PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 57 Blindsight
orbit—or into a quick discreet flyby if the neighborhood turned out
to be a little too rough. The Icarus stream fell invisibly to port, its
unswerving energy lost to space-time. Our city-sized, moleculethick
parasol wound down and packed itself away until the next
time the ship got thirsty. Antimatter stockpiles began dropping
immediately; this time we were alive to watch it happen. The dip
was infinitesimal, but there was something disquieting about the
sudden appearance of that minus sign on the display.
We could have retained the apron strings, left a buoy behind in
the telematter stream to bounce energy down the well after us.
Susan James wondered why we hadn't.
"Too risky," Sarasti said, without elaboration.
Szpindel leaned in James' direction. "Why give 'em something
else to shoot at, eh?"
We sent more probes ahead, though, spat them out hard and fast
and too fuel-constrained for anything but flyby and self-destruct.
They couldn't take their eyes off the machines swinging around Big
Ben. Theseus stared her own unblinking stare, more distant though
more acute. But if those high divers even knew we were out there,
they ignored us completely. We tracked them across the closing
distance, watched them swoop and loop though a million parabolas
at a million angles. We never saw them collide—not with each
other, not with the cauldron of rock tumbling around Ben's equator.
Every perigee dipped briefly into atmosphere; there they burned,
and slowed, and accelerated back into space, their anterior scoops
glowing with residual heat.
Bates grabbed a ConSensus image, drew highlights and a
conclusion around the front end: "Scramjet."
We tracked nearly four hundred thousand in less than two days.
That appeared to be most of them; new sightings leveled off
afterwards, the cumulative curve flattening towards some
theoretical asymptote. Most of the orbits were close and fast, but
Sarasti projected a frequency distribution extending almost back to
Pluto. We might stay out here for years, and still catch the
occasional new shovelnose returning from its extended foray into
the void.
"The faster ones are pulling over fifty gees on the hairpin turn,"