The engagement had to take place within one and a half minutes, or Seria Mau would burn out. During that time she would flicker unpredictably in and out of normal space fifty or sixty thousand times. She would remember little of it afterwards, an image here, an image there. In ship-space, a high-end gamma burst, generating 50,000K for an endless fourteen nanoseconds, looked like a flower. Targets turned under the gaze of her acquisition systems like diagrams, to be flipped this or that number of degrees in seven dimensions until they bloomed like flowers too. To the targets themselves the White Cat seemed to come out of nowhere on three or four different arcs which though sequential appeared simultaneous, in a mist of decoys, false signals and invented battle languages, a froth of code and violence which could have only the one conclusion. “The fact is, boys,” she commiserated, “I’m not sure which of these is me.” The Norma Shirike, struggling to connect, broke up into a cloud of pixels, like jigsaw pieces blown off a table in a high wind. The Kris Rhamion and the Sharmon Kier, trying not to run into one another in their haste to get away, ran into a small asteroid instead. Suddenly, it was all unmatched bits and pieces, floating in nowhere. They had ragged edges. None of them looked human, at any scale she chose. Local space was cooling down, but it was still like a cooker, resonating with light and heat, glittering with exotic particles and phase states. It was beautiful.
“I love it in here,” she said.
“You have three milliseconds left,” the mathematics warned her. “And we didn’t get them all. I think one of them left the system. But Moire himself is loose and I’m still looking for him.”
“Leave me in here.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Leave me in, or we’re stuffed anyway. He used his team as decoys, went on ship-time late. The bet was he would have a millisecond or two left to bounce me as I slowed down.” It was a textbook tactic and she had fallen for it. “Moire, you fucker, I know what you’re up to!” Too late. She was back on normal time. The tank proteome, flushed with nutrients and hormonal tranquillisers, was beginning to try and repair her. She could barely stay awake. “Fuck,” she told the mathematics. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” There was laughter on the RF frequencies. Krishna Moire flickered briefly into existence in front of her, dressed in his powder-blue stormtroop uniform.
“Hey, Seria,” he said. “What’s this, you ask? Well it’s goodnight from me. And a fucking goodnight to you.”
“He’s on us,” said the mathematics.
Moire’s ship flickered towards her through the wreckage. It looked like a ghost. It looked like a shark. Nothing she could do would be fast enough. The White Cat turned and turned in panic like one of her own victims, looking for a way out. Then everything lit up like a Christmas tree, and the Krishna Moire was batted away in the blast, a black needle toppling end over end against the dying flare of the explosion. In the same instant, Seria Mau became aware that something huge had materialised beside the White Cat. It was the Nastic cruiser, its vast, mouldy-looking hull, like a rotting windfall in some old orchard, still crawling with autorepair media.
“Jesus,” she said. “They bumped him. Uncle Zip bumped his own guy.”
“I don’t think it was Uncle Zip,” the mathematics said. “The command came from somewhere else in the ship.” A dry laugh. “It’s like the bicameral mind in there.”
Seria Mau felt weepy when she heard this.
“It was the commander,” she said. “He always liked me. And I always liked him.”
“You don’t like anyone,” the mathematics pointed out.
“Usually I don’t,” said Seria Mau. “But I’m very up and down today. I can’t work out what’s the matter with me.” Then she said: “Where’s that bastard Moire?”
“He’s down in the outer layers of the gas giant. He got out by surfing the expansion wave of the bump. He’s taken damage, but his engines still work. Do you want to go in after him?”
“No. Cook it up.”
“Pardon?”
“Cook the fucker up.”
“?”
“If you want something done,” sighed Seria Mau, “do it yourself. There.” Ordnance disengaged from one of the complex outer structures of the White Cat, hung for the blink of an eye while its engine fired, then streaked down into the gas giant’s atmosphere. Gravity tried to crush it out of existence, but between here and there it had turned itself into the voice of God. Something like lightning flared across the face of the gas giant, as it began to torch itself up. Uncle Zip opened a line to the White Cat. He was puffing out his cheeks angrily. “Hey,” he said, “all that was unnecessary. You know? I paid good money for those guys. In the end I wouldn’t of let them hurt you.”
Seria Mau ignored him.
“Better light out,” she advised her mathematics. She yawned. “This is where we’re going,” she said. And finally: “I really didn’t want to be bothered with that fucker again. I was just too tired.”
As they left the system, a new star had begun to burn behind them.
Seria Mau slept for a long time, dreamlessly at first. Then she began to see images. She saw the New Pearl River. She saw the garden, gloomy under rain. She saw herself from a great distance, very small but clear. She was thirteen. She had gone to sign up for the K-ships. She was saying goodbye to her brother and her father. The scene was this: the station at Saulsignon, still pretty under its wartime skies, which were just like the wartime skies of Antique European Earth, blue, turbulent, vapour-trailed but full of hope. She saw herself wave, and she saw the father raise his hand. The brother refused to wave. He didn’t want her to go, so he refused even to look at her. This scene faded slowly. After that, she glimpsed herself when she was last human, sitting on the edge of a bed shivering, vomiting into a plastic bowl while she tried to hold around her a cotton robe that fell open constantly at the back.
You sign up for the K-ships in sterile white rooms at even temperatures: nevertheless, whatever you do you can’t get warm. You mustn’t have eaten. They give you the emetics anyway. They give you the injection. They give you the tests, but to be honest that is only to pass the two or three days it takes the injection to work. By then your bloodstream is teeming with selected pathogens, artificial parasites and tailored enzymes. You present with the symptoms of MS, lupus and schizophrenia. They strap you down and give you a rubber gag to bite on. The way is cleared for the shadow operators, running on a nanomech substrate at the submicrometre level, which soon begin to take your sympathetic nervous system to pieces. They flush the rubbish out continually through the colon. They pump you with a white paste of ten-micrometre-range factories which will farm exotic proteins and monitor your internal indicators. They core you at four points down the spine. You are conscious all the way through this process, except for the brief moment when they introduce you to the K-code itself. Many recruits, even now, don’t make it past that point. If you do, they seal you in the tank. By then they have broken most of your bones, and taken some of your organs out: you are blind and deaf, and all you are aware of is a kind of nauseous surf rolling through you forever. They have cut into your neocortex so that it will accept the software bridge known ironically as “the Einstein Cross” from the shape you see the first time you use it. You are no longer alone. You will soon be able to consciously process billions of billions of bits per second; but you will never walk again. You will never laugh or touch someone or be touched, fuck or be fucked. You will never do anything for yourself again. You will never even shit for yourself again. You have signed up. It comes to you for an instant that you were able to choose this but that you will never, ever, ever be able to unchoose it.