PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 290 Blindsight
skimmers would be passing within a hundred kilometers on their
next orbits.
Sarasti reached for his injector, the blood rising in his face.
"Time to go. We refit Charybdis while you're sulking."
He held the hypo to his throat and shot up. I stared at
ConSensus, caught by that bright shifting web like a moth by a
streetlight.
"Now, Siri."
He pushed me from his quarters. I sailed into the passageway,
grabbed a convenient rung—and stopped.
The spine was alive with grunts, patrolling the airspace, standing
guard over the fab plants and shuttle 'locks, clinging like giant
insects to the rungs of unrolling spinal ladders. Slowly, silently,
the spine itself was stretching.
It could do that, I remembered. Its corrugations flexed and
relaxed like muscle, it could grow up to two hundred meters to
accommodate any late-breaking need for a bigger hanger or more
lab space.
Or more infantry. Theseus was increasing the size of the
battlefield.
"Come." The vampire turned aft.
Bates broke in from up front. "Something's happening."
An emergency handpad, geckoed to the expanding bulkhead, slid
past to one side. Sarasti grabbed it and tapped commands. Bates'
feed appeared on the bulkhead: a tiny chunk of Big Ben, an EMenhanced
equatorial quadrant only a few thousand klicks on a side.
The clouds boiled down there, a cyclonic knot of turbulence
swirling almost too fast for realtime. The overlay described
charged particles, bound in a deep Parker spiral. It spoke of great
mass, rising.
Sarasti clicked.
"DTI?" Bates said.
"Optical only." Sarasti took my arm and dragged me effortlessly
astern. The display paced us along the bulkhead: seven skimmers
shot from the clouds as I watched, a ragged circle of scramjets
screaming red-hot into space. ConSensus plotted their paths in an
instant; luminous arcs rose around our ship like the bars of a cage.