Dark As Day by Charles Sheffield

     "Dark As Day" (only about 21 and I wish it could vote) by Charles Sheffield.
     Set in the future after the Asteroid Belt Northern Hemisphere
wars. Earth is not destroyed but the Northern Hemisphere is ravaged
and seeded with monsters by the vicious Belters.  Two of the
characters are rescued as children from the North.  A male and female child become sole companions but not lovers. She helps him navigate
the necessities of life and he is a willing but somewhat passive ally. They have been gas mining and want to go out to Saturn to become settlers.  On the ship transporting them out-system because of his physiological anomalies he is placed under the supervision of a
doctor who advises the woman to limit her contact. She on the other
hand meets the love of her life the executive officer of the
space ship/liner.  Now we have a woman working on Alien contact
on a space station and she detects an alien message.  We have Megachirops of the Puzzle Network who lives isolated on a minor body orbiting Saturn. He is a hacker par excellence with interests aside
from the puzzles, in Belt War weapons and in one of the designers who may have escaped with a weapon that will end human life in solar
system. His frequent companion is Mord who tried to capture his life
in a computer program and spends time roaming the newly energized
Seine or system wide computer network.
We have the Ligon family* who want to use that minor body as places to mine gases from Saturn. We have a computer specialist who
  is a member in the Ligon family and in modeling the future he runs across a prediction of humanity dying out in the next hundred years.
*fabulously wealthy and insanely privileged.
     Sheffield pulls it all together nicely
     I read it with relative pleasure and if you have not yet enjoyed Sheffield you might want to go back to the earlier novels about the terrible Belt war.
bliss
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