PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 201 Blindsight
around them, keeping them fresh for the long trip home.
"Holy shit," Sascha breathed, watching them. "The bloodsucker
called it."
He hadn't called everything. He hadn't called a mob of
multiarmed aliens ripping one of their own to pieces before my
eyes. He hadn't seen that coming.
Or at least, he hadn't mentioned it.
I was already feeling nauseous. Bates was carefully bringing her
wrists together. For a moment I could barely make out a taut dark
thread of freakwire, fine as smoke, between them. Her caution was
well-advised; that stuff would slice through human limbs as easily
as alien ones. One of the grunts groomed its mouthparts at her
shoulder, cleaning gore from its mandibles.
The freakwire vanished from my sight. Sight itself was
dimming, now. The inside of this great lead balloon was going
dark around me. We were coasting, purely ballistic. We had to
trust that Scylla would swoop in and snatch us once we'd achieved
a discreet distance from the scene of the crime. We had to trust
Sarasti.
That was getting harder by the hour. But he'd been right so far.
Mostly.
"How do you know?" Bates had asked when he'd first laid out the
plan. He hadn't answered. Chances are he couldn't have, not to us,
any more than a baseline could have explained brane theory to the
inhabitants of Flatland. But Bates hadn't been asking about tactics
anyway, not really. Maybe she'd been asking for a reason, for
something to justify this ongoing trespass into foreign soil, the
capture and slaughter of its natives.
On one level she already knew the reason, of course. We all did.
We could not afford to merely react. The risks were too great; we
had to preempt. Sarasti, wise beyond all of us, saw this more
clearly than we. Amanda Bates knew he was right in her mind—
but perhaps she didn't feel it in her gut. Perhaps, I thought as my
vision failed, she was asking Sarasti to convince her.
But that wasn't all she was doing.
*