Still, the right sort of armor would have protected him. He possessed such an item—in the house.

This was a sustaining thought; but the house was too far, the lawn an unprotected killing ground. He glimpsed the marauder crouching to take aim; he ducked and rolled forward, too late. The beam intersected his left leg and severed it under the knee.

He felt a brief, terrible burst of pain … then numbness as the damaged nerves shut themselves down. Crippled, Ben fetched up against a birch stump projecting from the grass. He had been meaning to pull that stump for years now. The severed portion of his leg—now a barely recognizable tube of flayed meat—rolled past him. Absurdly, he wanted to pull it back to himself. But the leg was gone now—past recovery. He would need a new one.

He felt briefly dizzy as opened arteries clamped themselves shut. The gushing of blood from the blackened wound slowed to a trickle.

Clever programs had been written into the free sequences of his DNA. For Ben, this was not a deadly injury. A grave impediment, however, it most certainly was.

He was helpless here. The birch stump was no cover at all and the marauder was primed for another shot. Ben lurched forward, grinding his bloody knee-end into the dirt, hopped two paces and then rolled again in a drunken tumble that might have succeeded if the marauder had been aiming by line of sight; but the weapon was equipped with a target-recognition device and the beam cut twice across Ben’s body—first severing his right hand at the wrist and then slicing deep into his abdominal cavity. Blood and flame flowered across his shirt, which he had bought at the Sears in the Harbor Mall.

Now Ben began to consider dying.

Probably it was unavoidable. He understood how profoundly damaged he was. He experienced waves of dizziness as major arteries locked or dilated in a futile attempt to maintain blood pressure. Numbness spread upward from his hip to his collarbone: it was like slipping into a warm bath. He lay on the grass where his momentum had carried him, loose-jointed and faint.