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Peter Watts 121 Blindsight
"It's got to be a habitat for something. Why any atmosphere at
all, if it's just some kind of terraforming machine"
Szpindel pointed up at the Gang's tent. "What Susan said.
Atmosphere's still under construction and we get a free ride until
the owners show up."
"Free"
"Freeish. And I know we've only seen a fraction of a fraction of
what's inside. But something obviously saw us coming. It yelled
at us, as I recall. If they're smart and they're hostile, why aren't they
shooting"
"Maybe they are."
"If something's hiding down the hall wrecking your robots, it's
not frying them any faster than the baseline environment would do
anyway."
"What you call a baseline environment might be an active
counterintrusion measure. Why else would a habitat be so
uninhabitable"
Szpindel rolled his eyes. "Okay, I was wrong. We don't know
enough to make a few smart guesses."
Not that we hadn't tried. Once Jack's sensor head had been
irreparably fried, we'd relegated it to surface excavation; it had
widened the bore in infinitesimal increments, patiently burning
back the edges of our initial peephole until it measured almost a
meter across. Meanwhile we'd customized Bates's grunts—
shielded them against nuclear reactors and the insides of cyclotrons
—and come perigee we'd thrown them at Rorschach like stones
chucked into a haunted forest. Each had gone through Jack's
portal, unspooling whisker-thin fiberop behind them to pass
intelligence through the charged atmosphere.
They'd sent glimpses, mostly. A few extended vignettes. We'd
seen Rorschach's walls move, slow lazy waves of peristalsis
rippling along its gut. We'd seen treacly invaginations in progress,
painstaking constrictions that would presumably, given time, seal
off a passageway. Our grunts had sailed through some quarters,
staggered through others where the magnetic ambience threw them
off balance. They'd passed through strange throats lined with
razor-thin teeth, thousands of triangular blades in parallel rows,