Beastchild

gun even if he had possessed one. The second instinct was to run; however, he saw the young boy then, and the boy showed no fear-he did not seem to be stupefied by drugs. Having hesitated this short moment longer, he found it was too late to run. They both babbled excitedly at him, trying to state their case and falling all over each other in their verbal confusion. He listened to them, numb, disbelieving at first, then being won over by the story of the Hunter-Spacer correlation. The naoli had thought spacers were typical of all humans. It was just absurd, just hideously comical enough to be true.
        Their shuttlecraft was seriously depleted in power stores and had no way to recharge. They proposed that the three of them ride the Bluebolt since the train could make better speed anyway. They assumed David was going to the Haven-though he found it difficult to comprehend that Hulann's destination was the same.
        Now they were into the province of California after a high speed, all night run. They could soon begin a quest for the Haven, for the final safety and a new life-if this Hulann did not betray them.
        As the train's computer answered David's programming with brilliant blood letters on its response board, Hulann pressed palms against the side window, as if trying to push the glass away to get a better look at something. His four, wide nostrils were all open, and his breathing was more than a little ragged. Abruptly, his tail snapped and wound snakelike around his bulging thigh.
        "What is it?" Leo asked, coming out of the command chair next to David.
        "Docanil," Hulann replied. He pointed to the sky, far above them. A coppery speck flitted along the bottom of the high clouds. It was monitoring them, maintaining perfectly matched speeds; that could not be accidental.
        "Perhaps he doesn't see us," Leo said.
        "He does."
        "Yes."
        They watched the copper until big muddy droplets of rain spattered the thick glass. In this dark sheath of mist, the Hunter's helicopter was lost to their sight.
        The Bluebolt thundered on, hugged the rails as the sky lowered and the clouds appeared to drag by at little more than arm's length overhead. The four heavy rubber wipers thumped back and forth in hypnotic, melancholic rhythm (tunka, tunka, tunka), efficiently sloshing the water off the windscreen and into the drainage scoops.
        When Docanil struck, it was too swift to allow even for surprise. Several hundred yards up the track, the familiar copter bobbled out of the scudding clouds, skimmed toward them only inches above the rails. A firing tube opened in its side, and the first of its small power launch tubes spat a fist-sized missile.
        Involuntarily, they flinched from anticipated impact and dropped to the floor, clutching at handholds. The concussion almost threw them erect as the missile exploded a hundred feet ahead in a rich wash of crimson. Docanil had not been trying to kill; such a long-range retaliation would not have absolved his humiliation. He had only been trying to derail them so that he could reach them easily for a more personal revenge. Such was the way of a Hunter…
        The engine's front wheels leaped the twisted ends of the steel track, sank through the crossties and into the yielding sand. The cab tilted, toppled sideways in painfully slow motion. It pulled the other cars inexorably after it, whirling them free of the rails and hurtling them onto the wet sand. The shrieking, clanging, squealing noise grew until it was a vicious, impossible assault on the ears-then died with the abruptness of an exhausted man falling into sleep.
        David felt blood trickling down his head from a number of superficial cuts on his skull and a nasty gash on his right temple. For the first time in his life, the meaning of the war came home to him-like a fist in the guts. He had been separated from it before. He had told himself that a writer's duty was to be separate from the grossness of his generation. Later, he could comment. But now the blood was real.
        Aching, bloodied, they got to their feet inside the disordered, canted cabin, struggled upwards toward the sheered section of the big cab where the Hunter Docanil waited, silhouetted by the light gray dreariness of the stormy sky.
        A few drops of rain fell.
        Somewhere, there was thunder.
        Outside, the three fugitives stood against the overturned