Across the room a maintenance robot trundled in through an access door and began picking up one of the "dead" target robots. "And he didn't have a gun?" Jin ventured at last.

"You got it," Justin said, a touch of bitterness seeping into his tone. "No gun, no spray, not even a tangler reel. Just a simple, harmless, unarmed crank. And I shot him."

Jin looked past him at the maintenance robot. "Was it a setup?" she asked.

From the corner of her eye she caught her father's frown. "What do you mean?" he asked carefully.

"Was Monse trying to goad you or Uncle Corwin into attacking him? Trying to make you look bad?" She turned back to face him. "I don't know if you've seen the net yet, but an absolute flood of condemnation hit the thing practically from the minute Monse was taken off to the hospital. That wasn't reaction-those people had their rhetoric primed and ready to go."

Justin hissed through his teeth. "The thought has crossed my mind, I'll admit.

And you haven't even heard the best part yet: the fact that Monse is going to live despite taking a pair of setting-two fingertip laser blasts square in the center of his chest. Want to hazard a guess as to how he managed that?"

She frowned. Body armor was the obvious answer... but it was clear from her father's tone that it was something more interesting than that. Monse would have needed some kind of protection, though-at short range, a twin laser burst at number-two setting would have been perfectly adequate to cut through bones the thickness of ribs or breastbone and take out the lungs or heart beneath them.

Adequate, at least, to cut through normal bones... "The same reason Winward lived?" she asked hesitantly.