The Gliders of the Hunt

Tom Lao lay her hands against the wall, circuits lighting up. She could feel the motors that were the ship's heartbeats. The sounds she'd heard for so many years as a child. But it was turning away. It had answered the desperate vitality of children. Tom Lao, adult, and who had already died once, was no longer a child. For a moment, a bare, intolerably hurtful moment, Tom Lao thought they were saved. And then something whistled in the air as the gliders of the hunt approached.