Rifters 4 - Blindsight (8 page)

The probe arced down and in, drew close enough for false-color enhance. Ben's surface brightened to a seething parfait of high-contrast bands against a diamond-hard starscape. Something twinkled there, faint sparkles on endless overcast.

"Lightning?" James wondered.

Szpindel shook his head. "Meteorites. Must be a lot of rock in the neighborhood."

"Wrong color," Sarasti said. He was not physically among us—he was back in his tent, hardlined into the Captain—but ConSensus put him anywhere on board he wanted to be.

Morphometrics scrolled across my inlays: mass, diameter, mean density. Ben's day lasted seven hours twelve minutes. Diffuse but massive accretion belt circling the equator, more torus than ring, extending almost a half-million kilometers from the cloud-tops: the pulverized corpses of moons perhaps, ground down to leftovers.

"Meteorites." Szpindel grinned. "Told ya."

He seemed to be right; increasing proximity smeared many of those pinpoint sparkles into bright ephemeral hyphens, scratching the atmosphere. Closer to the poles, cloud bands flickered with dim, intermittent flashes of electricity.

Weak radio emission peaks at 31 and 400m. Outer atmosphere heavy with methane and ammonia; lithium, water, carbon monoxide in abundance. Ammonia hydrogen sulfide, alkali halide mixing locally in those torn swirling clouds. Neutral alkalis in the upper layers. By now even
Theseus
could pick those things out from a distance, but our scout was close enough to see filigree. It no longer saw a disk. It gazed down at a dark convex wall in seething layers of red and brown, saw faint stains of anthracene and pyrene.

One of a myriad meteorite contrails scorched Ben's face directly ahead; for a moment I thought I could even see the tiny dark speck at its core, but sudden static scratched the feed. Bates cursed softly. The image blurred, then steadied as the probe pitched its voice higher up the spectrum. Unable to make itself heard above the longwave din, now it spoke down a laser.

And still it stuttered. Keeping it aligned across a million fluctuating kilometers should have posed no problem at all; our respective trajectories were known parabolas, our relative positions infinitely predictable at any time
t
. But the meteorite's contrail jumped and skittered on the feed, as if the beam were being repeatedly, infinitesimally knocked out of alignment. Incandescent gas blurred its details; I doubted that even a rock-steady image would have offered any sharp edges for a human eye to hold on to. Still. There was something
wrong
about it somehow, something about the tiny black dot at the core of that fading brightness. Something that some primitive part of my mind refused to accept as
natural
—

The image lurched again, and flashed to black, and didn't return.

"Probe's fried," Bates reported. "Spike there at the end. Like it hit a Parker Spiral, but with a
really
tight wind."

I didn't need to call up subtitles. It was obvious in the set of her face, the sudden creases between her eyebrows: she was talking about a magnetic field.

"It's—" she began, and stopped as a number popped up in ConSensus:
11.2 Tesla
.

"
Holy shit
," Szpindel whispered. "Is that right?"

Sarasti clicked from the back of his throat and the back of the ship. A moment later he served up an instant replay, those last few seconds of telemetry zoomed and smoothed and contrast-enhanced from visible light down to deep infrared. There was that same dark shard cauled in flame, there was the contrail burning in its wake. Now it dimmed as the object skipped off the denser atmosphere beneath and regained altitude. Within moments the heat trace had faded entirely. The thing that had burned at its center rose back into space, a fading ember. A great conic scoop at its front end gaped like a mouth. Stubby fins disfigured an ovoid abdomen.

Ben lurched and went out all over again.

"Meteorites," Bates said dryly.

The thing had left me with no sense of scale. It could have been an insect or an asteroid. "How big?" I whispered, a split-second before the answer appeared on my inlays:

Four hundred meters along the major axis.

Ben was safely distant in our sights once more, a dark dim disk centered in
Theseus
's forward viewfinder. But I remembered the close-up: a twinkling orb of black-hearted fires; a face gashed and pockmarked, endlessly wounded, endlessly healing.

There'd been
thousands
of the things.

Theseus
shivered along her length. It was just a pulse of decelerating thrust; but for that one moment, I imagined I knew how she felt.

*

We headed in and hedged our bets.

Theseus
weaned herself with a ninety-eight-second burn, edged us into some vast arc that might, with a little effort, turn into an orbit—or into a quick discreet flyby if the neighborhood turned out to be a little too rough. The Icarus stream fell invisibly to port, its unswerving energy lost to space-time. Our city-sized, molecule-thick parasol wound down and packed itself away until the next time the ship got thirsty. Antimatter stockpiles began dropping immediately; this time we were alive to watch it happen. The dip was infinitesimal, but there was something disquieting about the sudden appearance of that minus sign on the display.

We could have retained the apron strings, left a buoy behind in the telematter stream to bounce energy down the well after us. Susan James wondered why we hadn't.

"Too risky," Sarasti said, without elaboration.

Szpindel leaned in James' direction. "Why give 'em something
else
to shoot at, eh?"

We sent more probes ahead, though, spat them out hard and fast and too fuel-constrained for anything but flyby and self-destruct. They couldn't take their eyes off the machines swinging around Big Ben.
Theseus
stared her own unblinking stare, more distant though more acute. But if those high divers even knew we were out there, they ignored us completely. We tracked them across the closing distance, watched them swoop and loop though a million parabolas at a million angles. We never saw them collide—not with each other, not with the cauldron of rock tumbling around Ben's equator. Every perigee dipped briefly into atmosphere; there they burned, and slowed, and accelerated back into space, their anterior scoops glowing with residual heat.

Bates grabbed a ConSensus image, drew highlights and a conclusion around the front end: "Scramjet."

We tracked nearly four hundred thousand in less than two days. That appeared to be most of them; new sightings leveled off afterwards, the cumulative curve flattening towards some theoretical asymptote. Most of the orbits were close and fast, but Sarasti projected a frequency distribution extending almost back to Pluto. We might stay out here for years, and still catch the occasional new shovelnose returning from its extended foray into the void.

"The faster ones are pulling over fifty gees on the hairpin turn," Szpindel pointed out. "Meat couldn't handle that. I say they're unmanned."

"Meat's reinforceable," Sarasti said.

"If it's got
that
much scaffolding you might as well stop splitting hairs and call it a machine anyway."

Surface morphometrics were absolutely uniform. Four hundred thousand divers, every one identical. If there was an alpha male calling the shots among the herd, it couldn't be distinguished on sight.

One night—as such things were measured on board— I followed a soft squeal of tortured electronics up to the observation blister. Szpindel floated there, watching the skimmers. He'd closed the clamshells, blocked off the stars and built a little analytical nest in their place. Graphs and windows spilled across the inside of the dome as though the virtual space in Szpindel's head was insufficient to contain them. Tactical graphics lit him from all sides, turned his body into a bright patchwork of flickering tattoos.

The Illustrated Man. "Mind if I come in?" I asked.

He grunted:
Yeah, but not enough to push it
.

Inside the dome, the sound of heavy rainfall hissed and spat behind the screeching that had led me here. "What
is
that?"

"Ben's magnetosphere." He didn't look back. "Nice, eh?"

Synthesists don't have opinions on the job; it keeps observer effects to a minimum. This time I permitted myself a small breach. "The static's nice. I could do without the screeching."

"Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's
beautiful
. Like old jazz."

"I never got the hang of that either."

He shrugged and squelched the upper register, left the rain pattering around us. His jiggling eyes fixed on some arcane graphic. "Want a scoop for your notes?"

"Sure."

"There you go." Light reflected off his feedback glove, iridescing like the wing of a dragonfly as he pointed: an absorption spectrum, a looped time-series. Bright peaks surged and subsided, surged and subsided across a fifteen-second timeframe.

Subtitles only gave me wavelengths and Angstroms. "What is it?"

"Diver farts. Those bastards are dumping complex organics into the atmosphere."

"How complex?"

"Hard to tell, so far. Faint traces, and they dissipate like
that
. But sugars and aminos at least. Maybe proteins. Maybe more."

"Maybe life? Microbes?" An alien terraforming project...

"Depends on how you define
life
, eh?" Szpindel said. "Not even
Deinococcus
would last long down there. But it's a big atmosphere. They better not be in any hurry if they're reworking the whole thing by direct inoculation."

If they were, the job would go a lot faster with self-replicating inoculates. "Sounds like life to me."

"Sounds like agricultural aerosols, is what it sounds like. Those fuckers are turning the whole damn gas ball into a rice paddy bigger than Jupiter." He gave me a scary grin. "Something's got a
beeeg
appetite, hmm? You gotta wonder if we aren't gonna be a teeny bit outnumbered."

*

Szpindel's findings were front and center at our next get-together.

The vampire summed it up for us, visual aids dancing on the table: "Von Neumann self-replicating r-selector. Seed washes up and sprouts skimmers, skimmers harvest raw materials from the accretion belt. Some perturbations in those orbits; belt's still unsettled."

"Haven't seen any of the herd giving birth," Szpindel remarked. "Any sign of a factory?"

Sarasti shook his head. "Discarded, maybe. Decompiled. Or the herd stops breeding at optimal N."

"These are only the bulldozers," Bates pointed out. "There'll be tenants."

"A
lot
of 'em, eh?" Szpindel added. "Outnumber us by orders of mag."

James: "But they might not show up for centuries."

Sarasti clicked. "Do these skimmers build Fireflies? Burns-Caulfield?"

It was a rhetorical question. Szpindel answered anyway: "Don't see how."

"Something else does, then. Something already local."

Nobody spoke for a moment. James' topology shifted and shuffled in the silence; when she opened her mouth again, someone indefinably
younger
was on top.

"Their habitat isn't anything like ours, if they're building a home way out here. That's hopeful."

Michelle. The synesthete.

"Proteins." Sarasti's eyes were unreadable behind the visor.
Comparable biochemistries. They might eat us
.

"Whoever these beings are, they don't even live in
sunlight
. No territorial overlap, no resource overlap, no basis for conflict. There's no reason we shouldn't get along just fine."

"On the other hand," Szpindel said, "Technology implies belligerence."

Michelle snorted softly. "According to a coterie of theoretical historians who've never actually met an alien, yes. Maybe now we get to prove them wrong." And in the next instant she was just
gone
, her affect scattered like leaves in a dust-devil, and Susan James was back in her place saying:

"Why don't we just
ask
them?"

"Ask?" Bates said.

"There are four hundred thousand machines out there. How do we know they can't talk?"

"We'd have heard.," Szpindel said. "They're drones."

"Can't hurt to ping them, just to make sure."

"There's no reason they should talk even if they
are
smart. Language and intelligence aren't all that strongly correlated even on Ear—"

James rolled her eyes. "Why not
try
, at least? It's what we're here for. It's what
I'm
here for. Just
send a bloody signal
."

After a moment Bates picked up the ball. "Bad game theory, Suze."

"Game theory." She made it sound like a curse.

"Tit-for-tat's the best strategy. They pinged us, we pinged back. Ball's in their court now; we send another signal, we may give away too much."

"I know the rules, Amanda. They say if the other party never takes the initiative again, we ignore each other for the rest of the mission because game theory says you don't want to look
needy
."

"The rule only applies when you're going up against an unknown player, " the Major explained. "We'll have more options the more we learn."

James sighed. "It's just—you all seem to be going into this
assuming
they'll be hostile. As if a simple hailing signal is going to bring them down on us."

Bates shrugged. "It only makes sense to be cautious. I may be a jarhead but I'm not eager to piss off
anything
that hops between stars and terraforms superJovians for a living. I don't have to remind anyone here that
Theseus
is no warship."

She'd said
anyone
; she'd meant
Sarasti
. And Sarasti, focused on his own horizon, didn't answer. Not out loud, at least; but his surfaces spoke in a different tongue entirely.