«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.
«Still no electromagnetic emission in any spectrum,» Karl reported. «They're certainly not scanning us with active sensors.»
«Sensors are picking up their thermal signature,» Schutz said. «The structure is being maintained at thirty-six degrees Celsius.»
«That's on the warm side,» Katherine observed. «Perhaps their environmental system is malfunctioning.»
«Shouldn't affect the transponder,» Karl said.
«Captain, I think you'd better access the radar return,» Schutz said.
Marcus boosted the fusion drives up to one and a half gees, and ordered the flight computer to datavise him the radar feed. The image which rose into his mind was of a fine scarlet mesh suspended in the darkness, its gentle ocean-swell pattern outlining the surface of the station and the disc particle it was attached to. Except Marcus had never seen any station like this before. It was a gently curved wedge-shaped structure, four hundred metres long, three hundred wide, and a hundred and fifty metres at its blunt end. The accompanying disc particle was a flattened ellipsoid of stony iron rock measuring eight kilometres along its axis. The tip had been sheered off, leaving a flat cliff half a kilometre in diameter, to which the structure was clinging. That was the smallest of the particle's modifications. A crater four kilometres across, with perfectly smooth walls, had been cut into one side of the rock. An elaborate unicorn-horn tower rose nine hundred metres from its centre, ending in a clump of jagged spikes.
«Oh, Jesus,» Marcus whispered. Elation mingled with fear, producing a deviant adrenalin high. He smiled thinly. «How about that?»
«This was one option I didn't consider,» Victoria said weakly.
Antonio looked round the bridge, a frown cheapening his handsome face. The crew seemed dazed, while Victoria was grinning with delight. «Is it some kind of radio astronomy station?» he asked.
«Yes,» Marcus said. «But not one of ours. We don't build like that. It's xenoc.»
Lady Mac locked attitude a kilometre above the xenoc structure. It was a position which made the disc appear uncomfortably malevolent. The smallest particle beyond the fuselage must have massed over a million tonnes; and all of them were moving, a slow, random three-dimensional cruise of lethal inertia. Amber sunlight stained those near the disc's surface a baleful ginger, while deeper in there were only phantom silhouettes drifting over total blackness, flowing in and out of visibility. No stars were evident through the dark, tightly packed nebula.
«That's not a station,» Roman declared. «It's a shipwreck.»
Now that Lady Mac 's visual-spectrum sensors were providing them with excellent images of the xenoc structure, Marcus had to agree. The upper and lower surfaces of the wedge were some kind of silver-white material, a fuselage shell which was fraying away at the edges. Both of the side surfaces were dull brown, obviously interior bulkhead walls, with the black geometrical outline of decking printed across them. The whole structure was a cross-section torn out of a much larger craft. Marcus tried to fill in the missing bulk in his mind; it must have been vast, a streamlined delta fuselage like a hypersonic aircraft. Which didn't make a lot of sense for a starship. Rather, he corrected himself, for a starship built with current human technology. He wondered what it would be like to fly through interstellar space the way a plane flew through an atmosphere, swooping round stars at a hundred times the speed of light. Quite something.
«This doesn't make a lot of sense,» Katherine said. «If they were visiting the telescope dish when they had the accident, why did they bother to anchor themselves to the asteroid? Surely they'd just take refuge in the operations centre.»