PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 276 Blindsight
towards us while collapsing in on itself. It took me a moment to
reconcile the contradiction: something had kicked the hab hard
from its far side, sent it careening toward us in a slow, majestic
tumble. Something had opened the hab, spilled its atmosphere and
left its elastic skin drawing in on itself like a deflating balloon.
The impact site swung into view as we watched, a scorched flaccid
mouth trailing tenuous wisps of frozen spittle.
Our guns were firing. They shot nonconducting slugs that would
not be turned aside by electromagnetic trickery—invisibly dark and
distant to human eyes but I saw them through the tactical crosshairs
of the firing robots, watched them sew twin dotted blackbodied
arcs across the heavens. The streams converged as the guns
tracked their targets, closed on two attenuate throwing stars fleeing
spread-eagled through the void, their faces turned to Rorschach
like flowers to the sun.
The guns cut them to pieces before they'd even made it half way.
But those shredded pieces kept falling, and suddenly the ground
beneath was alive with motion. I zoomed the view: scramblers
surged across Rorschach's hull like an orgy of snakes, naked to
space. Some linked arms, one to another to another, built
squirming vertebral daisy-chains anchored at one end. They lifted
from the hull, waved through the radioactive vacuum like fronds of
articulated kelp, reaching—grasping—
Neither Bates nor her machines were stupid. They targeted the
interlinked scramblers as ruthlessly as they'd gone after the
escapees, and with a much higher total score. But there were
simply too many targets, too many fragments snatched in passing.
Twice I saw dismembered bits of Stretch and Clench caught by
their brethren.
The ruptured hab loomed across ConSensus like a great torn
leukocyte. Another alarm buzzed somewhere nearby: proximity
alert. Cunningham shot into the drum from somewhere astern,
bounced off a cluster of pipes and conduits, grabbed for support.
"Holy shit—we are leaving, aren't we? Amanda?"
"No," Sarasti answered from everywhere.
"What—" does it fucking take? I caught myself. "Amanda, what
if it fires on the ship?"