The dart in her breast had drawn blood!
Latham Koler squirmed from behind the platform. His cadaverous face was transfixed with the grin of a skeleton skull. He aimed a blaster point blank at Rod and fired.
The streaming arc buried itself harmlessly in the three-inch sand layer over Rod’s chest. And he was on Koler like a berserk.
He broke the traitor’s helmet first. And forced fingers and thumb around his windpipe. When the peering eyes protruded and the thin-lipped mouth hung agape Rod lifted the dart gently from Mona Darlanan’s body.
He jammed it down Koler’s throat.
Williamson came pounding in. “We’ve got them all, Rod. Tetrarch IV is in our hands!”
Rod was frantically tearing at his sleeve. “Get me a knife,” he ordered, “quickly.”
He ripped the sleeve off. As more and more Survivors came piling into the room he ordered liters of distilled water.
Meanwhile he was busily plying the scalpel Williamson brought to him. The gash on his arm had never quite healed was getting probed. Rod dug with the scalpel as though he were going after a bullet.
The small platinum capsule he forced from the cut in his arm was not unlike one.