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Peter Watts 97 Blindsight
I didn't know from where.
"Got it," Bates said. A speck appeared at Ben's edge; the display
zoomed instantly to closeup. "Proximity boot."
Rorschach remained invisible to Theseus, close as we were,
close as we were coming. But parallax stripped at least some of
the scales from the probe's eyes; it woke to spikes and spirals of
smoky glass flickering in and out of view, Ben's flat endless
horizon semivisible through the intervening translucence. The
view trembled; waveforms rippled across ConSensus.
"Quite the magnetic field," Szpindel remarked.
"Braking," Bates reported. Jack turned smoothly retrograde and
fired its torch. On Tactical, delta-vee swung to red.
Sascha was driving the Gang's body this shift. "Incoming
signal," she reported. "Same format."
Sarasti clicked. "Pipe it."
"Rorschach to Theseus. Hello again, Theseus." The voice was
female this time, and middle-aged.
Sascha grinned "See She's not offended at all. Big hairy dick
notwithstanding."
"Don't answer," Sarasti said.
"Burn complete," Bates reported.
Coasting now, Jack—sneezed. Silver chaff shot into the void
towards the target: millions of compass needles, brilliantly
reflective, fast enough to make Theseus seem slow. They were
gone in an instant. The probe watched them flee, swept laser eyes
across every degree of arc, scanned its sky twice a second and took
careful note of each and every reflective flash. Only at first did
those needles shoot along anything approaching a straight line:
then they swept abruptly into Lorentz spirals, twisted into sudden
arcs and corkscrews, shot away along new and intricate trajectories
bordering on the relativistic. The contours of Rorschach's
magnetic field resolved in ConSensus, at first glance like the
nested layers of a glass onion.
"Sproinnnng," Szpindel said.
At second glance the onion grew wormy. Invaginations
appeared, long snaking tunnels of energy proliferating fractally at
every scale.