Charles Sheffield

Book One of The Heritage Universe.

Humans first reached out to the stars traveling at a painfully slow sublight crawl-then they found the Bose network, which allowed ships to jump instantaneously from one node in the galactic arm to another. Once in the Network they found the Artifacts: enigmatic structures, millions of years old, left by a vanished race. Incomprehensible to both human and non-human minds, the Artifacts seemingly defy natural law.

Now, after millions of years,

...

Set in the universe as Sheffield's previous novel Cold As Ice, Dark As Day is a hard science fiction novel set 30 years after the Great War, and interplanetary war that nearly destroyed the entire human race, and left horrifyingly dangerous weapons caches to threaten human survival. The Solar System is finally recovering from the Great War, a war that devastated the planets and nearly wiped out the human race, and the population of the outer moons,...

While exploring a planet, a group of 21st Century space travellers discover the source of eternal youth. They form a club to protect their secret, murdering anyone who might reveal it. The scheme works until a man acquires the memory of one of their murdered victims. By the author of Cold as Ice.

When a practical joke gets him kicked out of school, Rick Luban thinks he has nowhere to go. Instead, he gets a second chance--and a life of adventure--when he signs up for a career in asteroid mining. The mining company has its own system of turning boys into men, the "higher education" of the title.

Nine sleeping infants, once nestled in pods and ejected from a doomed ship, have grown up to become the key to an extraordinary race.