Blindsight, page 269 by Peter Watts
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apace curved away from me in all directions. Towards the prow, the sealed observation blister rose above the horizon like a gunmetal sunrise. Further aft a tattered snowdrift peeked across the hull: the edge of the broken labhab.
And past it all, close enough to touch, the endless dark cloudscape of Big Ben: a great roiling wall extending to some flat distant horizon I could barely grasp even in theory. When I focused it was dark and endless shades of gray--but dim, sullen redness teased the corner of my eye when I looked away.
"Robert?" I brought Cunningham's suit feed to my HUD: a craggy, motionless ice field thrown into high contrast by the light of his helmet. Interference from Rorschach's magnetosphere washed over the image in waves. "You there?"
Pops and crackles. The sound of breath and mumbling against an electrical hum. "Four point three. Four point oh. Three point eight--"
"Robert?"
"Three point--shit. What--what are you doing out here, Keeton? Where's the Gang?"
"I came instead." Another squeeze of the trigger and I was coasting towards the snowscape. Theseus' convex hull rolled past, just within reach. "To give you a hand."
"Let's move it then, shall we?" He was passing through a crevice, a scorched and jagged tear in the fabric that folded back at his touch. Struts, broken panels, dead robot arms tangled through the interior of the ice cave like glacial debris; their outlines writhed with static, their shadows leaped and stretched like living things in the sweep of his headlight. "I'm almost--"
Something that wasn't static moved in his headlight. Something uncoiled, just at the edge of the camera's view.
The feed died.
Suddenly Bates and Sarasti were shouting in my helmet. I tried to brake. My stupid useless legs kicked against vacuum, obeying some ancient brainstem override from a time when all monsters were earthbound, but by the time I remembered to use my trigger finger the labhab was already