PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 179 Blindsight
now, a backup restored with no other behind him. The secondleast
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
*