1n1REzE

Peter Watts 181 Blindsight
hadn't been closer to the mark.
We moved along the tunnel. Our destination resolved to merely
human eyes: not so much chamber as nexus, a knot of space
formed by the convergence of a dozen tunnels angling in from
different orientations. Ragged meshes of quicksilver dots gleamed
along several glistening surfaces; shiny protrusions poked through
the substrate like a scattershot blast of ball-bearings pressed into
wet clay.
I looked at Bates and Sascha. "Control panel"
Bates shrugged. Her drones panned the throats around us,
spraying sonar down each. My HUD sketched a patchy three-d
model from the echoes: swathes of paint thrown against invisible
walls. We were dots near the center of a ganglion, a tiny swarm of
parasites infesting some great hollowed host. Each tunnel curved
away in a gradual spiral, each along a different orientation. Sonar
could peep around those bends a few meters further than we could.
Neither eyes nor ultrasonics saw anything to distinguish one choice
from another.
Bates pointed down one of the passageways—"Keeton—" and
another— "Sascha," before turning to coast off down her own
unbeaten path.
I looked uneasily down mine. "Any particular—"
"Twenty-five minutes," she said.
I turned and jetted slowly down my assigned passageway. The
passage curved clockwise, a long unremarkable spiral; after twenty
meters that curvature would have blocked any view of its entrance
even if the foggy atmosphere hadn't. My drone kept point across
the tunnel, its sonar clicking like the chattering of a thousand tiny
teeth, its tether unspooling back to the distant drum in the nexus.
It was a comfort, that leash. It was short. The grunts could stray
ninety meters and no further, and we were under strict orders to
stay under their wings at all times. This dim infested burrow might
lead all the way to hell, but I would not be expected to follow it
nearly so far. My cowardice had official sanction.
Fifty meters to go. Fifty meters and I could turn and run with my
tail between my legs. In the meantime all I had to do was grit my
teeth, and focus, and record: everything you see, Sarasti had said.