They had located a single survivor in a vacuum suit, a bulky white figure windmilling its arms, trying to walk on nothing, opening and closing on itself like some kind of undersea life as it doubled up in pain or perhaps only fear and disorientation and denial. I suppose, thought Seria Mau, listening to its transmissions, you would close your eyes and tell yourself, “I can get out of this if I stay calm”; then open them and understand all over again where you were. That would be enough to make you scream like that.

She was wondering how to finish the survivor off when a fraction of a shadow passed across her. It was another vessel. It was huge. Alarms went off all over the K-ship. Shadow operators streamed about. The White Cat broke right and left, disappeared from local space in a froth of quantum events, non-commutative microgeometries and short-lived exotic vacuum states, then reappeared a kilometre away from her original position with all assets primed and ready. Disgusted, Seria Mau saw that she was still in the shadow of the intruder. It was so big it could only belong to her employers. She put a shot across its bows anyway. The Nastic commander edged his vessel irritably away from her. At the same time he sent a holographic fetch of himself to the White Cat. It squatted in front of the tank where Seria Mau lived, leaking realistically from the joints of its several yellowish legs, stridulating every so often for no reason she could see. Its bony-looking head had more palps, mosaic eyes and ropes of mucus than she preferred to look at. It wasn’t something you could ignore.

“You know who we are,” it said.

“Do you think it’s so clever to surprise a K-ship like that?” shouted Seria Mau.

The fetch clicked patiently.

“We were not trying to embarrass you,” it said. “We approached in a perfectly open way. You have been ignoring our transmissions since you did . . .” It paused as if searching for a word; then, clearly at a loss, concluded uneasily: “This.”

“That was a moment ago.”

“That was five hours ago,” the fetch said. “We have been trying to talk to you since then.”

Seria Mau was so shaken she broke contact and—as the fetch faded away into a kind of brown smoke, a transparency of itself—hid the White Cat in a cloud of asteroids some distance off, to give herself time to think. She felt ashamed of herself. Why had she acted like that? What could she have been thinking of to leave herself vulnerable like that, insensible out there for five hours? While she was trying to remember, the Nastic vessel’s mathematics began stalking her again, making two or three billion guesses a nanosecond at her position. After a second or two she allowed it to find her. The fetch reformed immediately.