Blindsight, page 69 by Peter Watts
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rbulent swirls and curlicues of Ben's atmosphere. There were curves, and spikes, and no smooth edges; I couldn't tell how much of the shape was real, and how much a fractal intrusion of underlying cloudscape. But the overall outline was that of a torus, or perhaps a collection of smaller jagged things piled together in a rough ring; and it was big. Those nine klicks of displaced contrail had merely grazed the perimeter, cut across an arc of forty or fifty degrees. This thing hiding in the shadow of ten Jupiters was almost thirty kilometers from side to side.
Sometime during Sarasti's executive summary we'd stopped accellerating. Down was back where it belonged. We weren't, though. Our hesitant maybe-maybe-not approach was a thing of the past: we vectored straight in now, and damn the torpedoes.
"Er, that's thirty klicks across," Sascha pointed out. "And it's invisible. Shouldn't we maybe be a little more cautious now?"
Szpindel shrugged. "We could second-guess vampires, we wouldn't need vampires, eh?"
A new facet bloomed on the feed. Frequency histograms and harmonic spectra erupted from flatline into shifting mountainscapes, a chorus of visible light.
"Modulated laser," Bates reported.
Szpindel looked up. "From that?"
Bates nodded. "Right after we blow its cover. Interesting timing."
"Scary timing," Szpindel said. "How'd it know?"
"We changed course. We're heading right for it."
The lightscape played on, knocking at the window.
"Whatever it is," Bates said, "it's talking to us."
"Well then," remarked a welcome voice. "By all means let's say hello."
Susan James was back in the driver's seat.
*
I was the only pure spectator.
They all performed what duties they could. Szpindel ran Sarasti's sketchy silhouette through a series of filters, perchance to squeeze a bit of biology from engineering. Bates compared morphometrics between the c