Light

'Don't keep saying that!'shrieked Seria Mau. Then she laughed. 'What does it matter, after all? They won't hurt us-not until they find out where we're going, anyway. And maybe not even then.'

'Where are we going?'

'Wouldn't you like to know!'

'We can't go there unless I do,' the mathematics reminded her.

'Ramp me up,' said Seria Mau. Instantly, the fourteen dimensions of the White Cat's sensorium folded out around her, and she was on ship-time. One nanosecond, she could smell vacuum. Two, she could feel the minute caress of dark matter against the hull. Three, she could tune into the hideous fusion life of the local sun, with its sounds no one has ever described. Four nanoseconds, and she had the shifting constantly redesigned command languages of the Moire pod drifting up to her through something like layers of clear liquid, which was the encryption they were suspended in. In five nanoseconds she knew everything about them: propulsion status, rate of burn, ordnance on call. What damage they were carrying from the day's encounter-the hulls thinned at crucial points from particle ablation, the arsenals depleted. She could feel the nanomachines working overtime to shore up their internal architecture. They were too young and stupid to realise how damaged they were. She thought she could beat them, whatever the mathematics said. She hung there a further nanosecond, warming herself in the fourteen-dimensional night. Blinks and fibres of illumination came and went. Distant things like noises. She heard Krishna Moire say, 'Got: it!' but knew he hadn't.

This was the place for her.

It was the place for people who didn't know what they were any more. Who had never known. Uncle Zip had called her 'a sad story'. Her mother was long dead. She had not seen her brother or father for fifteen years. Mona the clone had felt only contempt for her, and Billy Anker had pitied her even as she killed him: in addition his hard death still hung before her, like the menu for her own. Then she conned herself that all the complex stuff of being human was transparent at this level of things, and she could see straight through it to the other side-right to the simple code beneath. She could stay or go: in this place as in life. She was the ship.

'Arm me,' she commanded.

'Is this what you want;'

'Arm me.'

At that exact juncture, the K-pod found the last of her proxies and began unspooling the thread that led to her. But she was connected, and they were still thinking in milliseconds. Each time they found her, she was somewhere else. Then, in the instant it took them to realise what had happened, she had got into their personal space.

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 Man, '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.