Peter Watts - Blindsight

I could have pointed that out too, I suppose, but I knew how much stress the system could take and I wasn’t ready to test it to destruction. I didn’t want to lose her. I didn’t want to lose that feeling of safety, that sense that it made a difference whether I lived or died. I only wanted her to back off a bit. I only wanted room to breathe.

“You can be such a reptile sometimes,” she said.

Mission accomplished.

Our first approach had been all caution and safety margins. This time we came in like a strike force.

Scylla burned towards Rorschach at over two gees, its trajectory a smooth and predictable arc ending at the ruptured base camp. It may have even landed there, for all I know; perhaps Sarasti had two-birded the mission, programmed the shuttle for some collecting of its own. If so, it wouldn’t land with us on board. Scylla spat us into space almost fifty kilometers short of the new beachhead, left us naked and plummeting on some wireframe contraption with barely enough reaction mass for a soft landing and a quick getaway. We didn’t even have control over that : success depended on unpredictability, and how better to ensure that than to not even know ourselves what we were doing?

Sarasti’s logic. Vampire logic. We could follow it partway: the colossal deformation that had sealed Rorschach ’s breach was so much slower, so much more expensive than the dropgate that had trapped the Gang. The fact that dropgates hadn’t been used implied that they took time to deploy — to redistribute necessary mass, perhaps, or spring-load its reflexes. That gave us a window. We could still venture into the den so long as the lions couldn’t predict our destination and set traps in advance. So long as we got out again before they could set them afterwards.

“Thirty-seven minutes,” Sarasti had said, and none of us could fathom how he’d come to that number. Only Bates had dared to ask aloud, and he had merely glinted at her: “You can’t follow.”

Vampire logic. From an obvious premise to an opaque conclusion. Our lives depended on it.

The retros followed some preprogrammed algorithm that mated Newton with a roll of the dice. Our vector wasn’t completely random — once we’d eliminated raceways and growth zones, areas without line-of-sight escape routes, dead ends and unbranched segments (“Boring,” Sarasti said, dismissing them), barely ten percent of the artefact remained in the running. Now we dropped towards a warren of brambles eight kilometers from our original landing site. Here in the midst of our final approach, there was no way that even we could predict our precise point of impact.

If Rorschach could, it deserved to win.

We fell. Ridged spires and gnarled limbs sectioned the sky wherever I looked, cut the distant starscape and the imminent superJovian into a jagged mosaic veined in black. Three kilometers away or thirty, the tip of some swollen extremity burst in a silent explosion of charged particles, a distant fog of ruptured, freezing atmosphere. Even as it faded I could make out wisps and streamers swirling into complex spirals: Rorschach ’s magnetic field, sculpting the artefact’s very breath into radioactive sleet.

I’d never seen it with naked eyes before. I felt like an insect on a starry midwinter’s night, falling through the aftermath of a forest fire.

The sled fired its brakes. I snapped back against the webbing of my harness, bumped against the rebounding armored body next to me. Sascha. Only Sascha , I remembered. Cunningham had sedated the rest of them, left this one core lonely and alone in the group body. I hadn’t even realized that that was possible with multiple personalities. She stared back at me from behind her faceplate. None of her surfaces showed through the suit. I could see nothing in her eyes.

That was happening so often, these days.

Cunningham was not with us. Nobody had asked why, when Sarasti assigned the berths. The biologist was first among equals now, a backup restored with no other behind him. The second-least replaceable of our irreplaceable crew.

It made me a better bargain. The odds I bought had increased to one in three.

A silent bump shuddered up the frame. I looked forward again, past Bates on the front pallet, past the anchored drones that flanked her two to each side. The sled had launched its assault, a prefab inflatable vestibule mounted on an explosive injection assembly that would punch through Rorschach ’s skin like a virus penetrating a host cell. The spindle-legged contraption dwindled and disappeared from my sight. Moments later a pinpoint sodium sun flared and died against the ebony landscape ahead — antimatter charge, so small you could almost count the atoms, shot directly into the hull. A lot rougher than the tentative foreplay of our first date.

We landed, hard, while the vestibule was still inflating. The grunts were off the sled an instant before contact, spitting tiny puffs of gas from their nozzles, arranging themselves around us in a protective rosette. Bates was up next, leaping free of her restraints and sailing directly towards the swelling hab. Sascha and I unloaded the fiberop hub — a clamshell drum half a meter thick and three times as wide — lugging it between us while one of the grunts slipped through the vestibule’s membranous airlock.

“Let’s move, people.” Bates was hanging off one of the inflatable’s handholds. “Thirty minutes to—”

She fell silent. I didn’t have to ask why: the advance grunt had positioned itself over the newly-blasted entrance and sent back its first postcard.

Light from below.

You’d think that would have made it easier. Our kind has always feared the dark; for millions of years we huddled in caves and burrows while unseen things snuffled and growled — or just waited , silent and undetectable — in the night beyond. You’d think that any light, no matter how meager, might strip away some of the shadows, leave fewer holes for the mind to fill with worst imaginings.

You’d think.

We followed the grunt down into a dim soupy glow like blood-curdled milk. At first it seemed as though the atmosphere itself was alight, a luminous fog that obscured anything more than ten meters distant. An illusion, as it turned out; the tunnel we emerged into was about three meters wide and lit by rows of raised glowing dashes — the size and approximate shape of dismembered human fingers — wound in a loose triple helix around the walls. We’d recorded similar ridges at the first site, although the breaks had not been so pronounced and the ridges had been anything but luminous.

“Stronger in the near-infrared,” Bates reported, flashing the spectrum to our HUDs. The air would have been transparent to pit vipers. It was transparent to sonar: the lead grunt sprayed the fog with click trains and discovered that the tunnel widened into some kind of chamber seventeen meters further along. Squinting in that direction I could just make out subterranean outlines through the mist. I could just make out jawed things, pulling back out of sight.

“Let’s go,” Bates said.

We plugged in the grunts, left one guarding the way out. Each of us took another as a guardian angel on point. The machines spoke to our HUDs via laser link; they spoke to each other along stiffened lengths of shielded fiberop that unspooled from the hub trailing in our wake. It was the best available compromise in an environment without any optima. Our tethered bodyguards would keep us all in touch during lone excursions around corners or down dead ends.

Yeah. Lone excursions. Forced to either split the group or cover less ground, we were to split the group. We were speed-cartographers panning for gold. Everything we did here was an act of faith: faith that the unifying principals of Rorschach ’s internal architecture could be derived from the raw dimensions we’d grab on the run. Faith that Rorschach ’s internal architecture even had unifying principles. Earlier generations had worshipped malign and capricious spirits. Ours put its faith in an ordered universe. Here in the Devil’s Baklava, it was easy to wonder if our ancestors hadn’t been closer to the mark.