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.'

'You aren't leaving him here, are you?' Mona the clone called up anxiously from the human quarters.

'Are you deaf?' said Seria Mau.

'I wouldn't put it past you, that's all.'

'Shut up.'

The Krishna Moire pod, realising what had happened, swept in, fanned out into the parking orbit with a kind of idle bravado, the way shadow boys in one-shot cultivars occupy a doorway so they can spit, gamble and clean their nails with replicas of priceless antique flick-knives. They could afford to wait. Meanwhile, to move things along, Krishna Moire himself opened a line to the White Cat. He had signed on younger than Seria Mau, and his fetch, though it was six feet tall and presented itself in full Earth Military Contracts chic, including black boots, high-waist riding breeches and a dove-grey double-breasted tuxedo with epaulettes, had the demanding mouth of a boy.

'We want Billy Anker,' he said.

'Go through me,' Seria Mau invited.

Moire looked less certain. 'This is a wrong thing you are doing, resisting us,' he informed her. 'To add to all those other wrongdoings you done. But, hey, we didn't come for you, not this time.'

'I done?' said Seria Mau. 'Wrongdoings I done?'

Outside, explosions marched steadily across the mud, flinging up rocks and vegetation. Elements of the pod, becoming impatient with the half-minute wait, had entered the atmosphere and begun to shell the surface at random. Seria Mau sighed.

'Fuck off, Moire, and take speaking lessons,' she said.

'You're only alive because EMC don't care about you one way or another,' he warned her as he faded to brown smoke. 'They could change their minds. This operation is double red.' His fetch flickered, vanished, reformed suddenly in a kind of postscript. 'Hey, Seria, I got my own pod now!' it said.

'I knew that. So?'

'So next time I see you,' the fetch promised, 'I'll let the machine speak.'

'Jerk,' said Seria Mau.

By this time she had the cargo bay open. Billy Anker, dressed in a vintage EV suit, was shuffling head down towards it with all the grim patience of the physically unfit. He fell. He picked himself up. He fell again. He wiped his faceplate. Up in the stratosphere, the Krishna Moire pod shifted and turned in hungry disarray; while high above it in the parking lot, the hybrid ship awaited what would happen, its ambivalent signature flickering like a description of the events unfolding below. Who was up there, Seria Mau wondered, along with the commander of Touching the Void? Who was presiding over this fumbled op? Down in the cargo bay, Mona the clone called Billy's name. She leaned out, caught his hand, pulled him inside. The cargo ramp slammed shut. As if this was a signal, long vapour trails emerged from the cloudbase at steep angles. Billy Anker's ship burst open. Its engines went up in a sigh of gamma and visible light.

'Go,' Seria Mau told the mathematics. The White Cat torched out in a low fast arc over the South Pole, transmitting ghost signatures, firing off decoys and particle-dogs.