Part of his predicament was due to the ruinous cost of cryogenic fuels these days. Starflight was not a cheap venture, consuming vast quantities of energy. Maintenance, too, cut savagely into profit margins. Flying to Sonora without a cargo had been a severe financial blow. It was a position Marcus had constantly reacquainted himself with throughout his career; the galaxy didn't exactly shower favours on independent starships.
«This could be them,» Roman said, glancing over the rail. One of Sonora's little taxi boats was approaching their big resort raft.
Marcus had never seen an asteroid cavern quite like this one before. The centre of the gigantic rock had been hollowed out by mining machines, producing a cylindrical cavity twelve kilometres long, five in diameter. Usually the floor would be covered in soil and planted with fruit trees and grass. In Sonora's case, the environmental engineers had simply flooded it. The result was a small freshwater sea that no matter where you were on it, you appeared to be at the bottom of a valley of water.
Floating around the grey surface were innumerable rafts, occupied by hotels, bars, and restaurants. Taxi boats whizzed between them and the wharfs at the base of the two flat cavern walls. The trim cutter curving round towards the Lomaz had two people sitting on its red leather seats.
Marcus watched with interest as they left the taxi. He ordered his neural nanonics to open a fresh memory cell, and stored the pair of them in a visual file. The first to alight was a man in his mid-thirties; a long face and a very broad nose gave him a kind of imposing dignity. He wore expensive casual clothes, an orange jacket and turquoise trousers, with a bright scarlet sash that was this year's fashion on Avon.
His partner was less flamboyant. She was in her late twenties, obviously geneered; Oriental features matched with white hair that had been drawn together in wide dreadlocks and folded back aerodynamically. Her slate-grey office suit and prim movements made her appear formidably unsympathetic.
They walked straight over to Marcus's table, and introduced themselves as Antonio Ribeiro and Victoria Keef. Antonio clicked his fingers at the waitress, who took her time sauntering over. Her mood swung when Antonio slapped down a local 5,000 peso note on her tray and told her to fetch a bottle of Norfolk Tears.
«Hopefully to celebrate the success of our business venture, my friends,» he said. «And if not, it is a pleasant time of day to imbibe such a magical potion. No?»
Marcus found himself immediately distrustful. It wasn't just Antonio's phoney attitude; his intuition was scratching away at the back of his skull. Some friends called it his paranoia program, but it was rarely wrong. A family trait, like the wanderlust which no geneering treatment had ever eradicated.
«Any time of day will do for me,» Roman said.
Antonio smiled brightly at him.
«The cargo agent said you had a charter for us,» Marcus said. «He never mentioned any sort of business deal.»
«If I may ask your indulgence for a moment, Captain Calvert. You arrived here without a cargo. You must be a very rich man to afford that.»
«There were . . . circumstances requiring us to leave Ayacucho ahead of schedule.»
«Yeah,» Katherine muttered darkly. «Her husband.»
Marcus was expecting it, and smiled serenely. He'd heard very little else from the crew for the whole flight.
Antonio received the tray and its precious pear-shaped bottle from the waitress, and waved away the change. She gave him a coy smile, eyes flashing gamely.
«If I may be indelicate, Captain, your financial resources are not optimum at this moment,» Antonio suggested.
«They've been better. But I'm not desperate. Any financial institution would fall over themselves to advance me a loan against my next charter if I asked them for it.»
Antonio handed him a glass. «And yet you don't. Why is that, Captain?»
«I might not have a good cash flow, but I'm hardly bankrupt. I own Lady Mac , and it took me a long time to achieve that. That means I fly her as I want to, how she's meant to be flown. I've taken her on scouting missions beyond the Confederation boundaries to find new terracompatible planets, risked my own money on cargos, and even piloted her into battle for dubious causes. If I want commercial drudgery I'll sign on with a line company. Which is what I'd be doing if I took out a loan.»
«Bravo, Captain!» Antonio raised his glass in salute. «May the grey men be consigned to hell for all eternity.» He sipped his Norfolk Tears, and grinned in appreciation. «For myself, I was born with the wrong amount of money. Enough to know I needed more.»
«Mr Ribeiro, I've heard all the get-rich-quick schemes in existence. They all have one thing in common, they don't work. If they did, I wouldn't be sitting here with you.»
«You are wise to be cautious, Captain. I was, too, when I first heard this proposal. However, if you would humour me a moment longer, I can assure you this requires no capital outlay on your part. At the worst you will have another mad scheme to laugh about with your fellow captains.»
«No money at all?»
«None at all, simply the use of your ship. We would be equal partners sharing whatever reward we find.»
«Jesus. All right, I can spare you five minutes. Your drink has bought you that much attention span.»
«Thank you, Captain. My colleagues and I want to fly the Lady Macbeth on a prospecting mission.»
«For planets?» Roman asked curiously.
«No. Sadly, the discovery of a terracompatible planet does not guarantee wealth. Settlement rights will not bring more than a couple of million fuseodollars, and even that is dependent on a favourable biospectrum assessment, which would take many years. We have something more immediate in mind. You have just come from the Dorados?»
«That's right,» Marcus said. The system had been discovered six years earlier, comprising a red-dwarf sun surrounded by a vast disc of rocky particles. Several of the larger chunks had turned out to be nearly pure metal. Dorados was an obvious name; whoever managed to develop them would gain a colossal economic resource. So much so that the governments of Omuta and Garissa had gone to war over who had that development right.
It was the Garissan survivors who had ultimately been awarded settlement by the Confederation Assembly. There weren't many of them. Omuta had deployed twelve antimatter planet-busters against their homeworld. «Is that what you're hoping to find, another flock of solid metal asteroids?»
«Not quite,» Antonio said. «Companies have been searching similar disc systems ever since the Dorados were discovered, to no avail. Victoria, my dear, if you would care to explain.»
She nodded curtly and put her glass down on the table. «I'm an astrophysicist by training,» she said. «I used to work for Mitchell-Courtney; it's a company based in the O'Neill Halo that manufactures starship sensors, although their speciality is survey probes. It's been a very healthy business recently. For the last five years commercial consortiums, Adamist governments, and the Edenists have all been flying survey missions through every catalogued disc system in the Confederation. As Antonio said, none of our clients found anything remotely like the Dorados. That didn't surprise me, I never expected any of Mitchell-Courtney's probes to be of much use. All our sensors did was run broad spectroscopic sweeps. If anyone was going to find another Dorados cluster it would be the Edenists. Their voidhawks have a big advantage; those ships generate an enormous distortion field which can literally see mass. A lump of metal fifty kilometres across would have a very distinct density signature; they'd be aware of it from at least half a million kilometres away. If we were going to compete against that, we'd need a sensor which gave us the same level of results, if not better.»