At the opposite end of the spectrum was Karl Jordan, the Lady Mac 's systems specialist, with the shortest temper, the greatest enthusiasm, and certainly the most serious of the crew. His age was the reason, only twenty-five; the Lady Mac was his second starship duty.
As for Schutz, who knew what emotions were at play in the cosmonik's mind; there was no visible outlet for them. Unlike Marcus, he hadn't been geneered for free fall; decades of working on ships and spaceport docks had seen his bones lose calcium, his muscles waste away, and his cardiovascular system atrophy. There were hundreds like him in every asteroid, slowly replacing their body parts with mechanical substitutes. Some even divested themselves of their human shape altogether. At sixty-three, Schutz was still humanoid, though only twenty per cent of him was biological. His body supplements made him an excellent engineer.
We've been offered a joint prize flight, Marcus told them. He explained Victoria's theory about disc systems and the magnetic anomaly array. Ribeiro will provide us with consumables and a full cryogenics load. All we have to do is take Lady Mac to a disc system and scoop up the gold.
There has to be a catch, Wai said. I don't believe in mountains of gold just drifting through space waiting for us to come along and find them.
Believe it, Roman said. You've seen the Dorados. Why can't other elements exist in the same way?
I don't know. I just don't think anything comes that easy.
Always the pessimist.
What do you think, Marcus? she asked. What does your intuition tell you?
About the mission, nothing. I'm more worried about Antonio Ribeiro.
Definitely suspect, Katherine agreed.
Being a total prat is socially unfortunate, Roman said. But it's not a crime. Besides, Victoria Keef seemed levelheaded enough.
An odd combination, Marcus mused. A wannabe playboy and an astrophysicist. I wonder how they ever got together.
They're both Sonoran nationals, Katherine said. I ran a check through the public data cores, they were born here. It's not that remarkable.
Any criminal record? Wai asked.
None listed. Antonio has been in court three times in the last seven years; each case was over disputed taxes. He paid every time.
So he doesn't like the taxman, Roman said. That makes him one of the good guys.
Run-ins with the tax office are standard for the rich, Wai said.
Except he's not actually all that rich, Katherine said. I also queried the local Collins Media library; they keep tabs on Sonora's principal citizens. Mr Ribeiro senior made his money out of fish breeding, he won the franchise from the asteroid development corporation to keep the biosphere sea stocked. Antonio was given a fifteen per cent stake in the breeding company when he was twenty-one, which he promptly sold for an estimated eight hundred thousand fuseodollars. Daddy didn't approve, there are several news files on the quarrel; it became very public.
So he is what he claims to be, Roman said. A not very rich boy with expensive tastes.
How can he pay for the magnetic detectors we have to deploy, then? Wai asked. Or is he going to hit us with the bill and suddenly vanish?
The detector arrays are already waiting to be loaded on board, Marcus said. Antonio has several partners; people in the same leaky boat as himself, and willing to take a gamble.
Wai shook her head, still dubious. I don't buy it. It's a free lunch.
Victoria Keef's star disc formation theory sounds plausible, and they're willing to invest their own money in the array hardware. What other guarantees do you want?
What kind of money are we talking about, exactly? Karl asked. I mean, if we do fill the ship up, what's it going to be worth?
Given its density, Lady Mac can carry roughly five thousand tonnes of gold in her cargo holds, Marcus said. That'll make manoeuvring very sluggish, but I can handle her.
Roman grinned at Karl. And today's price for gold is three and a half thousand fuseodollars per kilogram.
Karl's eyes went blank for a second as his neural nanonics ran the conversion. Seventeen billion fuseodollars' worth!
He laughed. Per trip.
How is this Ribeiro character proposing to divide the proceeds? Schutz asked.
We get one-third, Marcus said. Roughly five-point-eight billion fuseodollars. Of which I take thirty per cent. The rest is split equally between you, as per the bounty flight clause in your contracts.
Shit, Karl whispered. When do we leave, Captain?
Does anybody have any objections? Marcus asked. He gave Wai a quizzical look.
OK, she said. But just because you can't see surface cracks, it doesn't mean there isn't any metal fatigue.
•••
The docking cradle lifted Lady Macbeth cleanly out of the spaceport's crater-shaped bay. As soon as she cleared the rim her thermo-dump panels unfolded, and sensor clusters rose up out of their recesses on long booms. Visual and radar information was collated by the flight computer, which datavised it directly into Marcus's neural nanonics. He lay on the acceleration couch at the centre of the bridge with his eyes closed as the external starfield blossomed in his mind. Delicate icons unfurled across the visualization, ship status schematics and navigational plots sketched in primary colours.
Chemical verniers fired, lifting Lady Mac off the cradle amid spumes of hot saffron vapour. A tube of orange circles appeared ahead of him, the course vector formatted to take them in towards the gas giant. Marcus switched to the more powerful ion thrusters, and the orange circles began to stream past the hull.
The gas giant, Zacateca, and its moon, Lazaro, had the same apparent size as Lady Mac accelerated away from the spaceport. Sonora was one of fifteen asteroids captured by their Lagrange point, a zone where their respective gravity fields were in equilibrium. Behind the starship Lazaro was a grubby grey crescent splattered with white craters. Given that Zacateca was small for a gas giant, barely forty thousand kilometres in diameter, Lazaro was an unusual companion. A moon nine thousand kilometres in diameter, with an outer crust of ice fifty kilometres deep. It was that ice which had originally attracted the interest of the banks and multistellar finance consortia. Stony-iron asteroids were an ideal source of metal and minerals for industrial stations, but they were also notoriously short of the light elements essential to sustain life. To have abundant supplies of both so close together was a strong investment incentive.
Lady Mac 's radar showed Marcus a serpentine line of one-tonne ice cubes flung out from Lazaro's equatorial mass driver to glide inertly up to the Lagrange point for collection. The same inexhaustible source which allowed Sonora to have its unique sea.
All the asteroids in the cluster had benefited from the plentiful ice, their economic growth racing ahead of equivalent settlements. Such success always bred resentment among the indigenous population, who inevitably became eager for freedom from the founding companies. In this case, having so many settlements so close together gave their population a strong sense of identity and shared anger. The cluster's demands for autonomy had become increasingly strident over the last few years. A situation agitated by numerous violent incidents and acts of sabotage against the company administration staff.
Ahead of the Lady Mac , Marcus could see the tidal hurricane Lazaro stirred up amid the wan amber and emerald stormbands of Zacateca's upper atmosphere. An ocean-sized hypervelocity maelstrom which followed the moon's orbit faithfully around the equator. Lightning crackled round its fringes, five hundred kilometre long forks stabbing out into the surrounding cyclones of ammonia cirrus and methane sleet.