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  DARK AS DAY

  CHARLES SHEFFIELD

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2002 by Charles Sheffield

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-61824-057-6

  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 flat 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.”r />
  “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 2097,

  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 floating-point, 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 garb
age.” 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?”