Blindsight

“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 they were merely — well.” She spread her hands. “Probably no big deal. I’m sure they’ll still be willing to talk, if we handle the introductions right. We just need to be a little more cautious, perhaps…”

Sarasti unfolded himself from his chair and loomed over us. “We go in. What we know weighs against further delay.”

Bates frowned and pitched her ball back into orbit. “Sir, all we actually know is that an Oasa emitter’s in our path. We don’t even know if there’s anyone there.”

“There is,” Sarasti said. “They expect us.”

Nobody spoke for a few seconds. Someone’s joints cracked in the silence.

“Er…” Szpindel began.

Without looking, Sarasti flicked out his arm and snatched Bates’ returning ball from the air. “Ladar pings Theseus four hours forty-eight minutes ago. We respond with an identical signal. Nothing. Probe launches half-hour before we wake up. We don’t go in blind, but we don’t wait. They see us already. Longer we wait, greater risk of countermeasures.”

I looked at the dark featureless placeholder on the table: bigger than Jupiter and we couldn’t even see it yet. Something in the shadow of that mass had just reached out with casual, unimaginable precision and tapped us on the nose with a laser beam.

This was not going to be an even match.

Szpindel spoke for all of us: “You knew that all along? You’re telling us now?”

This time Sarasti’s smile was wide and toothy. It was as though a gash had opened in the lower half of his face.

Maybe it was a predator thing. He just couldn’t help playing with his food.

* * *

It wasn’t so much the way they looked. The elongate limbs, the pale skin, the canines and the extended mandible — noticeable, yes, even alien, but not disturbing, not frightening. Not even the eyes, really. The eyes of dogs and cats shine in the darkness; we don’t shiver at the sight.

Not the way they looked. The way they moved.

Something in the reflexes, maybe. The way they held their limbs: like mantis limbs, long jointed things you just knew could reach out and snatch you from right across the room, any time they felt like it. When Sarasti looked at me — really looked, naked-eyed, unfiltered by the visor — a half-million years just melted away. The fact that he was extinct meant nothing. The fact that we’d come so far, grown strong enough to resurrect our own nightmares to serve us…meant nothing. The genes aren’t fooled. They know what to fear.