'Don't do that!' warned Seria Mau.

'Shh,' said Billy Anker absently, but he had thought better of it. 'I look inside,' he said, 'and I don't see anything. Do you?'

'There's nothing to see.'

'Dr Haends to surgery, please,' insisted the quiet voice.

Billy Anker cocked his head to listen, then closed the box. 'I never saw anything like this before,' he said. 'Of course, we don't know what Uncle Zip did to it.' He straightened up. Cracked the knuckles of his undamaged hand. 'It didn't look like this when I found it,' he said. 'It looked the way K-tech always looks. Small. Slippery but compact.' He shrugged. 'Packaged in those slinky metals they had back then, beautiful like a shell. It didn't have these theatrical values.' He smiled in a way she didn't understand, looking off into the distance. 'That's Uncle Zip's signature, if you like,' he said, in a bitter voice. Seria Mau's fetch wove nervously around his ankles.

'Where did you find it?' she said.

Instead of answering Billy Anker sat down on the deck to get more on a level with her. He looked perfectly comfortable there, in his two leather jackets and three-day stubble. He stared into the fetch's eyes for a while, as if he was trying to see through to the real Seria Mau, then surprised her by saying:

'You can't outrun EMC forever.'

'It's not me they're after,' she reminded him.

'All the same,' he said, 'they'll catch you in the end.'

'Look around at these million stars. See anything you like? It's easy to lose yourself out here.'

'You're already lost,' Billy Anker said. 'I admire that you stole a K-ship,' he went on quickly: 'Who wouldn't? But you're lost, and you aren't finding yourself. Anyone can see that. You're doing the wrong thing. You know?'

'How come you say these things?' she shouted. 'How come you make me feel bad like this?'

He couldn't answer that.

'What's the right thing to do, Billy Anker? Beach my ship on some shithole and wear two coats that creak? Oh, and be big about how I'm not a refund kind of guy?' She regretted saying this immediately. He looked hurt. From the start he had reminded her of someone. It wasn't his clothes, or all the rigmarole with the antique consoles and obsolete technology. It was his hair, she thought. Something about his hair. She kept looking at him from different angles, trying to remember who it brought to mind. 'I'm sorry,' she said, 'I don't know you well enough to say that.'

'No,' he said.

'I was wrong,' she said, after she had left him a pause which he didn't fill. 'It was wrong of me.'

She had to be content with a shrug.

'So. What then? What should I do? You tell me, you with your emotional intelligence you're clearly so proud of.'

'Take this ship deep,' he said. 'Take it to the Tract.'

'I don't know why I'm talking to you, Billy Anker.'

He laughed.

'I had to try,' he said. He said, 'OK, so this is how I found the package. First, you got to know a little about K-tech.'

She laughed.

'Billy Anker, what can you tell me about that?' He went on anyway.

Two hundred years before, humanity stumbled over the remains of the oldest halo culture of all. It was thinly represented compared to some, scattered across fifty cubic lights and half a dozen planets, with outstations huddled so close to the Tract it soon became known as the Kefahuchi Culture or K-culture. There was no clue what these people looked like, though from their architecture you could tell they were short. The ruins were alive with code, which turned out to be some kind of intelligent machine interface.

Working technological remains, sixty-five million years old.

No one knew what to do with it. The research arm of Earth Military Contracts arrived. They threw a cordon round what they called the 'affected area' and, working out of hastily thrown-up colonies of pressurised sheds, modified tools from various strains of shadow operator, which they ran on nano- and biotech substrates. With these they tried to manipulate the code direct. It was a disaster. Conditions in the sheds were brutal. Researchers and experimental subjects alike lived on top of the containment facilities. 'Containment' was another meaningless EMC word. There were no firewalls, no masks, nothing above a Class IV cabinet. Evolution ran at virus speeds. There were escapes, unplanned hybrids. Men, women and children, shipped in down the Carling Line from the branded prison hulks orbiting Cor Caroli, accidentally ingested the substrates, then screamed all night and in the morning spoke in tongues. It was like having a wave of luminous insects spill out of the machine, run up your arm and into your mouth before you could stop them. There were outbreaks of behaviour so incomprehensible it had to be an imitation of the religious rituals of the K-culture itself. Dancing. Sex and drugs cults. Anthemic chanting.

After the Tampling-Praine Outbreak of 2293, which escaped the halo and infected parts of the galaxy itself, attempts to deal directly with the code, or the machinery it controlled, were abandoned. The big idea after that was to contain it and connect the human operator via a system of buffers and compressors, cybernetic and biological, which mimicked the way human consciousness dealt with its own raw eleven-million-bit-a-second sensory input. The dream of a one-to-one realtime link with the mathematics faded, and, a generation after the original discoveries, EMC installed what they had into hybridised ships, drives, weapons and-especially-navigational systems which had last run sixty-five million years before.

The pressure-sheds were demolished, and the lives of the people in them quietly forgotten.

K-tech was born.

'So?' said Seria Mau. 'This is not news.'

She knew all this, but was embarrassed to hear it spoken out loud. She felt some guilt for all those dead people. She laughed. 'None of this is news to my life,' she said. 'You know?'

'I know,' said Billy Anker. He went on:

'EMC was born in those pressure-sheds, too. Before that you had a loose cartel of security corporations, designed so the neo-liberal democracies could blame subcontractors for any police action that got out of hand. So all those boyish decent-looking presidents could make eye contact with you out of the hologram display and claim in those holy voices of theirs, "We don't make the wars," and then have "terrorists" killed in numbers. After K-tech, well, EMC became the democracies: look at that little shit we just talked to.' He grinned. 'But here's the good news. K-tech has run out. For a while, it was a gold rush. There was always something new. The early prospectors were picking stuff up with their bare hands. But by the time Uncle Zip's generation came along, there was nothing left. Now they're adding refinements to refinements, but only at the human interface. They can't build new code, or back-engineer those original machines.

'Do you understand? We don't have a technology here. We have alien artifacts: a resource mined until it ran out.' He looked around him, gestured to indicate the White Cat. 'This may have been one of the last of them,' he said. 'And we don't even know what it was for.'

'Hey, Billy Anker,' she said. 'I know what it's for.'

He looked her fetch in the eye and she felt less sure.

'K-tech has run out,' he repeated.

'If that's a good thing, why are you so pissed off?'

Billy Anker got up and walked about to stretch his legs. He had another look at the Dr Haends package. Then he came back to her and knelt down again.

'Because I found a whole planet of it,' he said.

Silence strung itself out like packets in a wire in the human quarters of the ship. Under the dim fluorescent lights the shadow operators whispered to one another, turning their faces to the wall. Billy Anker sat on the floor scratching the calf of one leg. His shoulders were hunched, his stubbled face set in creases as habitual as the creases in his leather coats. Seria Mau watched him intently. Every tiny camera drifting in the room gave her a different view.