Blindsight, page 49

Blindsight, page 49 by Peter Watts

e primitive part of my mind refused to accept as natural--

The image lurched again, and flashed to black, and didn't return.

"Probe's fried," Bates reported. "Spike there at the end. Like it 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.

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