1n1REzE

Peter Watts 157 Blindsight
times she lost her faith once we got her into the bell, but it was
touch and go for a while; her warrior drones, drunk on power but
still under line-of-sight control, staggered from their perimeters
and pointed their weapons along bearings too close for comfort.
The grunts died fast. Some barely lasted a single foray; a few
died in minutes. The longest-lived were the slowest on the draw,
half-blind, thick-witted, every command and response bottlenecked
by raw high-frequency sound buzzing across their shielded
eardrums. Sometimes we backed them up with others that spoke
optically: faster but nervous, and even more vulnerable. Together
they guarded against an opposition that had not yet shown its face.
It hardly had to. Our troops fell even in the absence of enemy
fire.
We worked through it all, through fits and hallucinations and
occasional convulsions. We tried to watch each others' backs
while magnetic tendrils tugged our inner ears and made us seasick.
Sometimes we vomited into our helmets; then we'd just hang on,
white-faced, sucking sour air through clenched teeth while the
recyclers filtered chunks and blobs from our headspace. And we'd
give silent thanks for the small mercy of nonstick, static-repellent
faceplates.
It rapidly became obvious that my presence served as more than
cannon fodder. It didn't matter that I lacked the Gang's linguistic
skills or Szpindel's expertise in biology; I was another set of hands,
in a place where anyone could be laid out at a moment's notice.
The more people Sarasti kept in the field, the greater the odds that
at least one of them would be halfway functional at any given
moment. Even so, we were in barely any condition to accomplish
anything. Every incursion was an exercise in reckless
endangerment.
We did it anyway. It was that or go home.
The work proceeded in infinitesimal increments, hamstrung on
every front. The Gang wasn't finding any evidence of signage or
speech to decipher, but the gross mechanics of this thing were easy
enough to observe. Sometimes Rorschach partitioned itself,
extruded ridges around its passageways like the cartilaginous
hoops encircling a human trachea. Over hours some of them might