1n1REzE

Peter Watts 112 Blindsight
urged him to hide, hide, let them forget. Maybe he retreated when
they got too loud, maybe we made him as uneasy as he made us.
We could always hope.
Our final orbit combined discretion and valor in equal measure.
Rorschach described a perfect equatorial circle 87,900 km from
Big Ben's center of gravity. Sarasti was unwilling to let it out of
sight, and you didn't have to be a vampire to mistrust relay sats
when swinging through a radiation-soaked blizzard of rock and
machinery. The obvious alternative was to match orbits.
At the same time, all the debate over whether or not Rorschach
had meant—or even understood—the threats it had made was a bit
beside the point. Counterintrusion measures were a distinct
possibility either way, and ongoing proximity only increased the
risk. So Sarasti had derived some optimum compromise, a mildly
eccentric orbit that nearly brushed the artefact at perigee but kept a
discreet distance the rest of the time. It was a longer trajectory than
Rorschach's, and higher—we had to burn on the descending arc to
keep in synch—but the end result was continuously line-of-sight,
and only brought us within striking distance for three hours either
side of bottoming out.
Our striking distance, that is. For all we knew Rorschach could
have reached out and swatted us from the sky before we'd even left
the solar system.
Sarasti gave the command from his tent. ConSensus carried his
voice into the drum as Theseus coasted to apogee: "Now."
Jack had erected a tent about itself, a blister glued to
Rorschach's hull and blown semi-taut against vacuum with the
merest whiff of nitrogen. Now it brought lasers to bear and started
digging; if we'd read the vibrations right, the ground should be only
thirty-four centimeters deep beneath its feet. The beams stuttered
as they cut, despite six millimeters of doped shielding.
"Son of a bitch," Szpindel murmured. "It's working."
We burned through tough fibrous epidermis. We burned through
veins of insulation that might have been some sort of
*