'If only you had grown like this, Cinderella,' they mourned, in the old language.

'Such a blessing,' they said.

Don't let me have to deal with this now, she thought.

'Go back to your posts,' she ordered them, 'or I'll have the portholes taken out.'

'We're always at our posts-'

'I'm sure we never meant to upset you, dear.'

'-always at our posts, dear.'

As if this had been a signal, La Vie Fuerique, running fast upside the local sun, blundered into a minefield.

The mines, two micrograms of antimatter steered on to station by hydrazine engines etched into silicon wafers a centimetre square, weren't much more intelligent than a mouse; but once they knew you were there, you were dead. It was the old dilemma. You daren't move and you daren't stop moving. The crew of La Vie Fuerique understood what was happening to them, even though it was very quick. Seria Mau could hear them screaming at one another as the yawl split lengthwise and levered itself apart. Not long after that, two of the freighters ran into one another as, dynaflow drivers clawing at the spatial fabric, they broke cover on desperate, half-calculated EE trajectories. The third slunk quietly away into the debris around the gas giant, where it turned everything off and prepared to wait her out.

'No, no, this is not how we do it,' said Seria Mau. 'You tubby little thing.'

She appeared from nowhere on its port stern quarter and allowed herself to be detected. This produced an explosion of internal coms traffic and a satisfying little dash for safety, to which she put an end with some of her more serious-if less sophisticated-ordnance. The flare of the explosion lit up several small asteroids and, briefly, the wreckage of the yawl, which, locked into the local chaotic attractor, toppled past end over end, wrapped in a rather beautiful radioactive glow.