1n1REzE

Peter Watts 280 Blindsight
afraid than we are...
But then Rorschach blew us a kiss. I saw it burst from deep
within the forest, ethereal and incandescent. It shot across the
heavens and splashed against the small of Theseus' back, making a
complete and utter fool of Amanda Bates. The skin of our ship
flowed there, and opened like a mouth, and congealled in a
soundless frozen scream.
"You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time."
—Einstein
I have no idea whether the scrambler made it back home with its
hard-won prize. There was so much lost distance to make up, even
if the emplacements didn't pick it off en route. Cunningham's
pistol might have run out of fuel. And who knew how long those
creatures could survive in vacuum anyway Maybe there'd been
no real hope of success, maybe that scrambler was dead from the
moment it had gambled on staying behind. I never found out. It
had dwindled and vanished from my sight long before Rorschach
dove beneath the clouds and disappeared in turn.
There had always been three, of course. Stretch, and Clench, and
the half-forgotten microwaved remains of a scrambler killed by an
uppity grunt—kept on ice next to its living brethren, within easy
reach of Cunningham's teleops. I tried to dredge half-glimpsed
details from memory, after the fact: had both of those escapees
been spheres, or had one been flattened along one axis Had they
thrashed, waved their limbs the way some panicky human might
with no ground beneath him Or had one, perhaps, coasted lifeless
and ballistic until our guns destroyed the evidence
At this point, it didn't really matter. What mattered was that at
long last, everyone was on the same page. Blood had been drawn,
war declared.
And Theseus was paralysed from the waist down.