Beastchild

though his nerves screamed and his shoulder threatened to separate at its socket, he found he could manage on the single arm. Raising the other hand, he swung at the ice lump, claws extended.
        The very ends of the hard nails shaved the ice. Some of it fell away and was lost in the pulsating snow sheaths.
        The impact of the blow sent a tight vibration through the taut cable. The vibration coursed down the arm by which he hung, made his flesh pain even more.
        He swung again.
        More ice was sliced off. A major fracture appeared in the lump. He reached up, worked his claws into the crack, twisted and pried. The ice broke. Two large pieces fell away. He saw, then, what had caused the lump. A bird had struck the cable, lodged itself on long enough for ice to form to freeze it in place. Since then, the ice had continued to build over it.
        He knocked off more ice, then tugged the mangled bird free, looked at it. Its eyes were frozen solid, white and unseeing. Its beak was broken and covered with frozen blood. He dropped it, grabbed the cable with both hands, and began the tricky turn-about to head back for the safety of the roof, then the cab, then the header station, and finally the shelter of the blessed FRENCH ALPINE HOTEL…
        Docanil the Hunter sat in a gray swivel chair before a bank of blinking lights and shuddering dials, flanked on either side by Phasersystem technicians who watched him from the corners of their eyes as one might watch an animal that seemed friendly but which one did not quite trust, despite all assurances. "How soon?" he asked the room.
        "Any moment now," the chief technician said, flitting about his own console, touching various knobs and toggles and dials, turning some, just brushing others for the assurance they gave him.
        "You must find all you can," Docanil said.
        "Yes," the technician said. "Ah, here we are now…"
        Hulann, the voiceless voice said.
        He woke. Though not completely. The voice murmured to him, kept him slightly hazed as it asked questions of him. He felt it probing into his overmind, looking for something. What?
        Relax, it whispered.
        He started to relax… … then sat bolt upright!
        Open to us, Hulann.
        "No." It was possible to close down one's contact with the Phasersystem. In the beginning, centuries upon centuries ago, the central committee had decided that if the naoli could not have privacy when they wanted it, then the Phasersystem might become a tyranny, a thing from which there was no escape. Hulann was thankful for their foresight now.
        Open, Hulann. It is the wise thing.
        "Go. Leave me."
        Turn the boy over, Hulann.
        "To die?"
        Hulann"Go. Now. I am not listening."
        Reluctantly, the contact faded, broke, and left him alone with himself.
        Hulann sat in the dark lobby of the hotel, on the edge of the sofa where he had been sleeping. A few feet away, Leo snored lightly, drawn into a foetal position, his head tucked down between his shoulders. Hulann thought about the Phasersystem intrusion. They had, of course, been probing to find where he was. He tried to recall those first few moments of the probe to see whether he had given them what they wanted. It did not seem likely. A probe takes several minutes to be truly efficient. They couldn't have learned anything in six or eight seconds. Could they? Besides, would they have prodded him to give up the boy if they had discovered his whereabouts? Highly unlikely.
        Before his thoughts could begin to stray to his family in the home system, to his children that he would never see again, he stretched out on the couch and, for the second time in less than an hour, disassociated his overmind from his organic regulating brain, slipped into the nether world pocket of death sleep…
        "Well?" Docanil asked the chief technician.
        The man handed over the printouts of the probe. "Not much."
        "You tell me."
        The voice was a rasping command, given in a low but deadly key.
        The technician cleared his throat. "They've headed west. They passed the Great Lakes conversion crater. The scene was clear in his mind. They got off the superway at exit K-43 and took the secondary route toward Ohio."
        "Nothing more?"
        "Nothing more."
        "This is not much."
        "Enough for a Hunter," the technician chief