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 Ayacucho 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?»