Charles Sheffield - Cold as Ice 03 - Dark as Day

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

thereof, in any form.

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."

1

GANYMEDE, YEAR

2O97, SEINE-DAY

MINUS ONE

It was hard to say which was worse: waiting for Seine-Day to arrive, or

enduring the torrent of hype that preceded the event.

Alex Ligon stared at the output that filled the two-meter display volume of

his Ganymede office. In that display the solar system was evolving before his

eyes. The year showed as 2098, ticking along a steady daily tally of status:

population, economic activity, material and energy production and use, and

transportation and information flow between worlds. Any statistic was

available for the asking. And every statistic, he knew from past experience,

was likely to be wrong. For anything beyond a week, the predictions steadily

diverged from reality.

It was not the fault of his models, he felt sure of that. It was simply that

he was forced to run them with too-high levels of aggregation. Otherwise, a

one-day prediction would be slower than real-time and take more than a day to

run.

The Seine, once it came into operation, would cure that completely. He would

be able to model each individual human unit, all five billion of them,

together with data bank details from everywhere in the System. He would also,

if the Seine's performances matched the promises made for it, be able to run

at a million times real-time. He could sit back and watch his models blur

through a century of solar system development in an hour.

"When I dipped into the future, far as human eye can see." Or well beyond,

with a little help from the right computer. More than that, with the Seine's

quantum parallelism you could vary any parameter and observe the effect of

changes.

If the Seine's performance matched the promises.

Alex glanced at the bottom left-hand corner of the display, where media

inputs were displayed. He had the sound level damped way down, but the picture

was enough to tell him what was going on. It was another puff piece about the

Seine, set against a background of a high-level entangling unit. A smiling

woman with an unnatural number of teeth was doing the talking; a portly older

man beside her was nodding confidently; and a thin woman with worry lines

marking her forehead stood in the background--probably one of the engineers,

poor bastard, who actually had to deliver the Seine's entangling and

instantaneous data transfer across the whole System.

Alex turned his attention back to the main display. It was chugging along

toward the end of 2099, almost two years from now, and the model showed a

million tons of materials were being shipped daily between Ganymede and Rhea,

Saturn's second largest moon. And if you believed that figure you would

believe anything. Present shipping was less than a hundred tons a day. The

model was diverging again. Higher resolution was a must if the results were to

mean anything.

Alex swore and glanced back to the media corner. They were handling the

return of the Seine as the event of the century, bigger even than the war that

had disrupted and dispersed the original Seine. Maybe they were right. The

original pre-war version of the Seine had linked the System, but it was

primitive compared with its quantum logic successor. And Alex needed every bit

of computing power he could lay his hands on.

The media corner switched without warning from a shot of the worried

computer engineer. Kate Lonaker's face appeared, and the sound level changed.

"Sorry to pull an override on you." She grimaced out at Alex. "But Mrs. Ligon

is on the line."

"Shit. Will you tell her that I'm not--"

"No, I won't. She knows that you're here."

"Tell her I'm working."

"You're always working. Come on, sweetheart, you can't refuse to talk to

your dear old mother."

"But I'm right in the middle of running the model--"

"Right. And from the look on your face it's going nowhere, so you can afford

to take a break. Here she comes. Be nice to her."

Kate vanished. In her place appeared a woman whose vitality and beauty

seemed to burst out of the display. She smiled at Alex. "There you are."

"Hello, Mother."

"The young woman who put me through to you seems like a sweet little thing.

Is she your assistant?"

"No, Mother." Alex checked that they were on Record. He wanted to watch

Kate's expression when she learned that she was a sweet little thing. She

would hate it. "Ms. Lonaker is my boss."

"Boss?" Lena Ligon's perfect face took on a startled look.

"Boss. I report to her."

"But that's ridiculous. No one in our family needs to report to anybody. Who

is she?"

"She's division chief for Advanced Planning in the Outer System. She works

for the government. Like me."

"Doing what?"

"The same as the last time you asked me. I build predictive models for the

whole solar system--Inner and Outer." Alex glanced at the big display, where

the simulation was still rolling along. Estimated shipping tonnages for 2101

had exceeded fixed-point range and were being reported as floatingpoint, with

ridiculously large exponents. "Not very good models, I'm afraid."

"If that's what interests you, you could do it just as well by yourself

without reporting to anybody. We're not exactly paupers."

"I know."

"And you wouldn't have to work in a place like that." The single word

covered all of Alex's spartan office, where the display volume left space for

only a single chair and a small desk. The walls were neutral pale yellow, with

no pictures or decorations.

"I know. Let me think about it. Maybe we can discuss this after the family

meeting." Alex knew he was committing to something else he didn't want to do,

but it was the easiest way to avoid an argument he couldn't win.

"That's why I called, Alex, to make sure you will be there. And don't forget

about the other thing. I can make arrangements whenever you are ready."

"I won't forget." Alex studied his mother's image, seeking the invisible.

"I've been considering it."

"Good. We'll talk about that, too. Tomorrow, then. At four."

"Yes, Mother."

Lena Ligon nodded. "Try not to be late, as you usually are." To Alex's

relief she vanished from the display. He glanced at the main simulation, where

half the variables now showed overflow. Gibberish. He touched the pad to

terminate the run, at the same time as he heard the door behind him slide

open.

It was Kate, he knew without looking. He could smell her perfume, which

always made him think of oranges and lemons.

"Got a minute?" she said.

"The model run--"

"Is garbage." She took his arm. "I've been keeping an eye on it. Come on,

sweetie, let's go to my office."

"I should change parameters and do another case."

"It can wait. Me, I think we could easily take the rest of the day off."

Kate was leading the way along a narrow, dingy corridor. "If the Seine

performs as advertised, tomorrow everything changes."

"The run results can't be any better than the models. The Seine won't change

them."

"Runs also can't be better than their inputs. The Seine will draw from every

data bank in the System, no matter where it is. At the moment we're starved

for Belt data. Suppose that's the missing ingredient?"

They had reached Kate's office. It was twice the size of Alex's, and as

cluttered as his was empty. In pride of place on one wall, where Kate would

see it whenever she looked up from her work, was a hand-embroidered cloth.

Within an elaborate floral border were the words, "Prediction is difficult,

especially of the future."

Alex slumped into the chair opposite Kate, accepted a tumbler of her

made-to-order carbonated drink, and said abruptly, "What do you want to talk

about?"

"You. How are you feeling?"

"I'm fine."

"Lie Number One. Every time you meet your mother or anybody in your

immediate family, you can't think straight for hours. No, make that days."

"So why did you insist that I talk with her?"

"Suppose I'd put her off until later. Would you have been able to work, or

would you have worried all the time until she did reach you?"

When Alex said nothing, Kate went on, "You know, your mother just offered

you what most people who work here would die for."

"You tapped in to a private conversation!"

"I might have. Most of it I knew already. Anyway, you were talking in

working hours, so I could claim the right. But don't let's get sidetracked.

Me, I need to earn a living. I have to work, and I have to put up with

bureaucratic bullshit. I even generate some myself, though I try to keep it

down. But you don't. You could walk out tomorrow. You'd have the freedom to

work on what you want, when you want, where you want. There'd be nobody like

me to pester you for reports."

"You don't understand."

"Probably not. But I really want to. I'm a relatively recent arrival, but

you've been here for over three years. Why do you stay?"

"You have the reason sitting right there on your wall." He pointed to the

hand-embroidered sign. "I agree with Niels Bohr, prediction is difficult. What

will happen in the next ten years, or the next fifty? We don't know. I just

happen to think that it's the most important question in the solar system."

"I'm with you. And maybe the hardest."

Kate said nothing more, but sat waiting patiently until Alex at last took a

huge gulp from the tumbler, swallowed hard, and burst out, "The models in use

when I came here were useless. They couldn't even predict the past. They'd

been run over and over for the years leading up to the Great War, and they

never saw it coming until the Armageddon Defense Line was gone and Oberth City

was destroyed, and by then it was too late."

"What about your models?"

"You saw today's run. You said the right word: garbage."

"But isn't that a problem of inputs, and of computer limitations? You

designed the models to run with more than ten billion Faxes. That should be

enough to include a simulation of every individual in the System, even if you

let the prediction run for a whole century. You've always been forced to

aggregate to a million or less. What do you think of the models themselves?"

"They're pretty good."

"I think I ought to call that Lie Number Two. I'm not able to judge what

you're doing, but before I took this job I talked to people whose judgment I

respect. I also love modest men, but tell me true. Don't you have an entirely

new theoretical basis for predictive modeling?"

"I believe I do." Alex could feel the knot inside him starting to dissolve.

Was it something in the drink, or something in Kate Lonaker? "At least, no one

seems to have run across it before."

"That's what I've heard. Look, you must know by now that I'm not much of a

techie. I've looked at your papers, and didn't get diddly-squat out of them.

Can you describe what your models do in words of one syllable, so I'll

understand?"

"I don't think so. Not unless you have a few hours to spare."

"I don't. But your models did predict the Great War?"

"Sort of. When I ran from 2030 on, they reached a singularity in 2067. That

was the correct year, but of course you can't compute past a singularity of

the time line. So there was no way of knowing the war's outcome."

"You predicted a cataclysm. That's good enough for me. Let's go on. I asked

you to tell me true, now it's my turn to do the same. My worry list has three

items at the top of it. First, I'm worried that you'll take your mother's

offer, leave, and set up your own research shop."

"Not a chance."

"Why not--and don't tell me it's because your mother makes you nervous."

"She does, but that's got nothing to do with it." Alex paused. "You said you

love modest men. This is going to sound anything but."

"I didn't say I didn't like immodest men. I've certainly met enough of them.

Go on."

"All right. My models may be producing garbage, but every other long-range

predictive model that I've ever seen, here or elsewhere, is garbage. My models

have the potential to get it right. You say you don't understand what I do,

but in a way you don't have to. Because if you approve my results, they go up

the line, and with any luck they'll keep on going up to the point where the

results lead to action."

"I hope so. Otherwise there's no point in either of us working here."

"Now suppose that I go off and do what my mother suggests. I'd have plenty

of research funds--Ligon Industries is huge, and it's all in the family. Vast

available assets."

"Richer than God, if you believe the media."

"So I run my models, and suppose they produce surprising results. I come

here, and say, look what I've discovered. What happens next?"

"We'd have to verify them before we could act." Kate nodded. "Go on. I think

I see where you're leading."

"You'd verify them. Of course. And verify with what? The other models you

have floating around here, that I know are crap? No agreement, we can pretty

much guarantee that. And it would be NIH for me--Not Invented Here. I could

come in showing that the Sun would go supernova, and I wouldn't be heard. I'm

working on the most important question in the solar system, but what's the

point if I'm not taken seriously? And for that, I must be an insider. Does

that take care of your first worry? I'm not going to leave, unless somebody

higher up comes along and throws me out."

"Which conveniently leads me to my second worry. You told me that you can't

easily describe your models in a way that I can understand."

"It would take hours."

"I believe you. But I can't accept that answer. Because I have faith in you

and your models, and I assume that soon-- maybe starting tomorrow--they will

start producing meaningful predictions, results that we really believe. So I

take them up the line to Mischa Glaub. And the first thing I'm asked to do is

explain what's going on in a way that he can understand--and he has a lot less

time to spend on this than I do. Then he has to brief his boss, Tomas De

Mises. And he has to explain to anyone on the Council who shows interest."

"You make it sound impossible."

"If you talk about 'iterated multiple convolution kernels,' which is a

snappy phrase I remember from your last paper, it is impossible. I want you do

to something for me, and put it as high on your priority list as anything in

your models. I want you to find a way to explain the models in a way that

someone with no special training will understand."

"How can I do that?"

"Your problem. Use analogies, use pictures, use metaphors, I don't mind if

you have to try poetry and dancing. But we really need this--or all your work

will be ignored, just as surely as if it came from outside the organization."

Alex stared at her. He was feeling like a fool. She was right, and so

obviously right that he should have thought of it for himself. "I'll do my

best. But how will I know when I have what you want?"

"We use the Napoleonic principle." At Alex's raised eye-brows,-she went on,

"You'll brief Macanelly, from Pedersen's group. Do you know him?"

"No. But I've heard about him."

"Heard what about him?"

"That nobody likes to work with him. That he's conceited, and also that he's

close to being a moron."

"That's what I've heard, too. He'll be perfect. Napoleon used to have a

special officer, a very dim one, who read all outgoing dispatches. Unless a

dispatch was clear even to that man, it didn't go out. Loring Macanelly will

be our dispatch reader. When we have an explanation of what you're doing that

he can understand and repeat back to me, we'll be happy. Won't we? You don't

look happy."

"Kate, I want to work on theory, and I want to develop analytic models. I

consider what we are doing supremely important. But I hate this other sort of

stuff, simplifying work to the point where it's more misleading than

informative, and then feeding it to half-wits."

"You know what they say: God must be specially fond of half-wits, because he

made so many of them. Will you do it?"

"I told you, I'll do my best."

"When you get something halfway ready, I'll be your first half-wit." Kate

leaned back in her seat. "All right. That takes care of worries one and two.

I'm not sure I have any right to ask you about worry three."

"But you're going to." Alex had been vaguely upset when Kate Lonaker was

appointed as his boss. She was two years younger than he, and before the end

of their first brief meeting he knew she had little technical talent. Now, bit

by bit, he was realizing what she had instead. More nerve than he would ever

possess, and an inexplicable charm that took the edge off whatever she said.

And one other talent. How could a person do that, make you feel that they

liked you and found you fascinating, without saying a single word? She was

sitting there now, smiling at Alex as though he was the most interesting

person in the System. And Kate could do it with anybody.

"If you're going to ask me, then ask."

"I will." Kate glanced at her watch. "But I'm getting hungry. Can we talk

and eat at the same time?"

"That's fine with me." Was she stalling? "What's the third worry?"

"I was watching your face when your mother said that you mustn't forget

about the other thing, and she would make arrangements whenever you were

ready." Kate's gaze, blue-eyed and sympathetic, was again fixed on Alex's

face. "As I said, it's really none of my business, but I don't believe that

people I'm fond of should ever have to look like you looked. What is the other

thing that you said you'd consider?"

2

THE TROJAN L - 4

POINT, YEAR 2O97,

SEINE-DAY MINUS ONE

Alex Ligon and Kate Lonaker held their meeting in one of the "low-rent"

levels of the Ganymede interior, where most government offices are located.

Draw a line that joins Alex and Kate to the Sun. It's a straight line, a

long line, and a line of variable length, because Kate and Alex rotate with

Ganymede, and Ganymede revolves around Jupiter, and Jupiter itself circles the

Sun. But to one significant figure none of that matters. The distance is seven

hundred and seventy million kilometers, give or take thirty million. Using

that Sun-Jupiter line as base, draw two equilateral triangles in the same

plane as Jupiter's orbit. The apex of one of those triangles, trailing Jupiter

in its orbit, is known as the Jovian L-4 point. The apex leading Jupiter is

the Jovian L-5 point.

Both these locations are gravitationally stable. An object placed at one

will remain there, co-orbiting with Jupiter. Nature long ago discovered this,

and the group known as the Trojan asteroids reside there. The mathematician

Lagrange proved the existence of such stable points in the eighteenth century.

Humans only found a way to get there a good deal later.

Milly Wu arrived at the Jovian L-4 station most recently of all. She had

flown out in an economy 0.2 Earth-gee ship, on a flight of two weeks duration;

long enough to worry to excess about the adequacy of her talents, but not long

enough to learn all she felt she needed to know about the Argus Project. Now,

only six days after arrival, Milly was sitting in her first staff meeting and

wondering how long it would take her stomach to adjust to a micro-gravity

environment.

The good news was that she was not expected to do anything. "Just sit in the

back and keep quiet," her supervisor, Hannah Krauss, had said. "Answer a

direct question if the Ogre addresses one to you, of course. But I don't think

that's likely. JB is going to talk more than listen."

The Ogre. Hannah was about twenty-four, just a couple of years older than

Milly. She was alert and attractive, with a wild mop of dark curly hair, a

slim figure, and a mobile face that could take on a huge variety of

expressions. When she said, "the Ogre," her whole countenance somehow adopted

a look of menace and malevolence. Milly had heard bad things about Jack

Beston, even back on Ganymede. But could he really be as ogre-ish as he was

painted?

Milly looked, and decided that maybe he could. JB, Jack Beston, was standing

in front of the group now. He was tall, red-headed, and skinny as a

stim-stick. Not bad looking, if you liked skinny guys, as Milly did. But his

expression cancelled any possible attraction. He was glowering at everyone and

everything before a word was spoken. It made Milly wonder why she had

struggled through all the horrendous aptitude tests in cryptanalysis and

pattern analysis needed to bring her here. Was she all that keen to be part of

the Argus Project?

She decided that she was. If anyone made contact with aliens, Milly wanted

to be in the front row. But for the moment she was quite happy to follow

Hannah Krauss's advice and sit at the back. She scanned the windowless room.

Minimal furnishings. Twenty-one people, fourteen women, seven men; three empty

seats in her row. Sit tight, keep quiet, and try to be invisible. She placed

the rectangle of the scribe plate flat on her knees, where she could make

unobtrusive condensed Post-logic notes on whatever she felt needed recording.

"You've heard the crap the media are putting out." Jack Beston made no

introductory remarks. "The Seine is going to link everything to everything and

solve every problem in the solar system. I turn that around. When the Seine is

up and running--and that's less than a day from now--nobody will be safe.

Nobody will have secrets. People will use the Seine to wander all over the

System and stick their nose in where it's got no right to be. We can't have

that. I want to review where we stand on battening down on Argus information.

Druse?"

A small man with a wizened face and a shaved scalp stood up. "The incoming

signals all come in from open space, and we can't do anything about that.

Anyone with the right receiving equipment will get exactly what we get. But so

far as we know, no one else in the System has our sensitivity, or our

modulated neutrino beam detector. Except--" Druse hesitated.

"Except the Bastard." Beston scowled. "He's got Odin working different

targets and a different set of neutrino energies, but his equipment's as good

as ours. No point in worrying about the security of incoming signals. What

about the rest of it?"

"We propose to use the Seine's computer power only for raw data reduction

and for first frequency scan. We don't give much away there, even if someone

Charles Sheffield - Cold as Ice 03 - Dark as Day

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