The mines, two micrograms of antimatter steered on to station by hydrazine engines etched into silicon wafers a centimetre square, weren’t much more intelligent than a mouse; but once they knew you were there, you were dead. It was the old dilemma. You daren’t move and you daren’t stop moving. The crew of La Vie Féerique understood what was happening to them, even though it was very quick. Seria Mau could hear them screaming at one another as the yawl split lengthwise and levered itself apart. Not long after that, two of the freighters ran into one another as, dynaflow drivers clawing at the spatial fabric, they broke cover on desperate, half-calculated E&E trajectories. The third slunk quietly away into the debris around the gas giant, where it turned everything off and prepared to wait her out.

“No, no, this is not how we do it,” said Seria Mau. “You tubby little thing.”

She appeared from nowhere on its port stern quarter and allowed herself to be detected. This produced an explosion of internal coms traffic and a satisfying little dash for safety, to which she put an end with some of her more serious—if less sophisticated—ordnance. The flare of the explosion lit up several small asteroids and, briefly, the wreckage of the yawl, which, locked into the local chaotic attractor, toppled past end over end, wrapped in a rather beautiful radioactive glow.

“What does that mean?” Seria Mau asked the shadow operators: “La Vie Féerique?”

No answer.

A little later she matched velocities with the wreckage and hung there while it wheeled slowly around her: buckled hull plates, monolithic items of dynaflow machinery, what looked like mile upon mile of slowly weaving cable. “Cable?” Seria Mau laughed. “What kind of technology is that?” You could see every strange thing out there on the Beach, ideas washed up a million years ago, modified to trick out tubby little ships like these. In the end, the bottom line was this: everything worked. Wherever you looked, you found. That was everyone’s worst nightmare. That was the excitement of it all. Preoccupied by these thoughts, she eased the White Cat further in, to where the corpses turned in the vacuum. They were human. Men and women about her own age, bloated, frozen, limbs at odd, sexual angles, slowly cartwheeling through an atmosphere of their own possessions, they streamed past her bow. She nosed between them, looking for something in their expressions of dull fear and acceptance, though she was not sure what. Evidence. Evidence of herself.

“Evidence of myself,” she mused aloud.

“All around you,” whispered the shadow operators, giving her tragic glances from between their lacy fingers. “And look!”