I

as sheets of

else continued: a shrilling, jangled sonic assault that could wrench and distort a strong living body within seconds into a flaccid, hemorrhaged lump of very dead tissue—like a multitude of tiny, darting steel fingers that tore and twisted inside him.
A voice somewhere was saying: “There! Burn there!”
With unbearable slowness, the white brilliance ate down through the Dominator’s bulk, from top to bottom, carving it into halves.
The savage jangling ceased.
The voice said quietly: “Don’t harm the thing further. It can be useful now—”
It went silent.
He was going to black out, Grevan realized. And, simultaneously, feeling the tiny, quick steel fingers that had been trying to pluck him apart reluctantly relax, he knew that not one of the cubs could have endured those last few seconds beside him, and lived.
Sometimes it was just a matter of physical size and strength.
There were still a few matters to attend to, but the blackness was washing in on him now—his body ­urgently demanding time out to let it get in its ­adjusting.
“Wrong on two counts, so far!” he told the ruined Dominator.
Then he grudgingly let himself go. The blackness took him.

Somebody nearby was insanely whistling the three clear, rising notes which meant within the Group that all was extremely well.
In a distance somewhere, the whistle was promptly repeated.
Then Freckles seemed to be saying in a wobbly voice, “Sit up, Grevan! I can’t lift you, man-mountain! Oh, boss man, you really took it apart! You took down a Dominator!”
The blackness was receding, and suddenly washed away like racing streamers of smoke, and Grevan ­realized he was sitting up. The sectioned and partly glowing Dominator and the walls of the communications g