Seria Mau opened a line to the human quarters and found them clustered round the hologram display again. This time it was showing some of the complex machinery in the White Cat’s hold, being operated onsite in the middle of a desert of olivine sand and low melted-looking heaps of rock which when you studied them hard turned out to be ruins.

“The guys knew how to party all right,” one of the men said. “This stuff went down at twelve thousand Kelvin, maybe more, from some kind of large-scale gamma emitter. Looks as though they piped the output of a small star in here,” he said. “A million years ago, and they were fighting over assets a million years older than that. Jesus! Will you just look at this?”

“Jesus,” repeated the female clone listlessly. “What a fucking bore.”

They all laughed and gathered round the display. The two women, who were wearing identical shocking-pink tube skirts with a satin look, held hands behind their backs.

Seria Mau stared at them. They made her angry. It was just more fucking and fighting and shoving. All they ever talked about was profit-sharing deals, art events they had seen, holidays at the Core. All they ever talked about was the rubbish they had bought or would like to buy. What use were they to anyone, even themselves? What had they brought aboard her ship? “What have you brought aboard my ship?” she demanded in a loud voice. They started, glanced at each other, she thought guiltily. They looked around for the source of the voice. “Why have you brought this stuff on board?”

Before they could answer she cut away from them to her signature display. There was the K-ship, and tethered to it like a blind camel on a bit of rope was the Nastic battle cruiser. She had identified it now. She had matched its signature to the fakebooks stored in the White Cat’s databanks. A front-line cruiser called Touching the Void, it was the vessel whose commander had paid her for the Vie Féerique ambush. He had told her, “I know where you are going.” She shivered in her tank at this memory.

“What are they doing?” she asked the mathematics.

“Staying where they are,” it reported.

“They’re going to follow me wherever I go!” Seria Mau shrieked. “I hate this! I hate it! No one can follow us, no one is good enough.”

The mathematics thought.

“Their navigation system is nearly as clever as me,” it concluded. “Their pilot is military. He’s better than you.”

“Get rid of them,” she ordered.