Read Online Rifters 4 - Blindsight by Peter Watts - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Peter Watts
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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
"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
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