PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 289 Blindsight
"My—"
"Survive and bear witness."
"A drone—"
"Can deliver the data—assuming nothing fries its memory before
it gets away. It can't convince anyone. It can't counter
rationalizations and denials. It can't matter. And vampires—" he
paused—"have poor communications skills."
It should have been cause for petty, selfish rejoicing.
"It all comes down to me," I said. "That's what you're saying.
I'm a fucking stenographer, and it's all on me."
"Yes. Forgive me for that."
"Forgive you?"
Sarasti waved his hand. All faces save two disappeared.
"I don't know what I'm doing."
The news bloomed across ConSensus a few seconds before
Bates called it aloud: Thirteen skimmers had not reappeared from
behind Big Ben on schedule. Sixteen. Twenty-eight.
And counting.
Sarasti clicked to himself as he and Bates played catch-up.
Tactical filled with luminous multicolored threads, a tangle of
revised projections as intricate as art. The threads wrapped Ben
like a filamentous cocoon; Theseus was a naked speck in the
middle distance.
I expected any number of those lines to skewer us like needles
through a bug. Surprisingly, none did; but the projections only
extended twenty-five hours into the future, and were reliable for
only half that. Not even Sarasti and the Captain could look so far
ahead with that many balls in the air. It was something, though,
the faintest silver lining: that all these high-speed behemoths
couldn't simply reach out and swat us without warning. Evidently
they still had to ease into the curve.
After Rorschach's dive, I'd been starting to think the laws of
physics didn't apply.
The trajectories were close enough, though. At least three
*