Some hours ago she had lured a little convoy—three dynaflow freighters, civilian ships carrying “archeological” artefacts out of a mining belt twenty lights along the Beach, hurried along anxiously by a fast armed yawl called La Vie Féerique—into this benighted spot and left them there while she went and did something else. Her ship’s mathematics knew exactly how to find them again: they, however, tied to standard Tate-Kearney transformations, barely knew what day it was. By the time she returned, the yawl, overburdened by its duty of care, had got the freighters into the shadow of an old gas giant while it tried to calculate a way out of the trap. She watched them curiously. She was calm, they were not. She could hear their communications. They were beginning to suspect she was there. La Vie Féerique had sent out drones. Tiny actinic spangles of light showed where these had begun to encounter the minefields she had sown into the gravitational subcurrents of the cluster days before the freighters arrived.

“Ah,” said Seria Mau Genlicher, as if they could hear her. “You should be more careful, out here in empty space.”

As she spoke, the White Cat slipped into a cloud of non-baryonic junk, which, reacting weakly to her passage through it, stroked the hull like a ghost. A few dials woke up in the manual back-up systems in the empty human quarters of the ship, flickered, dropped back to zero. As matter, it was barely there, but the shadow operators were drawn to it. They gathered by the portholes, arranging the light that fell around them so that they could make the most tragic picture, looking at themselves in mirrors, whispering and running thin fingers across their mouths or through their hair, rustling their dry wings.

“If only you had grown like this, Cinderella,” they mourned, in the old language.

“Such a blessing,” they said.

Don’t let me have to deal with this now, she thought.

“Go back to your posts,” she ordered them, “or I’ll have the portholes taken out.”

“We’re always at our posts—”

“I’m sure we never meant to upset you, dear.”

“—always at our posts, dear.”

As if this had been a signal, La Vie Féerique, running fast upside the local sun, blundered into a minefield.