Blindsight, Peter Watts [books under 200 pages TXT] 📗

of its arms ripped off before it had disappeared into a writhing ball in the center of the passageway.

We fled. I turned to Bates—_Did you see_—but held my tongue. The deathly concentration on her face was unmistakable even across two faceplates and three meters of methane. According to HUD she’d lobotomized both grunts, bypassed all that wonderful autonomous decision-making circuitry entirely. She was running both machines herself, as manually as marionettes.

Grainy turbulent echoes appeared on the rear sonar display. The scramblers had finished with their sacrifice. Now they were coming after us. My grunt stumbled and careened against the side of the passage. Jagged shards of alien décor dug parallel gouges across my faceplate, tenderized chunks of thigh through the shielded fabric of my suit. I clenched down on a cry. It got out anyway. Some ridiculous in-suit alarm chirped indignantly an instant before a dozen rotten eggs broke open inside my helmet. I coughed. My eyes stung and watered in the reek; I could barely see Seiverts on the HUD, flashing instantly into the red.

Bates drove us on without a word.

My faceplate healed enough to shut off the alarm. My air began to clear. The scramblers had gained; by the time I could see clearly again they were only a few meters behind us. Up ahead Sascha came into view around the bend, Sascha who had no backup, whose other cores had all been shut down on Sarasti’s orders. Susan had protested at first—

“If there’s any opportunity to communicate—”

“There won’t be,” he’d said.

—so there was Sascha who was more resistant to Rorschach‘s influence according to some criterion I never understood, curled up in a fetal ball with her gloves clamped against her helmet and I could only hope to some dusty deity that she’d set the trap before this place had got to her. And here came the scramblers, and Bates was shouting “Sascha! Get out of the fucking way!” and braking hard, way too soon, the scrambling horde nipping at our heels like a riptide and Bates yelled “Sascha!” again and finally Sascha moved, kicked herself into gear and off the nearest wall and fled right back up the hole we’d blown in through. Bates yanked some joystick in her head and our warrior sedans slewed and shat sparks and bullets and dove out after her.

Sascha had set the trap just within the mouth of the breach. Bates armed it in passing with the slap of one gloved hand. Motion sensors were supposed to do the rest— but the enemy was close behind, and there was no room to spare.

It went off just as I was emerging into the vestibule. The cannon net shot out behind me in a glorious exploding conic, caught something, snapped back up the rabbit hole and slammed into my grunt from behind. The recoil kicked us against the top of the vestibule so hard I thought the fabric would tear. It held, and threw us back against the squirming things enmeshed in our midst.

Writhing backbones everywhere. Articulated arms, lashing like bony whips. One of them entwined my leg and squeezed like a brick python. Bates’ hands waved in a frantic dance before me and that arm came apart into dismembered segments, bouncing around the enclosure.

This was all wrong. They were supposed to be in the net, they were supposed to be contained…

“Sascha! Launch!” Bates barked. Another arm separated from its body and careened into the wall, coiling and uncoiling.

The hole had flooded with aerosol foam-core as soon as we’d pulled the net. A scrambler writhed half-embedded in that matrix, caught just a split-second too late; its central mass protruded like some great round tumor writhing with monstrous worms.

“SASCHA!”

Artillery. The floor of the vestibule irised shut quick as a leg-hold trap and everything slammed against it, grunts, people, scramblers whole and in pieces. I couldn’t breathe. Every thimbleful of flesh weighed a hundred kilograms. Something slapped us to one side, a giant hand batting an insect. Maybe a course correction. Maybe a collision.

But ten seconds later we were weightless again, and nothing had torn us open.

We floated like mites in a ping-pong ball, surrounded by a confusion of machinery and twitching body parts. There was little of anything that might pass for blood. What there was floated in clear, shuddering spherules. The cannon net floated like a shrink-wrapped asteroid in our midst. The things inside had wrapped their arms around themselves, around each other, curled into a shivering and unresponsive ball. Compressed methonia hissed around them, keeping them fresh for the long trip home.

“Holy shit,” Sascha breathed, watching them. “The bloodsucker called it.”

He hadn’t called everything. He hadn’t called a mob of multiarmed aliens ripping one of their own to pieces before my eyes. He hadn’t seen that coming.

Or at least, he hadn’t mentioned it.

I was already feeling nauseous. Bates was carefully bringing her wrists together. For a moment I could barely make out a taut dark thread of freakwire, fine as smoke, between them. Her caution was well-advised; that stuff would slice through human limbs as easily as alien ones. One of the grunts groomed its mouthparts at her shoulder, cleaning gore from its mandibles.

The freakwire vanished from my sight. Sight itself was dimming, now. The inside of this great lead balloon was going dark around me. We were coasting, purely ballistic. We had to trust that Scylla would swoop in and snatch us once we’d achieved a discreet distance from the scene of the crime. We had to trust Sarasti.

That was getting harder by the hour. But he’d been right so far. Mostly.

“How do you know?” Bates had asked when he’d first laid out the plan. He hadn’t answered. Chances are he couldn’t have, not to us, any more than a baseline could have explained brane theory to the inhabitants of Flatland. But Bates hadn’t been asking about tactics anyway, not really. Maybe she’d been asking for a reason, for something to justify this ongoing trespass into foreign soil, the capture and slaughter of its natives.

On one level she already knew the reason, of course. We all did. We could not afford to merely react. The risks were too great; we had to preempt. Sarasti, wise beyond all of us, saw this more clearly than we. Amanda Bates knew he was right in her mind—but perhaps she didn’t feel it in her gut. Perhaps, I thought as my vision failed, she was asking Sarasti to convince her.

But that wasn’t all she was doing.

*

Imagine you are Amanda Bates.

The control you wield over your troops would give wet dreams and nightmares to generals of ages past. You can drop instantly into the sensorium of anyone under your command, experience the battlefield from any number of first-person perspectives. Your every soldier is loyal unto death, asking no questions, obeying all commands with alacrity and dedication to which mere flesh could never even aspire. You don’t just respect a chain of command: you are one.

You are a little bit scared of your own power. You are a little bit scared of the things you’ve already done with it.

Taking orders comes as naturally as giving them. Oh, you’ve been known to question policy on occasion, or seek a bigger picture than may be strictly necessary for the job at hand. Your command initiative has become the stuff of legends. But you have never disobeyed a direct order. When asked for your perspective, you serve it straight up and unvarnished— until the decision is made, and the orders handed down. Then you do your job without question. Even when questions arise, you would hardly waste time asking them unless you expected an answer you could use.

Why, then, demand analytical details from a vampire?

Not for information. Might as well expect the sighted to explain vision to the congenitally blind. Not for clarification; there was no ambiguity in Sarasti’s bottom line. Not even for the benefit of poor dumb Siri Keeton, who may have missed some salient point but is too ashamed to raise his own hand.

No, there is only one reason why you might ask for such details: to challenge. To rebel, to the infinitesimal degree that rebellion is permitted once the word is given.

You argued and advocated as forcefully as you could, back when Sarasti was soliciting input. But he ignored yours, abandoned any attempt at communication and preemptively invaded foreign territory. He knew that Rorschach might contained living beings and still he tore it open without regard for their welfare. He may have killed helpless innocents. He may have roused an angry giant. You don’t know.

All you know is, you’ve been helping him do it.

You’ve seen this kind of arrogance before, among your own kind. You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones. Bad enough to see such arrogant stupidity inflicted on the helpless, but to do it at these stakes beggars belief. Killing innocents is the least of the risks you’re running; you’re gambling with the fate of worlds, provoking conflict with a star faring technology whose sole offense was to take your picture without permission.

Your dissent has changed nothing. So you reign it in; all that slips out now is the occasional pointless question with no hope of an answer, its inherent insubordination so deeply buried you don’t even see it yourself. If you did see it, you’d keep your mouth shut entirely—because the last thing you want is to remind Sarasti that you think he’s wrong. You don’t want him dwelling on that. You don’t want him to think you’re up to something.

Because you are. Even if you’re not quite ready to admit it to yourself.

Amanda Bates is beginning to contemplate a change of command.

*

The laceration of my suit had done a real number on the gears. It took three solid days for Theseus to bring me back to life. But death was no excuse for falling behind the curve; I resurrected with a head full of updates clogging my inlays.

I flipped through them, climbing down into the drum. The Gang of Four sat at the galley below me, staring at untouched portions of nutritionally-balanced sludge on her plate. Cunningham, over in his inherited domain, grunted at my appearance and turned back to work, the fingers of one hand tapping compulsively on the desktop.

Theseus‘ orbit had widened during my absence, and most of its eccentricities had been planed away. Now we kept our target in view from a more-or-less constant range of three thousand kilometers. Our orbital period lagged Rorschach‘s by an hour—the alien crept implacably ahead of us along its lower trajectory—but a supplementary burn every couple of weeks would be enough to keep it in sight. We had specimens now, things to be examined under conditions of our own choosing; no point in risking any more close approaches until we’d wrung every useful datum from what we had.

Cunningham had expanded his lab space during my time in the sepulcher. He’d built holding pens, one for each scrambler, modules partitioned by a common wall and installed in a whole new hab. The microwaved carcass had been sidelined like a discarded toy from a previous birthday, although according to the access logs Cunningham still visited it every now and then.

Not that he visited any part of the new wing in person, of course. Not that he was even able to, not without suiting up and jumping across the hold. The whole compartment had been disconnected from its spinal lock and pushed to a tethered anchorage midway between spine and carapace: Sarasti’s orders, given to minimize risk of contamination.