PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 20 Blindsight
the ship home again after everything else had failed.
Between the footwells the engineers had crammed one last hatch
and one last passageway: to the observation blister on Theseus'
prow. I hunched my shoulders (tendons cracked and complained)
and pushed through—
—into darkness. Clamshell shielding covered the outside of the
dome like a pair of eyelids squeezed tight. A single icon glowed
softly from a touchpad to my left; faint stray light followed me
through from the spine, brushed dim fingers across the concave
enclosure. The dome resolved in faint shades of blue and gray as
my eyes adjusted. A stale draft stirred the webbing floating from
the rear bulkhead, mixed oil and machinery at the back of my
throat. Buckles clicked faintly in the breeze like impoverished
wind chimes.
I reached out and touched the crystal: the innermost layer of
two, warm air piped through the gap between to cut the cold. Not
completely, though. My fingertips chilled instantly.
Space out there.
Perhaps, en route to our original destination, Theseus had seen
something that scared her clear out of the solar system. More
likely she hadn't been running away from anything but to
something else, something that hadn't been discovered until we'd
already died and gone from Heaven. In which case...
I reached back and tapped the touchpad. I half-expected nothing
to happen; Theseus' windows could be as easily locked as her
comm logs. But the dome split instantly before me, a crack then a
crescent then a wide-eyed lidless stare as the shielding slid
smoothly back into the hull. My fingers clenched reflexively into
a fistful of webbing. The sudden void stretched empty and
unforgiving in all directions, and there was nothing to cling to but a
metal disk barely four meters across.
Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me
understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.
Stars, and—
—nothing else.
What did you expect? I chided myself. An alien mothership
hanging off the starboard bow?