Soft come the dragons

and into his own set, removing the helmet.
    It was two o'clock in the morning. And Margle was on his way . . .
     
    There were preparations to be made. The police were not going to be any good. There was no hope that they would help. He knew without need of further corroboration, that any further calls he made to the police would be automatically routed to Modigliani, who would see that he was given the brush-off. So he had to defend himself. He had a collection of pin and dart weapons with which he amused himself in the basement shooting range. He collected three of these and brought them upstairs. He carried books into the kitchen and braced one of the weapons between them so that it covered the door at waist height. That he could trigger with his psionic talents if necessary. He took the other two and grasped one firmly in each servo. There was nothing more but waiting . . .
    He heard them in the courtyard behind the house. They were not attempting to be quiet. Their aide Modigliani had probably assured them that the police would stay out of it and that Ti was helpless. He stood at the doorway between kitchen and dining area, both gun-laden servos aimed at the door, his psi ready to trigger the book-propped weapon too. The door rattled. Then something struck it hard. It crashed inward, the lock ripped lose, and a Hound floated into the room.
    But the Hound was smashed, broken back at Taguster's!
    Which meant they had more than one Hound. With contacts like Modigliani, that was not surprising.
    But his guns were no good! The pins would bounce harmlessly off the Hound's "hide," and the beast would sweep in for a swift and sure kill. Ti turned into the dining area, dropping the guns and calling his servos after him. He had expected men, not machines. Now what? He heard the Hound in the kitchen, but it didn't remain there for long. When he reached the living room, it was humming into the dining area, following him.
    He felt panic welling in him as he remembered the pin-punctured throat of the musician, the bloody body of his lover as she had tried to crawl out of the window to avoid the alloy demon. The same alloy demon that now stalked him. But he fought the panic, knowing only death lay with it.
    The Hound entered the living room and sensed his presence, swept him with its tiny cameras and radar grids, ascertaining if he were the quarry . . .
    His mind raced to find an escape. The house, the great house that was almost a womb for him was highly equipped to contain him in complete luxury, but it wasn't equipped to afford him escape from death. The house would be surrounded by Margle and his men; therefore, the doors were useless. Then he remembered the cellars upon which the house had been built, the dozen rooms that had served as a Revolutionary War Tory supplies depot. If he could get into those, there were any number of outlets onto other places on the mountain.
    The Hound fired a series of three pins.
    Ti slammed down on his speed controls imbedded in the floating ball and streaked into the hallway, found the cellar door, and swept down the stairs without even touching them, stairs there for the convenience of guests. He crossed the Tri-D room with its three wall-sized white screens and moved into the shooting range, slamming the door behind. It was a heavy door, an antique resurrected from the Tory cellars before the house had been constructed over them. It would take the Hound a few moments to break it down.
    He floated along the left wall where he knew the cellars lay. They stretched back into the mountain, a rough series of fortified caves, after you passed through the first four or five of them. From those caves, there were a number of exits on the mountainside. He reached the end of the room and used his servos to rip loose the half-round that filled in the corner of the plasti-wood paneling. Then, gripping metal fingers around the paneling, he carefully pried the last section away from the wall beams and was looking through into cool darkness: the Tory cellars.
    Behind, the Hound struck the door, hard.
    Ti could not crouch to squeeze through the cross-beams, but he shifted the grav plates so that he was turned onto his side, then moved ball first through the gap and into the cellar. Once inside, he shifted the grav plates back to normal position and righted himself. He sent his servos back to pull the wood paneling back into place from the inside. It might confuse the demon machine for a few minutes, but