«Maybe.» He scratched the side of his head, unhappy with how limp and oily his hair had become. A vapour shower was something else he hadn't had for a while. «I'll get Jorge in here to help you monitor the results.»
«Great.» Her eyes closed again.
Antonio deactivated his flatchair's restraint straps. He hadn't seen much of Jorge on the flight. Nobody had. The man kept strictly to himself in his small cabin. The Crusade's council wanted him on board to ensure the crew's continuing cooperation once they realized there was no gold. It was Antonio who had suggested the arrangement; what bothered him was the orders Jorge had received concerning himself should things go wrong.
«Hold it.» Victoria raised her hand. «This is a really weird one.»
Antonio tapped his feet on a stikpad to steady himself. His neural nanonics accessed the analysis network again. Satellite eleven had located a particle with an impossible mass/density ratio; it also had its own magnetic field, a very complex one. «Holy Mother, what is that? Is there another ship here?»
«No, it's too big for a ship. Some kind of station, I suppose. But what's it doing in the disc?»
«Refining ore?» he said with a strong twist of irony.
«I doubt it.»
«OK. So forget it.»
«You are joking.»
«No. If it doesn't affect us, it doesn't concern us.»
«Jesus, Antonio; if I didn't know you were born rich I'd be frightened by how stupid you were.»
«Be careful, Victoria, my dear. Very careful.»
«Listen, there's two options. One, it's some kind of commercial operation; which must be illegal because nobody has filed for industrial development rights.» She gave him a significant look.
«You think they're mining pitchblende?» he datavised.
«What else? We thought of the concept, why not one of the black syndicates as well? They just didn't come up with my magnetic array idea, so they're having to do it the hard way.»
«Secondly,» she continued aloud, «it's some kind of covert military station; in which case they saw us the moment we emerged. Either way, they will have us under observation. We have to know who they are before we proceed any further.»
«A station?» Marcus asked. «Here?»
«It would appear so,» Antonio said glumly.
«And you want us to find out who they are?»
«I think that would be prudent,» Victoria said, «given what we're doing here.»
«All right,» Marcus said. «Karl, lock a communication dish on them. Give them our CAB identification code, let's see if we can get a response.»
«Aye, sir,» Karl said. He settled back on his acceleration couch.
«While we're waiting,» Katherine said, «I have a question for you, Antonio.»
She ignored the warning glare Marcus directed at her.
Antonio's bogus smile blinked on. «If it is one I can answer, then I will do so gladly, dear lady.»
«Gold is expensive because of its rarity value, right?»
«Of course.»
«So here we are, about to fill Lady Mac 's cargo holds with five thousand tonnes of the stuff. On top of that you've developed a method which means people can scoop up millions of tonnes any time they want. If we try and sell it to a dealer or a bank, how long do you think we're going to be billionaires for, a fortnight?»
Antonio laughed. «Gold has never been that rare. Its value is completely artificial. The Edenists have the greatest known stockpile. We don't know exactly how much they possess because the Jovian Bank will not declare the exact figure. But they dominate the commodity market, and sustain the price by controlling how much is released. We shall simply play the same game. Our gold will have to be sold discreetly, in small batches, in different star systems, and over the course of several years. And knowledge of the magnetic array system should be kept to ourselves.»
«Nice try, Katherine,» Roman chuckled. «You'll just have to settle for an income of a hundred million a year.»
She showed him a stiff finger, backed by a shark's smile.
«No response,» Karl said. «Not even a transponder.»
«Which, technically, is illegal,» Marcus said. «Though Lady Mac 's own transponder has been known to glitch at unfortunate moments.»
»Un- fortunate?» Wai challenged.
«Keep trying, Karl,» Marcus told him. «OK, Antonio, what do you want to do about it?»
«We have to know who they are,» Victoria said. «As Antonio has just explained so eloquently, we can't have other people seeing what we're doing here.»
«It's what they're doing here that worries me,» Marcus said; although, curiously, his intuition wasn't causing him any grief on the subject.
«I see no alternative but a rendezvous,» Antonio said.
«We're in a retrograde orbit, thirty-two million kilometres away and receding. That's going to use up an awful lot of fuel.»
«Which I believe I have already paid for.»
«OK, your call. I'll start plotting a vector.»
«What if they don't want us there?» Schutz asked.
«If we detect any combat-wasp launch, then we jump outsystem immediately,» Marcus said. «The disc's gravity field isn't strong enough to affect Lady Mac 's patterning-node symmetry. We can leave any time we want.»
For the last quarter of a million kilometres of the approach, Marcus put the ship on combat status. The nodes were fully charged, ready to jump. Thermo-dump panels were retracted. Sensors maintained a vigilant watch for approaching combat wasps.
«They must know we're here,» Wai said when they were eight thousand kilometres away. «Why don't they acknowledge us?»
«Ask them,» Marcus said sourly. Lady Mac was decelerating at a nominal one gee, which he was varying at random. It made their exact approach vector impossible to predict, which meant their course couldn't be seeded with proximity mines. The manoeuvre took a lot of concentration.