PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 171 Blindsight
on more or less as before. There would have been some faint hope
that Sarasti would have let us grit our teeth and keep on going,
besieged now by spring-loaded trapdoors as well as the usual
gauntlet of Seiverts and magnets and monsters from the id. But
Bates had made an issue out of it. It wasn't just another piece of
shit in the sewer to her: it was the one that clogged the pipe.
We're on the brink as it is, just surviving the baseline
environment of this thing. If it's started taking deliberate
countermeasures…I don't see how we can risk it.
Fourteen minutes to apogee, and Amanda Bates was still
regretting those words.
On previous expeditions we'd charted twenty-six septa in various
stages of development. We'd x-rayed them. We'd done ultrasound.
We'd watched them ooze their way across passages or ebb slowly
back into the walls. The iris that had snapped shut behind the
Gang of Four had been a whole different animal.
And what are the odds that the first one with a hair-trigger just
happened to also come with antilaser prismatics? That was no
routine growth event. That thing was set for us.
Set by…
That was the other thing. Thirteen minutes to apogee, and Bates
was worried about the tenants.
It had always been breaking and entering, of course. That much
hadn't changed. But when we'd jimmied the lock we'd thought we
were vandalizing an empty summer cottage, still under
construction. We'd thought the owners would be out of the picture
for a while. We hadn't been expecting one of them to catch us on
his way to take a late-night piss. And now that one had, and
vanished into the labyrinth, it was natural to wonder what weapons
it might keep stashed under the pillow…
Those septa could spring on us any time. How many are there?
Are they fixed, or portable? We can't proceed without knowing
these things..
At first, Bates had been surprised and delighted when Sarasti
agreed with her.
Twelve minutes to apogee. From this high ground, well above
the static, Theseus peered down through Rorschach's wrenched and