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.
The starship was accelerating at two gees now, her triple fusion drives sending out a vast streamer of arc-bright plasma as she curved around the bulk of the huge planet. Her course vector was slowly bending to align on the star which Antonio intended to prospect, thirty-eight light-years distant. There was very little information contained in the almanac file other than confirming it was a K-class star with a disc.
Marcus cut the fusion drives when the Lady Mac was seven thousand kilometres past perigee and climbing steadily. The thermo-dump panels and sensor clusters sank down into their jump recesses below the fuselage, returning the ship to a perfect sphere. Fusion generators began charging the energy-patterning nodes. Orange circles flashing through Marcus's mind were illustrating the slingshot parabola she'd flown, straightening up the further the planet was left behind. A faint star slid into the last circle.
An event horizon swallowed the starship. Five milliseconds later it had shrunk to nothing.
«OK, try this one,» Katherine said. «Why should the gold or anything else congeal into lumps as big as the ones they say it will? Just because you've got a planetoid with a hot core doesn't mean it's producing the metallic equivalent of fractional distillation. You're not going to get an onion layer effect with strata of different metals. It doesn't happen on planets, it won't happen here. If there is gold, and platinum, and all the rest of this fantasy junk, it's going to be hidden away in ores just like it always is.»
«So Antonio exaggerated when he said it would be pure,» Karl retorted. «We just hunt down the highest-grade ore particles in the disc. Even if it's only fifty per cent, who cares? We're never going to be able to spend it all anyway.»
Marcus let the discussion grumble on. It had been virtually the only topic for the crew since they'd departed Sonora five days ago. Katherine was playing the part of chief sceptic, with occasional support from Schutz and Wai, while the others tried to shoot her down. The trouble was, he acknowledged, that none of them knew enough to comment with real authority. At least they weren't talking about the sudden departure from Ayacucho any more.
«If the planetoids did produce ore, then it would fragment badly during the collision which formed the disc,» Katherine said. «There won't even be any mountain-sized chunks left, only pebbles.»
«Have you taken a look outside recently?» Roman asked. «The disc doesn't exactly have a shortage of large particles.»
Marcus smiled to himself at that. The disc material had worried him when they arrived at the star two days ago. Lady Mac had jumped deep into the system, emerging three million kilometres above the ecliptic. It was a superb vantage point. The small orange star burnt at the centre of a disc a hundred and sixty million kilometres in diameter. There were no distinct bands like those found in a gas-giant's rings, this was a continuous grainy copper mist veiling half of the universe. Only around the star itself did it fade away; whatever particles were there to start with had long since evaporated to leave a clear band three million kilometres wide above the turbulent photosphere.
Lady Mac was accelerating away from the star at a twentieth of a gee, and curving round into a retrograde orbit. It was the vector which would give the magnetic arrays the best possible coverage of the disk. Unfortunately, it increased the probability of collision by an order of magnitude. So far, the radar had only detected standard motes of interplanetary dust, but Marcus insisted there were always two crew on duty monitoring the local environment.
«Time for another launch,» he announced.
Wai datavised the flight computer to run a final systems diagnostic through the array satellite. «I notice Jorge isn't here again,» she said sardonically. «I wonder why that is?»
Jorge Leon was the second companion Antonio had brought with him on the flight. He'd been introduced to the crew as a first-class hardware technician, who had supervised the construction of the magnetic array satellites. As introverted as Antonio was outgoing, he'd shown remarkably little interest in the arrays so far. It was Victoria who'd familiarized the crew with the systems they were deploying.
«We should bung him in our medical scanner,» Karl suggested cheerfully. «Be interesting to see what's inside him. Bet you'd find a whole load of weapon implants.»
«Great idea,» Roman said. «You ask him. He gives me the creeps.»
«Yeah, Katherine, explain that away,» Karl said. «If there's no gold in the disc, how come they brought a contract killer along to make sure we don't fly off with their share?»
«Karl!» Marcus warned. «That's enough.» He gave the open floor hatch a pointed look. «Now let's get the array launched, please.»
Karl's face reddened as he began establishing a tracking link between the starship's communication system and the array satellite's transponder.
«Satellite systems on-line,» Wai reported. «Launch when ready.»
Marcus datavised the flight computer to retract the satellite's hold-down latches. An induction rail shot it clear of the ship. Ion thrusters flared, refining its trajectory as it headed down towards the squally apricot surface of the disc.
Victoria had designed the satellites to skim five thousand kilometres above the nomadic particles. When their operational altitude was established they would spin up and start to reel out twenty-five gossamer-thin optical fibres. Rotation insured the fibres remained straight, forming a spoke array parallel to the disc. Each fibre was a hundred and fifty kilometres long, and coated in a reflective, magnetically sensitive film.
As the disc particles were still within the star's magnetosphere, every one of them generated a tiny wake as it traversed the flux lines. It was that wake which resonated the magnetically sensitive film, producing fluctuations in the reflectivity. By bouncing a laser pulse down the fibre and measuring the distortions inflicted by the film, it was possible to build up an image of the magnetic waves writhing chaotically through the disc. With the correct discrimination programs, the origin of each wave could be determined.
The amount of data streaming back into the Lady Macbeth from the array satellites was colossal. One satellite array could cover an area of two hundred and fifty thousand square kilometres, and Antonio Ribeiro had persuaded the Sonora Autonomy Crusade to pay for fifteen. It was a huge gamble, and the responsibility was his alone. Forty hours after the first satellite was deployed, the strain of that responsibility was beginning to show. He hadn't slept since the first satellite launch, choosing to stay in the cabin which Marcus Calvert had assigned to them, and where they'd set up their network of analysis processors. Forty hours of his mind being flooded with near-incomprehensible neuroiconic displays. Forty hours spent fingering his silver crucifix and praying.
The medical monitor program running in his neural nanonics was flashing up fatigue toxin cautions, and warning him of impending dehydration. So far he'd ignored them, telling himself discovery would occur any minute now. In his heart, Antonio had been hoping they would find what they wanted in the first five hours.
His neural nanonics informed him the analysis network was focusing on the mass/density ratio of a three-kilometre particle exposed by satellite seven. The processors began a more detailed interrogation of the raw data.
«What is it?» Antonio demanded. His eyes fluttered open to glance at Victoria, who was resting lightly on one of the cabin's flatchairs.
«Interesting,» she murmured. «It appears to be a cassiterite ore. The planetoids definitely had tin.»
«Shit!» He thumped his fist into the chair's padding, only to feel the restraint straps tighten against his chest, preventing him from sailing free. «I don't fucking care about tin. That's not what we're here for.»
«I am aware of that.» Her eyes were open, staring at him with a mixture of contempt and anger.
«Sure, sure,» he mumbled. «Holy Mother, you'd expect us to find some by now.»
«Careful,» she datavised. «Remember this damn ship has internal sensors.»
«I know how to follow elementary security procedures,» he datavised back.
«Yes. But you're tired. That's when errors creep in.»
«I'm not that tired. Shit, I expected results by now; some progress.»
«We have had some very positive results, Antonio. The arrays have found three separate deposits of pitchblende.»
«Yeah, in hundred kilogram lumps. We need more than that, a lot more.»
«You're missing the point. We've proved it exists here; that's a stupendous discovery. Finding it in quantity is just a matter of time.»
«This isn't some fucking astrological experiment you're running for that university which threw you out. We're on an assignment for the cause. And we cannot go back emptyhanded. Got that? Cannot.»
«Astrophysics.»
«What?»
«You said astrological, that's fortune-telling.»
«Yeah? You want I should take a guess at how much future you're going to have if we don't find what we need out here?»