Marseguro

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental. Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law. eISBN : 978-1-436-22416-1 First Printing, February 2008 http://us.penguingroup.com For my big brothers, Jim and Dwight: if not for all those science fiction books they brought into the house, I never would have started reading and writing this stuff. Acknowledgments This book began with a single sentence, written in September, 2005, as an exercise in Robert J. Sawyer’s class in writing science fiction, part of the Writing With Style program at the Banff Centre. Thanks, Rob! Heartfelt thanks to my editor, Sheila Gilbert, whose insightful comments and questions helped make this a much better book than it would otherwise have been. Any remaining failings are entirely my own. Finally, special thanks to the staff of Second Cup in the Cornwall Centre, Regina, Saskatchewan, where most of this book was written, fueled by Icepresso Chillers. Chapter 1 The main pier of Hansen’s Harbor stank, but that was only one reason Chris Keating hated it. He stood in the early spring sun, shivering, glaring down the three-hundred-meter-long, fifty-meter-wide stretch of preformed bioplast planks. The pier looked secure, but Chris knew better. Some of that stink came from the salt water. Some of it came from the alcohol-fueled engine of the catamaran-sub SeaSkimmer, idling at the end of the pier. Some of it came from rotting seaweed. But some of it, Chris knew, came from the slowly decomposing bioplast itself. To him it always stank of anaerobic decay, the smell of swamps and stagnant ponds. One day—he knew it—one of the pier’s massive posts would give way, and the whole structure would collapse, flipping everything and everyone on it into the deep, cold water of New Botany Bay, where they would drown like his father drowned, lost at sea, when he was four. One day. Maybe even today, while he was on the pier. Chris shivered again. He hadn’t expected to come down to the pier today, and his white shirt and pants were made of thin cloth designed for comfort in the warm, humid environs of the genesculpting lab’s algae room, not for keeping out the wind currently whipping up whitecaps on the bay’s blue-green water. But Dr. Stanless had radioed half an hour ago for someone to come help unload the samples he’d collected from the algae fields off Slick Rock, and the only someone who could be spared had been Chris. He hadn’t dared refuse. No one on Marseguro knew his shameful secret except his mother, and she wasn’t likely to tell. He clenched his fists when he thought of her. He’d visited her in the hospital on his way to work that morning. She’d looked so frail, lying in that hospital bed hooked up to the machinery that kept her alive—not at all like the strong woman he remembered from childhood, the woman who had single-handedly raised him after his father’s death… and single-handedly made sure he knew the truth that lay behind that “accident.” She’d been conscious this morning, an unusual occurrence since the last stroke. She could speak, a