PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 87 Blindsight
"They don't like company," I reminded him. You didn't put
vampires of the same sex together, not unless you were taking bets
on a bloodbath. They were solitary hunters and very territorial.
With a minimum viable pred-prey ratio of one to ten—and human
prey spread so sparsely across the Pleistocene landscape—the
biggest threat to their survival had been competition from their
own kind. Natural selection had never taught them to play nicely
together.
That didn't cut any ice with Szpindel, though. "Doesn't mean he
can't be lonely," he insisted.
"Just means he can't fix it."
"They know the music but not the words."
— Hare, Without Conscience
We did it with mirrors, great round parabolic things, each
impossibly thin and three times as high as a man. Theseus rolled
them up and bolted them to firecrackers stuffed with precious
antimatter from our dwindling stockpiles. With twelve hours to
spare she flung them like confetti along precise ballistic
trajectories, and when they were safely distant she set them alight.
They pinwheeled off every which way, gamma sleeting in their
wake until they burned dry. Then they coasted, unfurling mercurial
insect wings across the void.
In the greater distance, four hundred thousand alien machines
looped and burned and took no obvious notice.
Rorschach fell around Ben barely fifteen hundred kilometers
from atmosphere, a fast endless circle that took just under forty
hours to complete. By the time it didn't return to our sight, the
mirrors were all outside the zone of total blindness. A closeup of
Ben's equatorial edge floated in ConSensus. Mirror icons sparkled
around it like an exploding schematic, like the disconnected facets
of some great expanding compound eye. None had brakes.