1n1REzE

Peter Watts 56 Blindsight
hit a Parker Spiral, but with a really tight wind."
I didn't need to call up subtitles. It was obvious in the set of her
face, the sudden creases between her eyebrows: she was talking
about a magnetic field.
"It's—" she began, and stopped as a number popped up in
ConSensus: 11.2 Tesla.
"Holy shit," Szpindel whispered. "Is that right"
Sarasti clicked from the back of his throat and the back of the
ship. A moment later he served up an instant replay, those last few
seconds of telemetry zoomed and smoothed and contrast-enhanced
from visible light down to deep infrared. There was that same dark
shard cauled in flame, there was the contrail burning in its wake.
Now it dimmed as the object skipped off the denser atmosphere
beneath and regained altitude. Within moments the heat trace had
faded entirely. The thing that had burned at its center rose back
into space, a fading ember. A great conic scoop at its front end
gaped like a mouth. Stubby fins disfigured an ovoid abdomen.
Ben lurched and went out all over again.
"Meteorites," Bates said dryly.
The thing had left me with no sense of scale. It could have been
an insect or an asteroid. "How big" I whispered, a split-second
before the answer appeared on my inlays:
Four hundred meters along the major axis.
Ben was safely distant in our sights once more, a dark dim disk
centered in Theseus's forward viewfinder. But I remembered the
close-up: a twinkling orb of black-hearted fires; a face gashed and
pockmarked, endlessly wounded, endlessly healing.
There'd been thousands of the things.
Theseus shivered along her length. It was just a pulse of
decelerating thrust; but for that one moment, I imagined I knew
how she felt.
We headed in and hedged our bets.
Theseus weaned herself with a ninety-eight-second burn, edged
us into some vast arc that might, with a little effort, turn into an
*