PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 203 Blindsight
All you know is, you've been helping him do it.
You've seen this kind of arrogance before, among your own
kind. You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones.
Bad enough to see such arrogant stupidity inflicted on the helpless,
but to do it at these stakes beggars belief. Killing innocents is the
least of the risks you're running; you're gambling with the fate of
worlds, provoking conflict with a star faring technology whose sole
offense was to take your picture without permission.
Your dissent has changed nothing. So you rein it in; all that slips
out now is the occasional pointless question with no hope of an
answer, its inherent insubordination so deeply buried you don't
even see it yourself. If you did see it, you'd keep your mouth shut
entirely—because the last thing you want is to remind Sarasti that
you think he's wrong. You don't want him dwelling on that. You
don't want him to think you're up to something.
Because you are. Even if you're not quite ready to admit it to
yourself.
Amanda Bates is beginning to contemplate a change of
command.
The laceration of my suit had done a real number on the gears. It
took three solid days for Theseus to bring me back to life. But
death was no excuse for falling behind the curve; I resurrected with
a head full of updates clogging my inlays.
I flipped through them, climbing down into the drum. The Gang
of Four sat at the galley below me, staring at untouched portions of
nutritionally-balanced sludge on her plate. Cunningham, over in
his inherited domain, grunted at my appearance and turned back to
work, the fingers of one hand tapping compulsively on the desktop.
Theseus' orbit had widened during my absence, and most of its
eccentricities had been planed away. Now we kept our target in
view from a more-or-less constant range of three thousand
kilometers. Our orbital period lagged Rorschach's by an hour—the
alien crept implacably ahead of us along its lower trajectory—but a
supplementary burn every couple of weeks would be enough to
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