Soft come the dragons

just fought his way through a garden of live and vicious roses. Officer Drennings did not have a chance to scream; the darts tore out his throat first.
    "Fall back!" Jacobs shouted.
    He slipped into the safe corridor. If the killerbot tried to come around, he would blast it open in a second. Cullen and Minter were beside him, panting. "God," Minter was saying over and over. Over and over, low and soft and meaninglessly.
    It is hunting for us, Jacobs thought.
    Their lamps had been smashed by darts. There was only darkness now, thick and all pervading. Their eyes were used to the gloom, somewhat, but everywhere there were dense shadows that seemed to move.
    The hall was quiet.
    To hell with this pessimism! They were three, well-trained police officers. That killerbot, no matter how advanced, was only one. Numerically, they had it cornered. They just had to move with more caution, stop blundering around as if it were a normal killerbot. "Come on," he whispered to Cullen and Minter. "And be careful."
    They edged around into the corridor. The two bodies were there, lying in black pools of blood.
    But the killerbot was gone.
    "Well never find him," Cullen said. "It will take more men."
    Jacobs hushed him, surveyed the corridor. For a moment, he couldn't understand what his eyes were trying to tell him. Then it registered. "No. We have him cornered."
    "What—"
    "There aren't any stairs or elevators in this corridor," Jacobs said, pointing to the four doors on each side. "Just those eight rooms. He has to be in one of them."
    Cautiously, quietly, they moved down the hall, checking the rooms on both sides. Jacobs stood to the side, flung the portal wide, and jerked his arm back as Minter fired a burst of frag slugs into the darkened room. Then, just as cautiously, they would flip on the light and scan it. When Jacobs threw open the fifth door, Minter fired another burst—and was answered with a round that smashed his chest apart.
    Two to one. The odds were still in their favor.
    Jacobs wished he had not left the suitcase of explosives in the storage room. A ball of contact jelly would be just the thing now. But they didn't have it, so no use wishing. He looked across the doorway to where Cullen waited on the other side, face drawn and white. He pantomimed his intentions, shook off Cullen's gestured disapproval. Gun clutched firm in his right hand, he bent down, leaned to his side, and rolled through the doorway into the darkened room.
     
    Frag shells splintered the doorway behind him.
    He had come to rest against a heavy desk, his shoulder stinging with the impact. From the flash of the killerbot's frag pistol, he knew it was on the other side of the desk. Holding his breath so that his panting would not give away his position, he placed the barrel of the pistol against the front of the desk, depressed the trigger and held it down until the clip had emptied itself, more than two dozen frag slugs shredding through the desk, ripping out and into the killerbot crouched on the other side.
    There were screams.
    That didn't fit either. Killerbots never screamed.
    Cullen hit the lights.
    The room seemed to flare as if the walls had been set afire. There was little left of the desk. The center had been chewed away by the bullets, and both halves had caved inward, the broken top now forming a vee whose point rested on the floor. Carefully, Jacobs got to his feet, his empty pistol clamped in his hand, only a talisman now that its ammunition had been expended. He walked around the desk, kicked away some larger chunks of wood.
    The killerbot was approximately forty years old. Black hair. Fair-skinned. And . . . And what? Something was wrong, but Jacobs could not decide quite what. He inspected the wounds. A dozen scraps of metal had punctured the corpse. The holes they made welled thick blood. Splinters of wood prickled the body. To one side of the head lay a dartgun.
    A dartgun.
    He stared at the thing for long, long seconds, unwilling to believe it—to even comprehend it.
    "Phil, look at this," Cullen said, shoving a frag slug clip and a pistol into the captain's hands.
    "Help me strip him," Jacobs said suddenly, laying the pistol and clip on the floor.
    "Huh?"
    "Come on."
    Jacobs bent to the corpse, hands trembling as he and Cullen peeled away the bloody garments. As he had suspected, the body bore no scars from weapon implantation. There were only the gashes of the frag slugs from Jacobs' own gun—and the wounds of wood