Charles Sheffield - Dark As Day

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DARK AS DAY

CHARLES SHEFFIELD

ATOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

DARK AS DAY

Edited by Beth Meacham

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN: 0-812-58031-1

First edition: March 2002

First mass market edition: April 2003

Printed in the United States of America

098 7 654321

BOOKS BY CHARLES SHEFFIELD

Cold as Ice

Dark as Day

The Ganymede Club

Georgia on My Mind and Other Places

Godspeed

How to Save the World (editor)

One Man's Universe

JUPITER™NOVELS

Higher Education (with Jerry Pournelle)

The Billion Dollar Boy

Putting Up Roots

The Cyborg from Earth

To KIT AND KAREN

LIST OF MAJOR CHARACTERS

(IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER)

RUSTUM BATTACHARIYA: aka Bat, aka Megachirops, the Great Bat, reclusive problem-solver

and Master of the Puzzle Network.

JACK BESTON: the Ogre, head of SETI Project Argus.

PHILIP BESTON: the Bastard, head of SETI Project Odin.

SEBASTIAN BIRCH: displaced person after the Great War, with obsessive interest in outer planet

cloud systems.

DR. VALNIA BLOOM: head of the Ganymede Department of Scientific Research.

JANEED JANNEX: displaced person after the Great War, and would-be Outer System colonist.

MAGRIT KNUDSEN: senior member of the Jovian Worlds cabinet, and former boss of Rustum

Battachariya.

CAPTAIN ERIC KONDO: captain of the Outer System Liner Achilles.

HANNAH KRAUSS: senior SETI analyst, and boss of Milly Wu.

HAROLD (HAL) LAUNIUS: a leading nanotech designer.

AGATHA LIGON: a Commensal, great-aunt to Alex Ligon and a member of Ligon Industries' board

of directors.

ALEX LIGON: predictive modeler and junior member of the Ligon family.

CORA LIGON: great-aunt to Alex Ligon and a member of Ligon Industries' board of directors.

HECTOR LIGON: cousin to Alex Ligon.

JULIANA LIGON: cousin to Alex Ligon and a Commensal.

KAROLUS LIGON: uncle to Alex Ligon, and Ligon Industries' senior "fix-it" specialist.

LENA LIGON: mother of Alex Ligon and a Commensal.

PROSPER LIGON: great-uncle to Alex Ligon and the head of Ligon Industries.

TANYA AND REZEL LIGON: cousins to Alex Ligon.

KATE LONAKER: division chief for advanced planning and predictive modeling on Ganymede, and

Alex Ligon's immediate superior and lover.

PAUL MARR: first officer of the Outer System Liner Achilles.

CHRISTA MATLOFF: director of Earth's orbiting medical facility.

CYRUS MOBARAK: the "Sun King," inventor of the Moby fusion drive, and head of Mobarak

Enterprises.

LUCY-MARIA MOBARAK: daughter of Cyrus Mobarak.

MORD: the idiosyncratic high-level Fax of the late Mordecai Perlman.

PACK RAT: senior member and Master of the Puzzle Network.

OLE PEDERSEN: the capable but paranoid head of a predictive group competing with Alex Ligon

and Kate Lonaker.

THE SEINE: the integrated quantum-entangled computer system that extends all through the solar

system.

NADEEN SELASSIE: legendary developer of a lost "dark as day" doomsday weapon, presumed

killed at the end of the Great War.

BENGT SUOMI: chief scientist for Ligon Industries.

MILLY Wu: SETI analyst, and former junior champion of the Puzzle Network.

ZETTER: security chief for Project Argus.

PROLOG

2071 A. D.

The Great War was over. It ended four months after it began, when the leaders of the Belt—crushed,

humiliated, drained, and defenseless—agreed to an unconditional surrender.

And yet the Great War did not end. It could not end. It had swept like a gigantic storm across the

face of the solar system, and like any storm it left behind its own trail of destruction, invisible eddies of

unspent energy, whirlpools of hatred, and cluttered heaps of flotsam: people, weapons, and secret

knowledge thrown together and abandoned.

Mars was not aware of the fact, but although hard-hit it had been doubly blessed. True, over half of

its people had died. But life could still continue far below the surface, and the same infernal forces that

swept clear the northern hemisphere had set in motion the melting of the permafrost. Two thousand years

later, humans would walk unaided on the surface and breathe the clear Mars air.

But that was far off, in a remote and unimaginable future. Today a gummy slick of microphages

covered the land from equator to poles, waiting for anything with a GACT sequence that invited

disassembly.

Night fell, for the seven hundred and fiftieth time since the end of the Great War. The stars came out,

bright and steady in the black sky. Phobos raced across the heavens, west to east. The purblind phages

were unaware of its presence, or of the rising of Jupiter and Saturn.

But others on Mars knew. Three hundred kilometers from the barren equator, in the dead center of a

low, flat valley, a ten-meter circle of surface released into the thin air a mist of chemicals. Any GACT or

GACU form would have died within milliseconds. The disassemblers were made of sterner stuff, but they

knew enough to recognize danger. A wave of microphages surged backward, clearing an annulus of bare

gray scree around the misted ring. Those disassembler phages unlucky enough to be caught within the

ring writhed, retreated toward the middle, and withered to a small heap of desiccated powder.

A puff of warmer air from below dispersed their dust. In the center of the ring a black dot had

appeared. The dot widened into a dark open disk, through which a fiat circular platform slowly rose. The

microphages retreated farther, recoiling from the blown spray at the platform's perimeter.

Two suited figures stood at the center of the platform. The woman was holding the hand of the little

boy, and pointing upward. He was about four years old, and showed far more interest in the writhing

circle of microphages and the bleak landscape beyond than in the starry sky.

"Do you see it?" The woman's voice was wheezing and husky, and her back was oddly twisted. She

shook the child's hand impatiently. "You're looking the wrong way. Over there. The brightest one."

The boy was tall for his age, and sturdily built. He followed her pointing arm to the place where rising

Jupiter hung above the eastern horizon. Dark eyes gleamed behind the suit's visor, but his scowl was

invisible in the dim light. "It's not big. You said it would be big."

"Jupiter is big. Huge. A lot bigger than this whole world. It only looks small because it's so far away."

"I could squash it in my fingers, it's so little. It can't hurt us."

"It did hurt us. Jupiter looks tiny, but it's really so big there are whole worlds, worlds nearly as big as

this one, that circle around it. The people who live on them started the war. They were monsters. They

killed your mother and father, and they killed your baby sister. They would have killed us, too, if we had

stayed in the Belt. They are the reason we have to hide away here."

It was an oft-told story, but the boy stared at Jupiter with greater interest. "I don't see the other

worlds at all."

"They are there, just so far away you can't see them. You've heard their names often. Ganymede, and

Europa, and old Callisto."

"And smoky smirky Io. You missed one. In the Gali-lo song there are four."

"You're right. And there really are four. But nobody lives on Io."

"Why not? Does it have lots of these?" The boy's arm waved toward the ring of microphages,

standing like the curled lip of a breaking wave just beyond the protective spray.

"No. Io has lightning and burning hot and other bad things. Nobody can live there. You wouldn't want

to go there."

"If Jupiter is so big, I'd like to live there."

"You can't do that, either. Jupiter is too big. It would crush you flat."

"I bet it wouldn't crush me. I'm strong. I'm stronger than you."

"You are." The woman tried to laugh, and it came out as a weak-lunged cough. "My dear, everyone is

stronger than I am. The people up there who started the war didn't kill me, but they certainly did their

best. I used to be strong, too."

A warning chime sounded in the suit helmets on her final words. The spray that held the phages at bay

was thinning. The woman stared around her at the barren landscape, seeing changes there invisible to the

boy.

She took his hand. "You can't stay here much longer, things are getting worse. We have to make

plans. No, not for Jupiter. Jupiter is a giant, it would crush even you. Come on. We have to go back

down."

"In a minute." He turned his head, to scan the whole sky. "Where's the other one? I can't see it."

"Because it's not so bright as Jupiter." She pointed to a star whose light had a leaden gleam compared

with its neighbors. "There you are. That's Saturn. It's big, but not so big as Jupiter."

"But I can go there?"

"You can go. There, or maybe Jupiter." She laughed again, at some secret joke. The platform was

beginning its slow descent into the dark shaft. The circle of microphages began to creep in. She painfully

straightened her rachitic spine. "Oh, yes, you can go. And one day, my dear, you will go to one or the

other. And then they'll pay, all of them, for what they've done to us."

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摘要：

>DARKASDAY CHARLESSHEFFIELD ATOMDOHERTYASSOCIATESBOOKNEWYORK Thisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookareeitherproductsoftheauthor'simaginationorareusedfictitiously. DARKASDAY Copyright©2002byCharlesSheffield Allrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbook,orport...

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