Blindsight

An emergency handpad, geckoed to the expanding bulkhead, slid past to one side. Sarasti grabbed it and tapped commands. Bates' feed appeared on the bulkhead: a tiny chunk of Big Ben, an EM-enhanced equatorial quadrant only a few thousand klicks on a side. The clouds boiled down there, a cyclonic knot of turbulence swirling almost too fast for realtime. The overlay described charged particles, bound in a deep Parker spiral. It spoke of great mass, rising.

Sarasti clicked.

"DTI?" Bates said.

"Optical only." Sarasti took my arm and dragged me effortlessly astern. The display paced us along the bulkhead: seven skimmers shot from the clouds as I watched, a ragged circle of scramjets screaming red-hot into space. ConSensus plotted their paths in an instant; luminous arcs rose around our ship like the bars of a cage.

Theseus shuddered.

We've been hit, I thought. Suddenly the spine's plodding expansion cranked into overdrive; the pleated wall lurched and accelerated, streaming past my outstretched fingers as the closed hatch receded up ahead—

— receded overhead.

The walls weren't moving at all. We were falling, to the sudden strident bleating of an alarm.

Something nearly yanked my arm from its socket: Sarasti had reached out with one hand and caught a rung, reached with his other and caught me before we'd both been flattened against the Fab plant. We dangled. I must have weighed two hundred kilograms; the floor shuddered ten meters below my feet. The ship groaned around us. The spine filled with the screech of torquing metal. Bates' grunts clung to its walls with clawed feet.

I reached for the ladder. The ladder pulled away: the ship was bending in the middle and down had started to climb the walls. Sarasti and I swung towards the center of the spine like a daisy-chain pendulum.

"Bates! James!" The vampire roared. His grip on my wrist trembled, slipping. I strained for the ladder, swung, caught it.

"Susan James has barricaded herself in the bridge and shut down autonomic overrides." An unfamiliar voice, flat and affectless. "She has initiated an unauthorized burn. I have begun a controlled reactor shutdown; be advised that the main drive will be offline for at least twenty-seven minutes."

The ship, I realized, its voice raised calmly above the alarm. The Captain itself. On Public Address.

That was unusual.

"Bridge!" Sarasti barked. "Open channel!"

Someone was shouting up there. There were words, but I couldn't make them out.

Without warning, Sarasti let go.

He dropped obliquely in a blur. Aft and opposite, the bulkhead waited to swat him like an insect. In half a second both his legs would be shattered, if the impact didn't kill him outright—

But suddenly we were weightless again, and Jukka Sarasti—purple-faced, stiff-limbed— was foaming at the mouth.

"Reactor offline," the Captain reported. Sarasti bounced off the wall.

He's having a seizure, I realized.

I released the ladder and pushed astern. Theseus swung lopsidedly around me. Sarasti convulsed in mid-air; clicks and hisses and choking sounds stuttered from his mouth. His eyes were so wide they seemed lidless. His pupils were mirror-red pinpoints. The flesh twitched across his face as though trying to crawl off.

Ahead and behind, battlebots held their position and ignored us.

"Bates!" I yelled up the spine. "We need help!"

Angles, everywhere. Seams on the shield plates. Sharp shadows and protrusions on the surface of every drone. A two-by-three matrix of insets, bordered in black, floating over the main ConSensus display: two big interlinked crosses right in front of where Sarasti had been hanging.

This can't be happening. He just took his antiEuclideans. I saw him. Unless…

Someone had spiked Sarasti's drugs.

"Bates!" She should be linked into the grunts, they should have leapt forward at the first sign of trouble. They should be dragging my commander to the infirmary by now. They waited stolid and immobile. I stared at the nearest: "Bates, you there?" And then—in case she wasn't—I spoke to the grunt directly. "Are you autonomous? Do you take verbal orders?"

On all sides the robots watched; the Captain just laughed at me, its voice posing as an alarm.

Infirmary.

I pushed. Sarasti's arms flailed randomly against my head and shoulders. He tumbled forward and sideways, hit the moving ConSensus display dead center, bounced away up the spine. I kicked off in his wake—

— and glimpsed something from the corner of my eye—

— and turned—

— And dead center of ConSensus, Rorschach erupted from Ben's seething face like a breaching whale. It wasn't just the EM-enhance: the thing was glowing, deep angry red. Enraged, it hurled itself into space, big as a mountain range.

Fuck fuck fuck.