PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 177 Blindsight
It was hers too, for that matter. Nobody who spliced brains for a
living could possibly be unaware of all that basic wiring in the subbasement.
Chelsea had simply chosen to ignore it; to have
admitted anything would have compromised her righteous anger.
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.
*