Rifters 4 - Blindsight by Peter Watts Read Free Book Online Page A

other ship caught en route could have packed enough fuel for anything but the long dejected loop back home. But Theseus ' thin, infinitely attenuate fuel line reached all the way back to the sun; she could turn on the proverbial dime. We'd changed course in our sleep and the Icarus stream tracked our moves like a cat after prey, feeding us at lightspeed.
    And here we were.
    "Talk about long shots," Szpindel grumbled.
    Across the table, Bates flicked her wrist. Her ball sailed over my head; I heard it bounce off the deck ( not the deck , something in me amended: handrail ). "We're assuming the comet was a deliberate decoy, then."
    Sarasti nodded. The ball riccocheted back into my line of sight high overhead and disappeared briefly behind the spinal bundle, looping through some eccentric, counterintuitive parabola in the drum's feeble grav.
    "So they want to be left alone."
    Sarasti steepled his fingers and turned his face in her direction. "That your recommendation?"
    She wished it was. "No, sir. I'm just saying that Burns-Caulfield took a lot of resources and effort to set up. Whoever built it obviously values their anonymity and has the technology to protect it."
    The ball bounced one last time and wobbled back towards the Commons. Bates half-hopped from her seat (she floated briefly), barely catching it on its way past. There remained a new-born-animal awkwardness to her movements, half Coriolis, half residual rigor. Still: a big improvement in four hours. The rest of the Humans were barely past the walking stage.
    "Maybe it wasn't much trouble for them at all, eh?" Szpindel was musing. "Maybe it was dead easy."
    "In which case they might or might not be as xenophobic, but they're even more advanced. We don't want to rush into this."
    Sarasti turned back to the simmering graphics. "So?"
    Bates kneaded the recovered ball with her fingertips. "The second mouse gets the cheese. We may have blown our top-of-the-line recon in the Kuiper, but we don't have to go in blind. Send in our own drones along separate vectors. Hold off on a close approach until we at least know whether we're dealing with friendlies or hostiles."
    James shook her head. "If they were hostile, they could have packed the Fireflies with antimatter. Or sent one big object instead of sixty thousand little ones, let the impact take us out."
    "The Fireflies only imply an initial curiosity," Bates said. "Who knows if they liked what they saw?"
    "What if this whole diversion theory's just so much shit?"
    I turned, briefly startled. James's mouth had made the words; Sascha had spoken them.
    "You wanna stay hidden, you don't light up the sky with fucking fireworks ," she continued. "You don't need a diversion if nobody's looking for you, and nobody's looking for you if you lie low. If they were so curious , they could've just snuck in a spycam."
    "Risks detection," the vampire said mildly.
    "Hate to break it, Jukka, but the Fireflies didn't exactly slip under the rad—"
    Sarasti opened his mouth, closed it again. Filed teeth, briefly visible, clicked audibly behind his face. Tabletop graphics reflected off his visor, a band of writhing polychrome distortions where eyes should be.
    Sascha shut up.
    Sarasti continued. "They trade stealth for speed. By the time you react, they already have what they want." He spoke quietly, patiently, a well-fed predator explaining the rules of the game to prey that really should know better: the longer it takes me to track you down, the more hope you have of escaping .
    But Sascha had already fled. Her surfaces had scattered like a flock of panicked starlings, and the next time Susan James' mouth opened, it was Susan James who spoke through it. "Sascha's aware of the current paradigm, Jukka. She's simply worried that it might be wrong."
    "Got another we could trade it on?" Szpindel wondered. "More options? Longer warranty?"
    "I don't know." James sighed. "I guess not. It's just— odd , that they'd want to actively mislead us. I'd hoped