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Peter Watts 178 Blindsight
"Thirty-seven minutes," Sarasti had said, and none of us could
fathom how he'd come to that number. Only Bates had dared to
ask aloud, and he had merely glinted at her: "You can't follow."
Vampire logic. From an obvious premise to an opaque
conclusion. Our lives depended on it.
The retros followed some preprogrammed algorithm that mated
Newton with a roll of the dice. Our vector wasn't completely
random—once we'd eliminated raceways and growth zones, areas
without line-of-sight escape routes, dead ends and unbranched
segments ("Boring," Sarasti said, dismissing them), barely ten
percent of the artefact remained in the running. Now we dropped
towards a warren of brambles eight kilometers from our original
landing site. Here in the midst of our final approach, there was no
way that even we could predict our precise point of impact.
If Rorschach could, it deserved to win.
We fell. Ridged spires and gnarled limbs sectioned the sky
wherever I looked, cut the distant starscape and the imminent
superJovian into a jagged mosaic veined in black. Three
kilometers away or thirty, the tip of some swollen extremity burst
in a silent explosion of charged particles, a distant fog of ruptured,
freezing atmosphere. Even as it faded I could make out wisps and
streamers swirling into complex spirals: Rorschach's magnetic
field, sculpting the artefact's very breath into radioactive sleet.
I'd never seen it with naked eyes before. I felt like an insect on a
starry midwinter's night, falling through the aftermath of a forest
fire.
The sled fired its brakes. I snapped back against the webbing of
my harness, bumped against the rebounding armored body next to
me. Sascha. Only Sascha, I remembered. Cunningham had
sedated the rest of them, left this one core lonely and alone in the
group body. I hadn't even realized that that was possible with
multiple personalities. She stared back at me from behind her
faceplate. None of her surfaces showed through the suit. I could
see nothing in her eyes.
That was happening so often, these days.
Cunningham was not with us. Nobody had asked why, when
Sarasti assigned the berths. The biologist was first among equals