«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 fuseodollars' 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.