Blindsight

“It’s different this time,” James insisted. “The geometry — it’s not so symmetrical. Looks almost like the Phaistos disk.” She spun slowly, pointed down the passage: “I think it’s stronger down here…”

“Bring Michelle out,” Szpindel suggested. “Maybe she can talk some sense into you.”

James laughed weakly. “Never say die, do you?” She tweaked her pistol and coasted into deeper gloom. “Yes, it’s definitely stronger here. There’s content, superimposed on—”

Quick as a blink, Rorschach cut her off.

I’d never seen anything move so fast before. There was none of the languor we’d grown accustomed to from Rorschach’s septa, no lazy drift to contraction; the iris snapped shut in an instant. Suddenly the artery just ended three meters ahead, with a matte-black membrane filigreed in fine spiral.

And the Gang of Four was on the other side.

The grunts were on it immediately, lasers crackling through the air. Bates was yelling Get behind me! Stick to the walls!, kicking herself into space like an acrobat in fast-forward, taking some tactical high ground that must have been obvious to her, at least. I edged towards the perimeter. Threads of superheated plasma sliced the air, shimmering. Szpindel, at the corner of my eye, hugged the opposite side of the tunnel. The walls crawled. I could see the lasers taking a toll; the septum peeled back from their touch like burning paper, black oily smoke writhing from its crisping edges and—

Sudden brightness, everywhere. A riot of fractured light flooded the artery, a thousand shifting angles of incidence and reflection. It was like being trapped in the belly of a kaleidoscope, pointed at the sun. Light—

—and needle-sharp pain in my side, in my left arm. The smell of charred meat. A scream, cut off.

Susan? You there, Susan?

We’re taking you first.

Around me, the light died; inside me, a swarm of floaters mixed it up with the chronic half-visions Rorschach had already planted in my head. Alarms chirped irritatingly in my helmet — breach, breach, breach — until the smart fabric of the suit softened and congealed where the holes had been. Something stung maddeningly in my left side. I felt as if I’d been branded.

“Keeton! Check Szpindel!” Bates had called off the lasers. The grunts closed for hand-to-hand, reaching with fiery nozzles and diamond-tipped claws to grapple with some prismatic material glowing softly behind that burnt-back skin.

Fibrous reflector, I realized. It had shattered the laser light, turned it to luminous shrapnel and thrown it back in our faces. Clever.

But its surface was still alight, even with the lasers down; a diffuse glow, dipping and weaving, filtered through from the far side of the barrier while the drones chewed doggedly through the near one. After a moment it struck me: James’s headlamp.

“Keeton!”

Right. Szpindel.

His faceplate was intact. The laser had melted the Faraday mesh laminated onto the crystal, but the suit was sealing that tiny hole even now. The hole behind, drilled neatly through his forehead, remained. The eyes beneath stared at infinity.

“Well?” Bates asked. She could read his vitals as easily as I, but Theseus was capable of post-mortem rebuilds.

Barring brain damage. “No.”

The whine of drills and shredders stopped; the ambience brightened. I looked away from Szpindel’s remains. The grunts had cut a hole in the septum’s fibrous underlayer. One of them nosed its way through to the other side.

A new sound rose into the mix, a soft animal keening, haunted and dissonant. For a moment I thought Rorschach was whispering to us again; its walls seemed to contract slightly around me.

“James?” Bates snapped. “James!”

Not James. A little girl in a woman’s body in an armored spacesuit, scared out of her wits.

The grunt nudged her curled-up body back into our company. Bates took it gently. “Susan? Come back, Suze. You’re safe.”

The grunts hovered restlessly, alert in every direction, pretending everything was under control. Bates spared me a glance — “Take Isaac.” — and turned back to James. “Susan?”

“N — n-no,” whimpered a small voice, a little girl’s voice.

“Michelle? Is that you?”

“There was a thing,” the little girl said. “It grabbed me. It grabbed my leg.”

“We’re out of here.” Bates pulled the Gang back along the passage. One grunt lingered, watching the hole; the other took point.

“It’s gone,” Bates said gently. “There’s nothing there now. See the feed?”

“You can’t s-see it.” Michelle whispered. “It’s in — it’s in — visible…”