1n1REzE

Peter Watts 184 Blindsight
no uncertainty, nothing but a collapsed probability wave and solid,
undeniable mass. Exposed, it grabbed the nearest wall and
scrambled over our heads, segmented arms flailing like whips. A
sudden crackling buzz in the back of my head and it was drifting
free again, charred and smoking.
A stuttering click. The whine of machinery gearing down.
Three grunts hovered in formation in the middle of the
passageway. One faced the alien. I glimpsed the tip of some lethal
proboscis sliding back into its sheath. Bates shut the grunt down
before it had finished closing its mouth.
Optical links and three sets of lungs filled my helmet with a roar
of heavy breathing.
The offlined grunt drifted in the murky air. The alien carcass
bumped gently off the wall, twitching: a hydra of human
backbones, scorched and fleshless. It didn't look much like my onboard
visions after all.
For some reason I couldn't put my finger on, I found that almost
reassuring.
The two active grunts panned the fog until Bates gave them new
orders; then one turned to secure the carcass, the other to steady its
fallen comrade. Bates grabbed the dead grunt and unplugged its
tether. "Fall back. Slowly. I'm right behind you."
I tweaked my jets. Sascha hesitated. Coils of shielded cable
floated about us like umbilical cords.
"Now," Bates said, plugging a feed from her own suit directly
into the offlined grunt.
Sascha started after me. Bates took up the rear. I watched my
HUD; a swarm of multiarmed monsters would appear there any
moment.
They didn't. But the blackened thing against the belly of Bates'
machine was real enough. Not a hallucination. Not even some
understandable artefact of fear and synesthesia. Rorschach was
inhabited. Its inhabitants were invisible.
Sometimes. Sort of.
And, oh yeah. We'd just killed one.
*