“You brought this about,” she accused the human beings. The men were beginning to look anxious. They were still casting little glances here and there, as if she had a real presence in the cabin with them. The two women clasped hands and whispered to one another. For now, you couldn’t tell which one was the cultivar. “Turn that thing off,” Seria Mau said. They turned the hologram off. “Now tell me what use you are to anyone.” While they were trying to think of an answer to this, a small shudder went through the fabric of the White Cat. A moment later a bell chimed.

“What?” said Seria Mau impatiently.

“They’re coming up on us,” the mathematics reported. “Half a light in the last thirty nanoseconds. At the moment it’s a soft alarm, but it could harden.”

“Half a light? I don’t believe this.”

“What would you like me to do?”

“Arm the ordnance.”

“At the moment I think they’re just trying—”

“Put something between us and them. Something big. And make sure it outputs in all particle regimes. I want them blind. Hit them if you can, but just make sure they can’t see us.”

“A quarter of a light,” said the mathematics. “Hard alarm.”

“Well,” said Seria Mau. “He is good.”

“He’s here. It’s down to kilometres.”

She said: “We’re ninety-five nanoseconds into a disaster. Where’s that ordnance?”

There was a vague ringing in the hull. Out in the flat grey void beyond, a huge flare erupted. In an attempt to protect its client hardware the White Cat’s massive array shut down for a nanosecond and a half. By this time, the ordnance had already cooked off at the higher wavelengths. X-rays briefly raised the temperature in local space to 25,000 degrees Kelvin, while the other particles blinded every kind of sensor, and temporary sub-spaces boiled away from the weapons-grade singularity as fractal dimensions. Shockwaves sang through the dynaflow medium like the voices of angels, the way the first music resonated through the viscous substrate of the early universe before proton and electron recombined. Under cover of this moment—less of grace than of raw insanity and literal metaphysics—Seria Mau cut the drivers and dropped her ship out into ordinary space. The White Cat flickered back into existence ten light-years from anywhere. She was alone.

“There, you see,” Seria Mau said. “He wasn’t that good.”

“I have to say he pulled the plug before we did,” the mathematics told her. “But I can’t tell if he got the Nastic vessel out with him.”

“Can we see him?”

“No.”

“Just take us somewhere and hide, then,” Seria Mau said.

“Do you care where?”

Seria Mau turned over exhaustedly in her tank.

“Not at the moment,” she said.