Blindsight, page 89 by Peter Watts
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to B&E an empty condo. Szpindel had named it Jack-in-the-box, after some antique child's toy that didn't even rate a listing in ConSensus; we fell in its wake, nearly ballistic now, momentum and inertia carefully precalculated to thread us through the chaotic minefield of Ben's accretion belt.
Kepler couldn't do it all, though; Theseus grumbled briefly now and then, the intermittent firing of her attitude jets rumbling softly up the spine as the Captain tweaked our descent into the Maelstrom.
No plan ever survives contact with the enemy I remembered, but 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