PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 42 Blindsight
ship caught en route could have packed enough fuel for anything
but the long dejected loop back home. But Theseus' thin, infinitely
attenuate fuel line reached all the way back to the sun; she could
turn on the proverbial dime. We'd changed course in our sleep and
the Icarus stream tracked our moves like a cat after prey, feeding us
at lightspeed.
And here we were.
"Talk about long shots," Szpindel grumbled.
Across the table, Bates flicked her wrist. Her ball sailed over my
head; I heard it bounce off the deck (not the deck, something in me
amended: handrail). "We're assuming the comet was a deliberate
decoy, then."
Sarasti nodded. The ball riccocheted back into my line of sight
high overhead and disappeared briefly behind the spinal bundle,
looping through some eccentric, counterintuitive parabola in the
drum's feeble grav.
"So they want to be left alone."
Sarasti steepled his fingers and turned his face in her direction.
"That your recommendation?"
She wished it was. "No, sir. I'm just saying that Burns-Caulfield
took a lot of resources and effort to set up. Whoever built it
obviously values their anonymity and has the technology to protect
it."
The ball bounced one last time and wobbled back towards the
Commons. Bates half-hopped from her seat (she floated briefly),
barely catching it on its way past. There remained a new-bornanimal
awkwardness to her movements, half Coriolis, half residual
rigor. Still: a big improvement in four hours. The rest of the
Humans were barely past the walking stage.
"Maybe it wasn't much trouble for them at all, eh?" Szpindel was
musing. "Maybe it was dead easy."
"In which case they might or might not be as xenophobic, but
they're even more advanced. We don't want to rush into this."
Sarasti turned back to the simmering graphics. "So?"
Bates kneaded the recovered ball with her fingertips. "The
second mouse gets the cheese. We may have blown our top-of-theline
recon in the Kuiper, but we don't have to go in blind. Send in