Schlichten, stuck his
dagger into the neck of a rioter and left it there, then caught the
girl around the waist with his free arm. Themistocles M'zangwe dropped
his mace and swung the frail-looking man onto his back. Together, they
struggled back to the command-car, von Schlichten covering the retreat
with his pistol. Another rioter--a Zirk nomad from the North, he
guessed--was aiming one of the long-barreled native air-rifles,
holding the ten-inch globe of the air-chamber in both lower hands. Von
Schlichten shot him, and the Zirk literally blew to pieces.

For an instant, he wondered how the small bursting-charge of a 10-mm
explosive pistol-bullet could accomplish such havoc, and assumed that
the native had been carrying a bomb in his belt. Then another
explosion tossed fragmentary corpses nearby, and another and another.
Glancing quickly over his shoulder, he saw four combat-cars coming in,
firing with 40-mm auto-cannon and 15-mm machine-guns. They swept
between the hovels on one side and the warehouses on the other,
strafing the mob, darted up to a thousand feet, looped, and came
swooping back, and this time there were three long blue-gray
troop-carriers behind them.

These landed in the hastily cleared street and began disgorging native
Company soldiers--Kragan mercenaries, he noted with satisfaction. They
carried a modified version of the regular Terran Federation infantry
rifle, stocked and sighted to c