«And you produced one?» Marcus enquired.

«Not quite. I proposed expanding our magnetic anomaly detector array. It's a very ancient technology; Earth's old nations pioneered it during the twentieth century. Their military maritime aircraft were equipped with crude arrays to track enemy submarines. Mitchell-Courtney builds its array into low-orbit resource-mapping satellites; they produce quite valuable survey data. Unfortunately, the company turned down my proposal. They said an expanded magnetic array wouldn't produce better results than a spectroscopic sweep, not on the scale required. And a spectroscopic scan would be quicker.»

«Unfortunate for Mitchell-Courtney,» Antonio said wolfishly. «Not for us. Dear Victoria came to me with her suggestion, and a simple observation.»

«A spectrographic sweep will only locate relatively large pieces of mass,» she said. «Fly a starship fifty million kilometres above a disc, and it can spot a fifty-kilometre lump of solid metal easily. But the smaller the lump, the higher the resolution you need or the closer you have to fly, a fairly obvious equation. My magnetic anomaly detector can pick out much smaller lumps of metal than a Dorado.»

«So? If they're smaller, they're worth less,» Katherine said. «The whole point of the Dorados is that they're huge. Believe me, I've been there and seen the operation those ex-Garissans are building up. They've got enough metal to supply their industrial stations with specialist microgee alloys for the next two thousand years. Small is no good.»

«Not necessarily,» Marcus said carefully. Maybe it was his intuition again, or just plain logical extrapolation, but he could see the way Victoria's thoughts were flowing. «It depends on what kind of small, doesn't it?»

Antonio applauded. «Excellent, Captain. I knew you were the right man for us.»

«What makes you think they're there?» Marcus asked.

«The Dorados are the ultimate proof of concept,» Victoria said. «There are two possible origins for disc material around stars. The first is accretion; matter left over from the star's formation. That's no use to us, it's mostly the light elements, carbonaceous chondritic particles with some silica aluminium thrown in if you're lucky. The second type of disc is made up out of collision debris. We believe that's what the Dorados are, fragments of planetoids that were large enough to form molten metal cores. When they broke apart the metal cooled and congealed into those hugely valuable chunks.»

«But nickel iron wouldn't be the only metal,» Marcus reasoned, pleased by the way he was following through. «There will be other chunks floating about in the disc.»

«Exactly, Captain,» Antonio said eagerly. «Theoretically, the whole periodic table will be available to us, we can fly above the disc and pick out whatever element we require. There will be no tedious and expensive refining process to extract it from ore. It's there waiting for us in its purest form; gold, silver, platinum, iridium. Whatever takes your fancy.»

• • •

Lady Macbeth sat on a docking cradle in Sonora's spaceport, a simple dull-grey sphere fifty-seven metres in diameter. All Adamist starships shared the same geometry, dictated by the operating parameters of the ZTT jump, which required perfect symmetry. At her heart were four separate life-support capsules, arranged in a pyramid formation; there was also a cylindrical hangar for her spaceplane, a smaller one for her Multiple Service Vehicle, and five main cargo holds. The rest of her bulk was a solid intestinal tangle of machinery, generators, and tanks. Her main drive system was three fusion rockets capable of accelerating her at eleven gees, clustered round an antimatter intermix tube which could multiply that figure by an unspecified amount; a sure sign of her combat-capable status. (By a legislative quirk it wasn't actually illegal to have an antimatter drive, though possession of antimatter itself was a capital crime throughout the Confederation.)