PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 122 Blindsight
helically twisted. They'd edged cautiously around clouds of mist
sculpted into abstract fractal shapes, shifting and endlessly
recursive, their charged droplets strung along a myriad converging
lines of electromagnetic force.
Ultimately, every one of them had died or disappeared.
"Any way to increase the shielding?" I wondered.
Szpindel gave me a look.
"We've shielded everything except the sensor heads," Bates
explained. "If we shield those we're blind."
"But visible light's harmless enough. What about purely optical
li—"
"We're using optical links, commissar," Szpindel snapped. "And
you may have noticed the shit's getting through anyway."
"But aren't there, you know—" I groped for the word—
"bandpass filters? Something that lets visible wavelengths
through, cuts out the lethal stuff on both sides?"
He snorted. "Sure. It's called an atmosphere, and if we'd
brought one with us—about fifty times deeper than Earth's— it
might block some of that soup down there. Course, Earth also gets
a lot of help from its magnetic field, but I'm not betting my life on
any EM we set up in that place."
"If we didn't keep running into these spikes," Bates said. "That's
the real problem."
"Are they random?" I wondered.
Szpindel's shrug was half shiver. "I don't think anything about
that place is random. But who knows? We need more data."
"Which we're not likely to get," James said, walking around the
ceiling to join us, "if our drones keep shorting out."
The conditional was pure formality. We'd tried playing the odds,
sacrificing drone after drone in the hope that one of them would get
lucky; survival rates tailed exponentially to zero with distance from
base camp. We'd tried shielding the fiberop to reduce aperture
leakage; the resulting tethers were stiff and unwieldy, wrapped in
so many layers of ferroceramic that we were virtually waving the
bots around on the end of a stick. We'd tried cutting the tethers
entirely, sending the machines out to explore on their own,
squinting against the radiant blizzard and storing their findings for