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Peter Watts 74 Blindsight
"Watch." Sarasti took hold of ConSensus and shook it.
It was a blizzard, not a briefing: gravity wells and orbital
trajectories, shear-stress simulations in thunderheads of ammonium
and hydrogen, stereoscopic planetscapes buried under filters
ranging from gamma to radio. I saw breakpoints and saddlepoints
and unstable equilibria. I saw fold catastrophes plotted in five
dimensions. My augments strained to rotate the information; my
meaty half-brain struggled to understand the bottom line.
Something was hiding down there, in plain sight.
Ben's accretion belt still wasn't behaving. Its delinquency wasn't
obvious; Sarasti hadn't had to plot every pebble and mountain and
planetesimal to find the pattern, but he'd come close. And neither
he nor the conjoined intelligence he shared with the Captain had
been able to explain those trajectories as the mere aftermath of
some past disturbance. The dust wasn't just settling; some of it
marched downhill to the beat of something that even now reached
out from the cloud-tops and pulled debris from orbit.
Not all that debris seemed to hit. Ben's equatorial regions
flickered constantly with the light of meteorite impacts—much
fainter than the bright wakes of the skimmers, and gone in the wink
of an eye—but those frequency distributions didn't quite account
for all the rocks that had fallen. It was almost as though, every
now and then, some piece of incoming detritus simply vanished
into a parallel universe.
Or got caught by something in this one. Something that circled
Ben's equator every forty hours, almost low enough to graze the
atmosphere. Something that didn't show up in visible light, or
infrared, or radar. Something that might have remained pure
hypothesis if a skimmer hadn't burned an incandescent trail across
the atmosphere behind it when Theseus happened to be watching.
Sarasti threw that one dead center: a bright contrail streaking
diagonally across Ben's perpetual nightscape, stuttering partway a
degree or two to the left, stuttering back just before it passed from
sight. Freeze-frame showed a beam of light frozen solid, a
segment snapped from its midsection and jiggled just a hair out of
alignment.
A segment nine kilometers long.