PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 291 Blindsight
Theseus shuddered.
We've been hit, I thought. Suddenly the spine's plodding
expansion cranked into overdrive; the pleated wall lurched and
accelerated, streaming past my outstretched fingers as the closed
hatch receded up ahead—
—receded overhead.
The walls weren't moving at all. We were falling, to the sudden
strident bleating of an alarm.
Something nearly yanked my arm from its socket: Sarasti had
reached out with one hand and caught a rung, reached with his
other and caught me before we'd both been flattened against the
Fab plant. We dangled. I must have weighed two hundred
kilograms; the floor shuddered ten meters below my feet. The ship
groaned around us. The spine filled with the screech of torquing
metal. Bates' grunts clung to its walls with clawed feet.
I reached for the ladder. The ladder pulled away: the ship was
bending in the middle and down had started to climb the walls.
Sarasti and I swung towards the center of the spine like a daisychain
pendulum.
"Bates! James!" The vampire roared. His grip on my wrist
trembled, slipping. I strained for the ladder, swung, caught it.
"Susan James has barricaded herself in the bridge and shut down
autonomic overrides." An unfamiliar voice, flat and affectless.
"She has initiated an unauthorized burn. I have begun a controlled
reactor shutdown; be advised that the main drive will be offline for
at least twenty-seven minutes."
The ship, I realized, its voice raised calmly above the alarm. The
Captain itself. On Public Address.
That was unusual.
"Bridge!" Sarasti barked. "Open channel!"
Someone was shouting up there. There were words, but I
couldn't make them out.
Without warning, Sarasti let go.
He dropped obliquely in a blur. Aft and opposite, the bulkhead
waited to swat him like an insect. In half a second both his legs
would be shattered, if the impact didn't kill him outright—
But suddenly we were weightless again, and Jukka Sarasti—