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One of the two figures seated at the dining table twisted around, cocking its head to listen.

“What’s that?” a gruff voice demanded. “Rover, go check!”

Something shifted in a shadowed corner. A mass slid forward with a wet, sucking sound, coming into the light. It was a gelatinous form, a mucuslike mass of greasily shining bile-green that humped and slithered itself over the floor as a ring of slender, bulb-tipped stalks wavered atop the rounded mass. It oozed on across the width of the long dining room toward one of the arched window openings in the far wall.

“I wouldn’t have believed a Meduza could be trained at all,” the second figure at the table remarked with some surprise.

The first man turned back to the guest seated across the dining table from him. “On the contrary, Senator. It’s quite easy to train. One of the most malleable species I’ve found, in fact. I wish there were more like it.”

The man’s face was obscured by a massive scar disfiguring the right side, leaving the right eye a slit in the sagging flesh and flattening out the nose, giving him a piggish look.

“I can unfortunately imagine what things you wish for, Dr. Evazan,” the Aqualish senator replied with a shudder of revulsion. Generally humanoid, he had walruslike features, with large, liquid black eyes and thick, incurving tusks. Short bristling whiskers lined the stubby snout that was split by a wide, thin mouth.

The senator lifted a hand to clutch the glass before him. The hand was finlike, fingerless, but with an opposable thumb. It marked him as a member of the more prominent of the two Aqualish races, and thus belonging to their ruling classes. He drank deeply of the dark green Andoan ale within the glass as he watched Rover nervously.

The gelatinous creature had by now reached one of the window openings. Heaving itself into a higher peak, it poised a moment, its bulbed stalks jerking about as if sniffing the air.

Beyond the opening, the vast sea of the water planet of Ando stretched away to a gray-black horizon. In the boiling storm clouds that hung there, spectacular lightning flickered and flared to light the towering thunderheads.

The deep boom of thunder rolled across the gale-churned waves to rebound from the sheer stone walls of the spired castle perched high upon the cliffs. Hundreds of meters below the castle window, fists of massive waves slammed themselves against the base of the rocky isle, splaying to white fingers that grabbed futilely upward.

The full magnificence of the wild scene was somewhat obscured by a shimmering scrim of light created by the energy shield that formed a screen across each opening.

The bloblike creature sank back down. Its pod-tipped stalks turned toward Evazan at once and waved to him, as if in urgent signal.

Dr. Evazan cocked the remaining eyebrow above his left eye. His half-blasted face expressed no other sign of emotion.

“You might just want to drop down under the table now,” he told his guest in a quite matter-of-fact voice.

The Aqualish senator stared in astonishment as one of Evazan’s hands appeared from under the table clutching a blaster pistol. The other hand lifted to punch one button on a small tabletop console, and then a second.

All the lights went out.

Simultaneously a sizzling sound came from beyond the windows, and the energy screens of three openings were punctured inward as three forms dived through them from outside.

The senator gave a shrill honk of terror and dived beneath the thick tabletop.

The three forms hit the floor, rolled, and came instantly to their feet. A flicker of distant lightning illuminated three humanoid shapes as they lifted blaster rifles to fire.

Evazan was already rolling from his chair toward the shelter of a conform lounge. He fired as he went, his bolt striking one of the three forms squarely.

The attacker let out a grunt of pain as he staggered and went down. The other two dived for cover. Bolts from opposing weapons crisscrossed the dark room, cracking into stone walls and ripping through