M. Harrison - LIGHT

Beneath this image, in bold art deco letters, someone had printed the words:

DR HAENDS, PSYCHIC SURGEON.

Appears twice nightly.

Seria Mau woke puzzled, to find her tank flooded with benign hormones. The mathematics had changed its mind. 'I believe after all that we're alone,' it said, and left for its own space before she could comment. This compelled her to call up the relevant displays and give them her attention.

'Now I'm not so sure,' she said.

No reply.

Next, a line opened from the planet below.

'So what happened here?' Billy Anker wanted to know. 'One minute you're talking, the next you aren't?'

'This interference!' said Seria Mau gaily.

'Hey, well, don't do me any favours,' he grumbled. Then he said: 'You want to know the history of that package, maybe I'll help. But first you got to do something for me.'

Seria Mau laughed.

'No one can help you with your dress-sense, Billy Anker; I want to say that from the start.'

This time it was Billy Anker who broke the connection.

She sent down her fetch. 'Hey, come on,' she said, 'it was a joke. What do you want me to do?'

You could see him swallow his pride. You could see he had his own reasons to keep her attention. 'I wanted you to come with me,' he said. 'See some things on Redline, that's all.' She was touched, until his voice got that note she already recognised. 'Nothing special. Or only as special as everything else we know out here on the edge-'

'Let's go,' she interrupted. 'If we're going.'

In the end, though, there wasn't time to do that. Alarms chimed. The shadow operators flew about. The White Cat went up to full readiness. Her battle clocks, reset to zero, began to count off in femtoseconds, the last stop before the unknowable realtime of the universe. Meanwhile, she diverted fusion product into engines and ordnance and began, as a precautionary spoiling measure, to flicker in and out of the dynaflow at random. From this behaviour, Seria Mau judged they were in an emergency.

'What?' she demanded of the mathematics.

'Look,' it recommended, and began increasing the connections between her and the White Cat until, in important ways, Seria Mau became the ship. She was on ship-time. She had ship consciousness. Processing rates ramped up by several orders of magnitude from the paltry human forty bits a second. Her sensorium, analogued to represent fourteen dimensions, echoed with replicas of itself like a cathedral built in 'brane-space. Seria Mau was now alive in a way, in a place-and at a speed-which would burn her out if it lasted for more than a minute and half. As a precautionary measure the mathematics was already sluicing the tank proteome with endorphins, adrenalin inhibitors and warm-down hormones which, operating at biological speeds, would take effect only after any encounter was finished.

'I was wrong,' it said. 'Do you see? There?'

'I see,' said Seria Mau. 'I see the fuckers!'

It was EMC. There was no need for signature diagrams or fakebooks. She knew them. She knew their shapes. She even knew their names. A pod of K-ships-coms shrieking with fake traffic, decoys flaring off in several dimensions-flipped themselves down the Redline gravitational alley along a trajectory designed for maximum unpredictability. Second-guessed from instant to instant, this appeared in the White Cat's sensorium as neon, scripted recursively against the halo night. The Krishna Moire pod, on long-distance ops out of New Venusport, comprised: the Norma Shirike, the Kris Rhamion, the Shannon Kier and the Marino Shrike, and was led by the Krishna Moire itself. In they came, their crosslinked mathematics causing them to constantly exchange positions in a kind of randomised braid or plait. It was a classic K-ship ploy. But the centre thread of the plait (though 'centre' was a meaningless term in these circumstances) presented as an object Seria Mau recognised: an object with a weird linked signature, half-Nastic, half-human.

As they roared down upon her, the White Cat flickered and fluttered, miming uncertainty and perhaps a broken wing. She vanished from her orbit. The pod took note. You could hear their sarcastic laughter. They assigned a fraction of their intelligence to finding her; bored on in. Seria Mau-her signature dissembled to mimic that of an abandoned satellite at the Redline L2 - needed no further evidence. Her intuition was operating in fourteen dimensions too.

'I know where they're going.'

'Who cares?' said the mathematics. 'We're out of here in twenty-eight nanoseconds.'

'No. It's not us. It's not us they want!'

There was a prickle of white light in the upper atmosphere of Redline as mid-range ordnance, despatched into the dynaflow before the raid began, popped out to engage Billy Anker's nominal complement of minefields and satellites. Down on the surface in the streaming rain, the Karaoke Sword began to wake up to its situation, coms reluctant, engines slow to warm, countermeasures half-blind to the day: a rocket with a ten-year hangover, entering Seria Mau's sensorium as a pained, lazy worm of light.

Too slow! she thought. Too old.

She opened a line, 'Too slow, Billy Anker!' she called. No answer. The entradista, tapping in a panic at the arms of his acceleration couch, had dislocated his left index finger. 'I'm coming down!'

'Is this wise?' the mathematics wanted to know.

'Disconnect me,' said Seria Mau.

The mathematics thought.

'No,' it said.

'Disconnect me. We're a side-issue here. This isn't a battle, it's a police raid. They've come for Billy Anker, and he doesn't have a clue how to help himself

The White Cat reappeared 200 kilometres above Redline. Ordnance burst around her. Someone had predicted she would come out there and then. 'Oh yes,' said Seria Mau, 'very clever. Fuck you too.' Tit for tat, she cooked off a high-end mine she had slipped into the path of the incoming pod. 'Here's one I prepared earlier,' she said. The pod broke up, temporarily blinded, and toppled away in several directions. 'They won't forgive us for that,' she told her mathematics. 'They're arrogant bastards, that team.' The mathematics, which was using the respite to normalise her relationship with the White Cat, had no comment to make. The ship's sensorium collapsed around her. Everything slowed down. 'In and out now,' she ordered. 'Quick as we can.' The White Cat pitched over into entry attitude. Retrofire pulsed and flared. Outside, the colours of space gave way to weird smears; reds and greens. Seria Mau airbraked relentlessly in the thickening atmosphere, letting speed scrub off as heat and noise until her ship was a roaring yellow fireball across the night sky. It was a rough ride. The shadow operators streamed about, their lacy wings rippling out behind them, their long hands covering their faces. Mona the clone, who had looked out of a porthole as the ship stood on its nose, was throwing up energetically in the human quarters.

They breached the cloudbase at fifteen hundred feet, to find the Karaoke Sword immediately below them. 'I don't believe this,' said Seria Mau. The old ship had lifted itself a foot or two out of the mud and was turning hesitantly this way and that, shaking like a cheap compass needle. A fusion torch fired up at the rear, setting nearby vegetation alight and generating gouts of radioactive steam. After twenty seconds, its bows dropped suddenly and the whole thing slumped back to earth with a groan, breaking in two about a hundred yards forward of the engine. 'Jesus Christ,' Seria Mau whispered. 'Put us down.'

The mathematics said it was unwilling to commit.

'Put us down. I'm not leaving him here.'