Rifters 4 - Blindsight (6 page)

On the display it was—nothing. Our apparent destination was a black disk, a round absence of stars. In real life it weighed in at over ten Jupiters and measured twenty percent wider at the belly. It was directly in our path: too small to burn, too remote for the reflection of distant sunlight, too heavy for a gas giant, too light for a brown dwarf.

"When did
that
show up?" Bates squeezed her rubber ball in one hand, the knuckles whitening.

"X-ray spike appears during the '76 microwave survey." Six years before Firefall. "Never confirmed, never reacquired. Like a torsion flare from an L-class dwarf, but we should see anything big enough to generate that kind of effect and the sky's dark on that bearing. IAU calls it a statistical artefact."

Szpindel's eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillers. "What changed?"

Sarasti smiled faintly, keeping his mouth closed. "The metabase gets—
crowded
, after Firefall. Everyone
skittish
, looking for clues. After Burns-Caulfield explodes—" He clicked at the back of his throat. "Turns out the spike might arise from a subdwarf object after all, if the magnetosphere's torqued enough."

Bates: "Torqued by what?"

"Don't know."

Layers of statistical inference piled up on the table while Sarasti sketched background: even with a solid bearing and half the world's attention, the object had hidden from all but the most intensive search. A thousand telescopic snapshots had been stacked one on another and squeezed through a dozen filters before something emerged from the static, just below the three-meter band and the threshold of certainty. For the longest time it hadn't even been real: just a probabilistic ghost until
Theseus
got close enough to collapse the waveform. A quantum particle, heavy as ten Jupiters.

Earthbound cartographers were calling it
Big Ben
.
Theseus
had barely passed Saturn's orbit when it showed up in the residuals. That discovery would have been moot for anyone else; no 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 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.

Of course, you had to experience it in person. Robert Paglini knew the theory of vampires down the molecules, but even with all those technical specs in his head he never really
got
it.

He called me, before we left. I hadn't been expecting it; ever since the roster had been announced our watches had blocked calls from anyone not explicitly contact-listed. I'd forgotten that Pag had been. We hadn't spoken since Chelsea. I'd given up on ever hearing from him again.

But there he was. "Pod-man." He smiled, a tentative overture.

"It's good to see you," I said, because that's what people said in similar situations.

"Yeah, well I saw your name in the noose. You've made it big, for a baseline."

"Not so big."

"Crap. You're the vanguard of the Human Race. You're our first, last, and only hope against the unknown. Man, you
showed
them." He held his fist up and shook it, vicariously triumphant.

Showing them
had become a cornerstone of Robert Paglino's life. He'd really made it work for him, too, overcome the handicap of a natural birth with retrofits and enhancements and sheer bloody-mindedness. In a world in which Humanity had become redundant in unprecedented numbers, we'd both retained the status of another age:
working professional
.

"So you're taking orders from a vamp," he said now. "Talk about fighting fire with fire."

"I guess it's practice. Until we run up against the real thing."

He laughed. I couldn't imagine why. But I smiled back anyway.

It
was
good to see him.

"So, what are they like?" Pag asked.

"Vampires? I don't know. Just met my first one yesterday."

"And?"

"Hard to read. Didn't even seem to be aware of his surroundings sometimes, he seemed to be... off in his own little world."

"He's aware all right. Those things are so fast it's scary. You know they can hold both aspects of a Necker cube in their heads at the same time?"

The term rang a bell. I subtitled, and saw the thumbnail of a familiar wireframe box:

Now I remembered: classic ambiguous illusion. Sometimes the shaded panel seemed to be in front, sometimes behind. The perspective flipped back and forth as you watched.

"You or I, we can only see it one way or the other," Pag was saying. "Vamps see it both ways
at once
. Do you have any
idea
what kind of an edge that gives 'em?"

"Not enough of one."

"
Touché
. But hey, not their fault neutral traits get fixed in small populations."

"I don't know if I'd call the Crucifix glitch
neutral
."

"It was at first. How many intersecting right angles do you see in nature?" He waved one dismissive hand. "Anyway, that's not the point. The point is they can do something that's neurologically impossible for us Humans. They can hold
simultaneous multiple worldviews
, Pod-man. They just
see
things we have to work out step-by-step, they don't have to
think
about it. You know, there isn't a single baseline human who could just tell you, just off the top of their heads, every prime number between one and a billion? In the old days, only a few autistics could do shit like that."

"He never uses the past tense," I murmered.

"Huh? Oh, that." Pag nodded. "They never
experience
the past tense. It's just another thread to them. They don't remember stuff, they
relive
it."

"What, like a post-traumatic flashback?"

"Not so traumatic." He grimaced. "Not for
them
, at least."

"So this is obviously your current hot spot? Vampires?"

"Pod, vampires are the capital-Hot spot for
anyone
with a 'neuro' in their c.v. I'm just doing a couple of histology papers. Pattern-matching receptors, Mexican-hat arrays, reward/irrelevance filters. The eyes, basically."

"Right." I hesitated. "Those kind of throw you."

"No
shit
." Pag nodded knowingly. "That tap lucidum of theirs, that
shine
. Scary." He shook his head, impressed all over again at the recollection.