Blindsight, page 99 by Peter Watts
<< Return to Title Details & Download100
em>Rorschach was holding its fire.
*
"It sounded to me like it knew what it was saying," I remarked.
"I guess that's the whole point," Bates said. She had no one to confide in, partook of no intimate dialogs that could be overheard. With her, I used the direct approach.
Theseus was birthing a litter, two by two. They were nasty-looking things, armored, squashed egg-shapes, twice the size of a human torso and studded with gardening implements: antennae, optical ports, retractable threadsaws. Weapons muzzles.
Bates was summoning her troops. We floated before the primary fab port at the base of Theseus' spine. The plant could just as easily have disgorged the grunts directly into the hold beneath the carapace--that was where they'd be stored anyway, until called upon--but Bates was giving each a visual inspection before sending it through one of the airlocks a few meters up the passageway. Ritual, perhaps. Military tradition. Certainly there was nothing she could see with her eyes that wouldn't be glaringly obvious to the most basic diagnostic.
"Would it be a problem?" I asked. "Running them without your interface?"
"Run themselves just fine. Response time actually improves without spam in the network. I'm more of a safety precaution."
Theseus growled, giving us more attitude. The plating trembled to stern; another piece of local debris, no longer in our path. We were angling towards an equatorial orbit just a few miniscule kilometers above the artefact; insanely, the approach curved right through the accretion belt.
It didn't bother the others. "Like surviving traffic in a high speed lane," Sascha had said, disdainful of my misgivings. "Try creeping across and you're road kill. Gotta speed up, go with the flow." But the flow was turbulent; we hadn't gone five minutes without a course correction since Rorschach had stopped talking to us.
"So, do you buy it?" I asked. "Pattern-matching, empty threat