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“This is a difficult system to see in. The fakebooks are clear on that. And Billy Anker says—”

“I appreciate that. But you do agree that something is there?”

“Something’s there,” admitted Seria Mau. “It can’t be them. That ordnance would have melted a planet.”

She thought for a moment.

“We’ll ignore it,” she said.

“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” the mathematics told her. “Something is happening here and we don’t know what it is. They slipped away, like us, just as the ordnance went off. We have to assume this is them.”

Seria Mau thrashed in her tank.

“How could you let this happen!” she shrieked. “They were gas in eighty nanoseconds!”

The mathematics sedated her while she was still speaking. She heard herself Dopplering away into silence like an illustration of some point in General Relativity. Then she dreamed she was back in the garden, one month before the first anniversary of her mother’s death. Damp spring now reigned, with Earth-daffodils in the beds beneath the laurel bushes, Earth-sky pale blue between towering white clouds. The house, opening its doors and shutters reluctantly after the long winter, had breathed the three of them forth like an old man’s breath. The brother found a slug. He bent down and poked it with a stick. Then he picked it up and ran about with it, going, “Yoiy yoiy yoiy.” Seria Mau, nine years old, dressed carefully in her red woollen coat, wouldn’t look at him, or laugh. All winter she had dreamed of a horse, a white horse which would step so delicately! It would come from nowhere and after that follow her everywhere she went, touching her with its soft nose.

Smiling sadly, the father watched them play.

“What do you want?” he asked them.

“I want this slug!” cried the brother. He fell down and kicked his legs. “Yoiy yoiy.”

The father laughed.

“What about you, Seria Mau?” he said. “You can have anything you want!”

He had lived by himself all winter, playing chess in his cold room upstairs, with his hands in fingerless mitts. He cried every lunchtime when he saw Seria Mau bringing the food. He wouldn’t let her leave the room. He put his hands on her shoulders and made her look into his hurt eyes. She didn’t want that every day of her life. She didn’t want his tears; she didn’t want his garden, either, with its patch of ashes and its smell of loss among the birch trees. The moment she thought that, she did want him, after all! She loved him. She loved her brother. All the same, she wanted to run far away from them both and sail the New Pearl River.

She wanted to go right up into some space of her own, clutching the mane of a great white horse whose gentle breath would smell of almonds and vanilla.

“I want not to have to be the mother,” Seria Mau said.

Her father’s face fell. He turned away. She found herself standing in front of a retro-shop window in the rain.

Hundreds of small items were on display behind the steamy glass. Every one of them was false. False teeth, false noses, fake ruby lips, false hair, X-ray spectacles that never worked. Old, corrupt stuff made of tin or plastic, whose only purpose was to become something else the moment you picked it up. A kaleidoscope that blacked your eye. Puzzles which, taken apart, would never go back together. False-bottom boxes that laughed when they were touched. Musical instruments which farted when you blew in them. It was all false. It was a paradigm of undependability. In the middle of all the other objects, in pride of place, lay Uncle Zip’s gift-box with its green satin ribbon and its dozen long-stemmed roses. The rain stopped. The lid of the box lifted a little of its own accord. A nanotech substrate like white foam poured out and began to fill the shop window, while the soft bell chimed and the woman’s voice whispered:

“Dr. Haends? Dr. Haends please. Dr. Haends to surgery!”

At this there came a light but peremptory tap on the inside of the glass. The foam cleared, revealing the display to be empty but for a single item. Against a background of ruched oyster satin stood a piece of stiff white card, on which was reproduced the crude and lively drawing of a man in black top hat and tails, caught preparing to light an oval Turkish cigarette. He had shot his cuffs with a flourish. He had tamped the tobacco on the back of his long white hand. Frozen in that moment, he was full of elegant potential. His black eyebrows made ironic arcs. “Who knows what will happen next?” he seemed to be saying. The cigarette would vanish. Or the magician would vanish. He would tip back his hat with the end of his ebony cane and fade slowly into nothing while the Kefahuchi Tract slithered across the ruched satin void behind him like a cheap Victorian necklace and the streetlight flashed—ting!—off one of his white, even, incisor teeth. Everything would vanish.

Beneath this image, in bold art deco letters, someone had printed the words:

DR. HAENDS, PSYCHIC SURGEON.
Appears twice nightly.

Seria Mau woke puzzled, to find her tank flooded with benign hormones. The mathematics had changed its mind. “I believe after all that we’re alone,” it said, and left for its own space before she could comment. This compelled her to call up the relevant displays and give them her attention.

“Now I’m not so sure,” she said.

No reply.

Next, a line opened from the planet below.

“So what happened here?” Billy Anker wanted to know. “One minute you’re talking, the next you aren’t?”

“This interference!” said Seria Mau gaily.

“Hey, well, don’t do me any favours,” he grumbled. Then he said: “You want to know the history of that package, maybe I’ll help. But first you got to do something for me.”

Seria Mau laughed.

“No one can help you with your dress-sense, Billy Anker; I want to say that from the start.”

This time it was Billy Anker who broke the connection.

She sent down her fetch. “Hey, come on,” she said, “it was a joke. What do you want me to do?”

You could see him swallow his pride. You could see he had his own reasons to keep her attention. “I wanted you to come with me,” he said. “See some things on Redline, that’s all.” She was touched, until his voice got that note she already recognised. “Nothing special. Or only as special as everything else we know out here on the edge—”

“Let’s go,” she interrupted. “If we’re going.”

In the end, though, there wasn’t time to do that. Alarms chimed. The shadow operators flew about. The
White Cat
went up to full readiness. Her battle clocks, reset to zero, began to count off in femtoseconds, the last stop before the unknowable realtime of the universe. Meanwhile, she diverted fusion product into engines and ordnance and began, as a precautionary spoiling measure, to flicker in and out of the dynaflow at random. From this behaviour, Seria Mau judged they were in an emergency.

“What?” she demanded of the mathematics.

“Look,” it recommended, and began increasing the connections between her and the
White Cat
until, in important ways, Seria Mau
became
the ship. She was on ship-time. She had ship consciousness. Processing rates ramped up by several orders of magnitude from the paltry human forty bits a second. Her sensorium, analogued to represent fourteen dimensions, echoed with replicas of itself like a cathedral built in ’brane-space. Seria Mau was now alive in a way, in a place—and at a speed—which would burn her out if it lasted for more than a minute and half. As a precautionary measure the mathematics was already sluicing the tank proteome with endorphins, adrenaline inhibitors and warm-down hormones which, operating at biological speeds, would take effect only after any encounter was finished.

“I was wrong,” it said. “Do you see? There?”

“I see,” said Seria Mau. “I see the fuckers!”

It was EMC. There was no need for signature diagrams or fakebooks. She knew them. She knew their shapes. She even knew their names. A pod of K-ships—coms shrieking with fake traffic, decoys flaring off in several dimensions—flipped themselves down the Redline gravitational alley along a trajectory designed for maximum unpredictability. Second-guessed from instant to instant, this appeared in the
White Cat
’s sensorium as neon, scripted recursively against the halo night. The
Krishna Moire
pod, on long-distance ops out of New Venusport, comprised: the
Norma Shirike,
the
Kris Rhamion,
the
Sharmon Kier
and the
Marino Shrike,
and was led by the
Krishna Moire
itself. In they came, their crosslinked mathematics causing them to constantly exchange positions in a kind of randomised braid or plait. It was a classic K-ship ploy. But the centre thread of the plait (though “centre” was a meaningless term in these circumstances) presented as an object Seria Mau recognised: an object with a weird linked signature, half-Nastic, half-human.

As they roared down upon her, the
White Cat
flickered and fluttered, miming uncertainty and perhaps a broken wing. She vanished from her orbit. The pod took note. You could hear their sarcastic laughter. They assigned a fraction of their intelligence to finding her; bored on in. Seria Mau—her signature dissembled to mimic that of an abandoned satellite at the Redline L2—needed no further evidence. Her intuition was operating in fourteen dimensions too.

“I know where they’re going.”

“Who cares?” said the mathematics. “We’re out of here in twenty-eight nanoseconds.”

“No. It’s not us. It’s not us they want!”

There was a prickle of white light in the upper atmosphere of Redline as mid-range ordnance, despatched into the dynaflow before the raid began, popped out to engage Billy Anker’s nominal complement of minefields and satellites. Down on the surface in the streaming rain, the
Karaoke Sword
began to wake up to its situation, coms reluctant, engines slow to warm, countermeasures half-blind to the day: a rocket with a ten-year hangover, entering Seria Mau’s sensorium as a pained, lazy worm of light.

Too slow! she thought. Too old.

She opened a line. “Too slow, Billy Anker!” she called. No answer. The entradista, tapping in a panic at the arms of his acceleration couch, had dislocated his left index finger. “I’m coming down!”

“Is this wise?” the mathematics wanted to know.

“Disconnect me,” said Seria Mau.

The mathematics thought.

“No,” it said.

“Disconnect me. We’re a side-issue here. This isn’t a battle, it’s a police raid. They’ve come for Billy Anker, and he doesn’t have a clue how to help himself.”

The
White Cat
reappeared 200 kilometres above Redline. Ordnance burst around her. Someone had predicted she would come out
there
and
then
. “Oh yes,” said Seria Mau, “very clever. Fuck you too.” Tit for tat, she cooked off a high-end mine she had slipped into the path of the incoming pod. “Here’s one I prepared earlier,” she said. The pod broke up, temporarily blinded, and toppled away in several directions. “They won’t forgive us for that,” she told her mathematics. “They’re arrogant bastards, that team.” The mathematics, which was using the respite to normalise her relationship with the
White Cat,
had no comment to make. The ship’s sensorium collapsed around her. Everything slowed down. “In and out now,” she ordered. “Quick as we can.” The
White Cat
pitched over into entry attitude. Retrofire pulsed and flared. Outside, the colours of space gave way to weird smeary reds and greens. Seria Mau airbraked relentlessly in the thickening atmosphere, letting speed scrub off as heat and noise until her ship was a roaring yellow fireball across the night sky. It was a rough ride. The shadow operators streamed about, their lacy wings rippling out behind them, their long hands covering their faces. Mona the clone, who had looked out of a porthole as the ship stood on its nose, was throwing up energetically in the human quarters.

They breached the cloudbase at fifteen hundred feet, to find the
Karaoke Sword
immediately below them. “I don’t believe this,” said Seria Mau. The old ship had lifted itself a foot or two out of the mud and was turning hesitantly this way and that, shaking like a cheap compass needle. A fusion torch fired up at the rear, setting nearby vegetation alight and generating gouts of radioactive steam. After twenty seconds, its bows dropped suddenly and the whole thing slumped back to earth with a groan, breaking in two about a hundred yards forward of the engine. “Jesus Christ,” Seria Mau whispered. “Put us down.”

The mathematics said it was unwilling to commit.

“Put us down. I’m not leaving him here.”

“You aren’t leaving him here, are you?” Mona the clone called up anxiously from the human quarters.

“Are you deaf?” said Seria Mau.

“I wouldn’t put it past you, that’s all.”

“Shut up.”

The
Krishna Moire
pod, realising what had happened, swept in, fanned out into the parking orbit with a kind of idle bravado, the way shadow boys in one-shot cultivars occupy a doorway so they can spit, gamble and clean their nails with replicas of priceless antique flick-knives. They could afford to wait. Meanwhile, to move things along, Krishna Moire himself opened a line to the
White Cat
. He had signed on younger than Seria Mau, and his fetch, though it was six feet tall and presented itself in full Earth Military Contracts chic, including black boots, high-waist riding breeches and a dove-grey double-breasted tuxedo with epaulettes, had the demanding mouth of a boy.

“We want Billy Anker,” he said.

“Go through me,” Seria Mau invited.

Moire looked less certain. “This is a wrong thing you are doing, resisting us,” he informed her. “To add to all those other wrongdoings you done. But, hey, we didn’t come for you, not this time.”

“I done?” said Seria Mau. “Wrongdoings I
done
?”

Outside, explosions marched steadily across the mud, flinging up rocks and vegetation. Elements of the pod, becoming impatient with the half-minute wait, had entered the atmosphere and begun to shell the surface at random. Seria Mau sighed.

“Fuck off, Moire, and take speaking lessons,” she said.

“You’re only alive because EMC don’t care about you one way or another,” he warned her as he faded to brown smoke. “They could change their minds. This operation is double red.” His fetch flickered, vanished, reformed suddenly in a kind of postscript. “Hey, Seria, I got my own pod now!” it said.