A Second Chance at Eden (44 page)

Spaceport umbilical hoses were jacked into sockets on her lower hull, supplying basic utility functions. Another expense Marcus wished he could avoid; it was inflicting further pain on his already ailing cash flow situation. They were going to have to fly soon, and fate seemed to have decided what flight it would be. That hadn’t stopped his intuition from maintaining its subliminal assault on Antonio Ribeiro’s scheme. If he could just find a single practical or logical argument against it . . .

He waited patiently while the crew drifted into the main lounge in life-support capsule A. Wai Choi, the spaceplane pilot, came down through the ceiling hatch and used a stikpad to anchor her shoes to the decking. She gave Marcus a sly smile that bordered on teasing. There had been times in the last five years when she’d joined him in his cabin, nothing serious, but they’d certainly had their moments. Which, he supposed, made made her more tolerant of him than the others.

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 fuseodol-lars’ 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.

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 Ayachcho 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.