“Please adopt an appropriately abasing attitude within yourself!” The voice issued from the metal of the cyborg. Yet a moment after she’d heard it, she realized it had been preceded by a battery of squeaks from the more grandly dressed rodent. “We await your confirmation that you are the hominid expert—assigned to further our grandiloquent oversight, for the purposes of mastering the universe.” The voice itself resembled a mobile phone personal assistant, calm and vaguely female, never human enough to be threatening, entirely at odds with what was being translated.

“My name is Dr. Kay Amal Khan. I am a mathematician.” She almost added “from Earth,” except they were all from one Earth or another. Most likely this jumped-up pagoda of a creature had been given her old name, but she would make damn sure that they called her by her real one.

“You have the honour of addressing me as Dr. Rat,” the creature’s translator rat announced, as it drew itself up to its full height. “Kindly adopt an appropriate stance, if you would be pleased to.”

Kay shifted, and abruptly it fell into that hand-wringing, shrinking posture, cowering in her shadow before remembering itself and straining for height and space again. Good, little fucker, remember I can stamp your tail flat… But the need to bully left as quickly as it came, shooed out by common sense, which reminded her who held the cards now. She could put herself in the creature’s place too, imagining how she might approach some alien monster twice her size, given into her care.

Carefully, she let herself down until she was sitting on the hard metal floor. “Hello, Dr. Rat,” she managed. She imagined its real name was a series of inaudible squeaks or contortions, or maybe just the smell it made when pissing on things. But seriously, was its name Rove’s joke or something? “It’s your work I’ve been looking at, right?”

“Mine is the genius to draw together the weft of many minds,” the translator said, the artificial voice’s lack of enthusiasm sounding like sarcasm.