PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 200 Blindsight
Motion sensors were supposed to do the rest— but the enemy was
close behind, and there was no room to spare.
It went off just as I was emerging into the vestibule. The cannon
net shot out behind me in a glorious exploding conic, caught
something, snapped back up the rabbit hole and slammed into my
grunt from behind. The recoil kicked us against the top of the
vestibule so hard I thought the fabric would tear. It held, and threw
us back against the squirming things enmeshed in our midst.
Writhing backbones everywhere. Articulated arms, lashing like
bony whips. One of them entwined my leg and squeezed like a
brick python. Bates' hands waved in a frantic dance before me and
that arm came apart into dismembered segments, bouncing around
the enclosure.
This was all wrong. They were supposed to be in the net, they
were supposed to be contained...
"Sascha! Launch!" Bates barked. Another arm separated from
its body and careened into the wall, coiling and uncoiling.
The hole had flooded with aerosol foam-core as soon as we'd
pulled the net. A scrambler writhed half-embedded in that matrix,
caught just a split-second too late; its central mass protruded like
some great round tumor writhing with monstrous worms.
"SASCHA!"
Artillery. The floor of the vestibule irised shut quick as a leghold
trap and everything slammed against it, grunts, people,
scramblers whole and in pieces. I couldn't breathe. Every
thimbleful of flesh weighed a hundred kilograms. Something
slapped us to one side, a giant hand batting an insect. Maybe a
course correction. Maybe a collision.
But ten seconds later we were weightless again, and nothing had
torn us open.
We floated like mites in a ping-pong ball, surrounded by a
confusion of machinery and twitching body parts. There was little
of anything that might pass for blood. What there was floated in
clear, shuddering spherules. The cannon net floated like a shrinkwrapped
asteroid in our midst. The things inside had wrapped
their arms around themselves, around each other, curled into a
shivering and unresponsive ball. Compressed methonia hissed