Chasm City - Alastair Reynolds

The once utopian Chasm City -- a domed human settlement on an otherwise inhospitable planet -- has been overrun by a virus known as the Melding Plague, capable of infecting any body, organic or computerized. Now, with the entire city corrupted -- from its people to the very buildings they inhabit -- only the most wretched, grim sort of existence remains.
And it is through this city that Tanner Mirabel must pursue the object of his vendetta: a lowlife postmortal named Argent Reivich. But as Reivich keeps slipping through the cracks of Chasm, Tanner will be taken far beyond the mere settling of a score -- to come face to face with a centuries-old atrocity that history would rather forget....
Author Biography:
Alastair Reynolds was born in Wales. He has a Ph.D. in astronomy. Since 1991, he has worked for The European Space Agency. He is a long-time contributor to Interzone, the premier professional science fiction magazine in Great Britain. One of his stories, A Spy in Europa, appeared in the 1998 edition of Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction.