Resting his right hand against his left arm, he took careful aim and fired. The man with the rifle staggered and fell. The one with the shotgun dropped completely out of sight.
Bennington heard someone shouting hoarsely about the lights.
The first floor blacked out.
He took a deep breath, held it, slowly released it. Then he was able to think.
How this had started was for the moment unimportant. First came the problem of regaining control.
To regain control, he needed help. To get help he had to reach the nearest visiphone.
Glass tinkled to his right. Almost too late Bennington remembered how his white hair could reflect the lights from the second-story windows. He rolled rapidly to his left and a little more down the slope.
The dew-wet grass chilled his face and hands. His long legs felt the water of the moat creep up past his knees.
A semiautomatic rifle with carefully timed shots searched the area where he had been. "Good man," he noted professionally and replied with a pistol shot. He rolled again back to where he had been, but still further down the slope.
The rifle spoke copper-coated syllables once more, with a sequence of shots that started where he had fired from. But this time the sequence hunted further to both right and left.