“We’re here to look,” he’d say, “and be amazed. We’re not here long. Look at this. See that? Look!”

He was a thin, active, seeking little man, skin and tendons, who at all times wore the bottom half of an ancient air-pilot’s G-suit, two leather coats, a red and green do-rag tied in a fanciful knot. He lost two fingers of one hand in a bad landing on Sigma End, on the edge of the accretion disc of the notorious black hole they called Radio RX-1 (nearby was the entrance to an artificial wormhole which, he believed at the time, had its eye on the same target as the Redline South Polar Artefact). These he never had replaced.

When Seria Mau fetched up at his feet, he studied her a moment.

“What do you look like, the real you?” he asked.

“Nothing much,” said Seria Mau. “I’m a K-ship.”

“So you are,” said Billy Anker, consulting his systems. “I see that now. How has that worked out for you?”

“None of your business, Billy Anker.”

“You shouldn’t be so defensive,” was how he replied. And then, after a moment or two: “So what’s new in the universe? What have you seen that I haven’t?”

Seria Mau was amused. “You ask me that when you stay in this piece-of-shit old heap,” she said, looking round the inside of Billy Anker’s quarters, “wearing a glove on one hand?” She laughed. “Plenty of things, though I was never down in the Core.” She told him some of the things she had seen.

“I’m impressed,” he admitted.

He rocked back in his chair. Then he said:

“That K-ship of yours. It’ll go deep. You know what I mean, ’go deep?’ I heard one of those will go almost anywhere. You ever think of the Tract? You ever think of taking it there?”

“The day I get tired of this life.”

They both laughed, then Billy Anker said:

“We’ve got to leave the Beach some day. All of us. Grow up. Leave the Beach, dive in the sea—”

“—because why else be alive, right?” said Seria Mau. “Isn’t that what you’re going to say? I heard a thousand men like you say that. And you know what, Billy Anker?”

“What?”

“They all had better coats than you.”

He stared at her.

“You aren’t just a K-ship, you’re the White Cat,” he said. “You’re the girl who stole the White Cat.” She was surprised he worked that out so fast. He smiled at her surprise. “So what can I do for you?”

Seria Mau looked away from him. She didn’t like to be worked out so quickly, on some junk planet in Radio Bay in the back passage of nowhere. Also, even in a fetch she couldn’t manage those eyes of his. She knew bodies, whatever the shadow operators said. That was part of the problem. And when she saw Billy Anker’s eyes she was glad she didn’t have one now, which would find them irresistible.