Blindsight

"Keeton!"

Right. Szpindel.

His faceplate was intact. The laser had melted the Faraday mesh laminated onto the crystal, but the suit was sealing that tiny hole even now. The hole behind, drilled neatly through his forehead, remained. The eyes beneath stared at infinity.

"Well?" Bates asked. She could read his vitals as easily as I, but Theseus was capable of post-mortem rebuilds.

Barring brain damage. "No."

The whine of drills and shredders stopped; the ambience brightened. I looked away from Szpindel's remains. The grunts had cut a hole in the septum's fibrous underlayer. One of them nosed its way through to the other side.

A new sound rose into the mix, a soft animal keening, haunted and dissonant. For a moment I thought Rorschach was whispering to us again; its walls seemed to contract slightly around me.

"James?" Bates snapped. "James!"

Not James. A little girl in a woman's body in an armored spacesuit, scared out of her wits.

The grunt nudged her curled-up body back into our company. Bates took it gently. "Susan? Come back, Suze. You're safe."

The grunts hovered restlessly, alert in every direction, pretending everything was under control. Bates spared me a glance—"Take Isaac." — and turned back to James. "Susan?"

"N—n-no," whimpered a small voice, a little girl's voice.

"Michelle? Is that you?"

"There was a thing," the little girl said. "It grabbed me. It grabbed my leg."

"We're out of here." Bates pulled the Gang back along the passage. One grunt lingered, watching the hole; the other took point.

"It's gone," Bates said gently. "There's nothing there now. See the feed?"

"You can't s-see it." Michelle whispered. "It's in—it's in—visible.."

The septum receded around a curve as we retreated. The hole torn through its center watched us like the ragged pupil of some great unblinking eye. It stayed empty as long as it stayed in sight. Nothing came out after us. Nothing we could see. A thought began cycling through my head, some half-assed eulogy stolen from an eavesdropped confessional, and try as I might I couldn't shut it down.

Isaac Szpindel hadn't made the semifinals after all.

Susan James came back to us on the way up. Isaac Szpindel did not.

We stripped wordlessly in the decon balloon. Bates, first out of her suit, reached for Szpindel but the Gang stopped her with a hand and a headshake. Personae segued one into another as they stripped the body. Susan removed helmet and backpack and breastplate. Cruncher peeled away the silvery leaded skin from collar to toe. Sascha stripped the jumpsuit and left the pale flesh naked and exposed. Except for the gloves. They left his feedback gloves in place; their fingertips forever tactile, the flesh inside forever numb. Through it all, Szpindel stared unblinking beneath the hole in his forehead. His glazed eyes focused on distant quasars.

I expected Michelle to appear in her turn and close them, but she never did.

"You have eyes, but you do not see"

— Jesus the Nazorean

I don't know how to feel about this, I thought. He was a good man. He was decent, he was kind to me, even when he didn't know I was listening in. I didn't know him long— he wasn't a friend exactly— but still. I should miss him. I should mourn.

I should feel more than this sick sinking fear that I could be next…

Sarasti hadn't wasted any time. Szpindel's replacement met us as we emerged, freshly thawed, nicotine-scented. The rehydration of his flesh was ongoing— saline bladders clung to each thigh—although it would never entirely erase the sharpness of his features. His bones cracked when he moved.

He looked past me and took the body. "Susan—Michelle…I—"

The gang turned away.

He coughed, began fumbling a body condom over the corpse. "Sarasti wants everyone in the drum."

"We're hot," Bates said. Even cut short, the excursion had piled up a lethal Seivert count. Faint nausea tickled the back of my throat.

"Decontaminate later." One long pull of a zipper and Szpindel was gone, engulfed in an oily gray shroud. "You—" he turned in my direction, pointed at the scorched holes in my jumpsuit. "With me."

Robert Cu

He held no cigarette now. He held only the shrouded body of his hard-luck primary and his ongoing, freshly thawed distaste for the ship's synthesist. His fingers trembled.

Bates and the Gang moved silently up the spine. Cu

At the hatch we broke into single-file: Szpindel first, Cu

His eyes were naked. From this angle the soft, full-spectrum light of the drum washed the shine from them. If you didn't look too closely, for too long, you might almost think those eyes were Human.

BioMed had been spun down for my arrival. Cu

I tapped ConSensus to hear them. James was speaking, quietly and without expression. "I noticed a new pattern in the form-constants. Something in the grating. It looked like a signal. It got stronger as I went down the tu

A hundred degrees away in the no-gee zone, Cu

"Sascha," Sarasti said.

"Yeah." Sascha's trademark drawl infected the voice. "I was riding Mom. Went deaf dumb and stark fucking blind when she passed out. I tried to take over but something was blocking me. Michelle, I guess. Never thought she had it in her. I couldn't even see."

"But you don't lose consciousness."

"I was awake the whole time, far as I know. Just completely in the dark."

"Smell? Tactile?"

"I could feel it when Michelle pissed in the suit. But I didn't notice anything else."

Cu

"Nothing touches you," the vampire surmised. "Nothing grabs your leg."

"No," Sascha said. She didn't believe Michelle's stories about invisible monsters. None of us did; why bother, when dementia could so easily explain anything we experienced?

"Cruncher."

"Don't know anything," I still wasn't used to the maleness of the voice now emanating from James's throat. Cruncher was a workaholic. He hardly ever surfaced in mixed company.