PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 75 Blindsight
"It's cloaked," Sascha said, impressed.
"Not very well." Bates emerged from the forward hatch and
sailed spinward. "Pretty obvious refractory artefact." She caught
stairs halfway to the deck, used the torque of spin-against-spam to
flip upright and plant her feet on the steps. "Why didn't we catch
that before?"
"No backlight," Szpindel suggested.
"It's not just the contrail. Look at the clouds." Sure enough,
Ben's cloudy backdrop showed the same subtle dislocation. Bates
stepped onto the deck and headed for the conference table. "We
should've seen this earlier."
"The other probes see no such artefact," Sarasti said. "This
probe approaches from a wider angle. Twenty-seven degrees."
"Wider angle to what?" Sascha said.
"To the line," Bates murmured. "Between us and them."
It was all there on tactical: Theseus fell inwards along an
obvious arc, but the probes we'd dispatched hadn't dicked around
with Hohmann transfers: they'd burned straight down, their
courses barely bending, all within a few degrees of the theoretical
line connecting Ben to Theseus.
Except this one. This one had come in wide, and seen the
trickery.
"The further from our bearing, the more obvious the
discontinuity," Sarasti intoned. "Think it's clearly visible on any
approach perpendicular to ours."
"So we're in a blind spot? We see it if we change course?"
Bates shook her head. "The blind spot's moving, Sascha. It's—"
"Tracking us." Sascha sucked breath between her teeth.
"Motherfucker."
Szpindel twitched. "So what is it? Our skimmer factory?"
The freeze-frame's pixels began to crawl. Something emerged,
granular and indistinct, from the turbulent swirls and curlicues of
Ben's atmosphere. There were curves, and spikes, and no smooth
edges; I couldn't tell how much of the shape was real, and how
much a fractal intrusion of underlying cloudscape. But the overall
outline was that of a torus, or perhaps a collection of smaller
jagged things piled together in a rough ring; and it was big. Those