The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  "Not necessarily," Marcus said carefully. Maybe it was his intuition again, or just plain logical extrapolation, but he could see the way Victoria Keef'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 57 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 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.)

  Spaceport umbilical hoses were jacked into sockets on her lower hull, supplying basic utility functions. Another expense Marcus wished he could avoid; it was inflicting further pain on his already ailing cash-flow situation. They were going to have to fly soon, and fate seemed to have decided what flight it would be. That hadn't stopped his intuition from maintaining its subliminal assault on Antonio Ribeiro's scheme. If he could just find a single practical or logical argument against it ... He waited patiently while the crew drifted into the main lounge in life-support capsule A. Wai Choi, the spaceplane pilot, came down through the ceiling hatch and used a stikpad to anchor her shoes to the decking. She gave Marcus a sly smile that bordered on teasing. There had been times in the last five years when she'd joined him in his cabin, nothing serious, but they'd certainly had their moments. Which, he supposed, made her more tolerant of him than the others.

  At the opposite end of the spectrum was Karl Jordan, the Lady Mac's systems specialist. with the shortest temper, the greatest enthusiasm, and certainly the most serious of the crew. His age was the reason, only 25; the Lady Mac was his second starship duty.

  As for Schutz, who knew what emotions were at play in the cosmonik's mind; there was no visible outlet for them. Unlike Marcus, he hadn't been geneered for freefall-, decades of working on ships and spaceport docks had seen his bones lose calcium, his muscles waste away, and his cardiovascular system atrophy. There were hundreds like him in every asteroid, slowly replacing their body parts with mechanical substitutes. Some even divested themselves of their human shape altogether. At 63, Schutz was still humanoid, though only 20 percent of him was biological. His body supplements made him an excellent engineer.

  "We've been offered a joint-prize flight," Marcus told them. He explained Victoria's theory about disc systems and the magnetic anomaly array. "Ribeiro will provide us with consumables and a full cryogenics load. All we have to do is take Lady Mac to a disc system and scoop up the gold."

  "There has to be a catch," Wai said. "I don't believe in mountains of gold just drifting through space waiting for us to come along and find them."

  "Believe it," Roman said. "You've seen the Dorados. Why can't other elements exist in the same way?"

  "I don't know. I just don't think anything comes that easy."

  "Always the pessimist."

  "What do you think, Marcus?" she asked. "what does your intuition tell you?"

  "About the mission, nothing. I'm more worried about Antonio Ribeiro."

  "Definitely suspect," Katherine agreed.

  "Being a total prat is socially unfortunate," Roman said. "But it's not a crime. Besides, Victoria Keef seemed levelheaded enough."

  "An odd combination," Marcus mused. "A wannabe playboy and an astrophysicist. I wonder how they ever got together."

  "They're both Sonora nationals," Katherine said. "I ran a check through the public data cores, they were born here. It's not that remarkable."

  "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 tax man," 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 15 percent stake in the breeding company when he was 21, which he promptly sold for an estimated 800,000 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," Marcussaid.

  "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."

  "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 5,000 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 30 percent. 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.

  "Okay," 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, 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. Del icate icons unfuried across the visualization, ship status schematics and navigational plots sketched in primary colours.

  Chemical verniers fired, lifting Lady Mac off the cradle amid spumes of hot saffron vapour. A tube of orange circles appeared ahead of him, the course vector formatted to take them in towards the gas giant. Marcus switched to the more powerful ion thrusters, and the orange circles began to stream past the hull.

  The gas giant, Zacateca, and its moon, Lazaro, had the same apparent size as Lady Mac accelerated away from the spaceport. Sonora was one of 15 asteroids captured by their Lagrange point, a zone where their respective gravity fields were in equilibrium. Behind the starship, Lazaro was a grubby grey crescent splattered with white craters. Given that Zacateca was small for a gas giant, barely 40,000 kilometres in diameter, Lazaro was an unusual companion. A moon 9,000 kilometres in diameter, with an outer crust of ice 50 kilometres deep. It was that ice which had originally attracted the interest of the banks and multistellar finance consortia. Stony iron asteroids were an ideal source of metal and minerals for industrial stations, but they were also notoriously short of the light elements essential to sustain life. To have abundant supplies of both so close together was a strong investment incentive.

  Lady Mac's radar showed Marcus a serpentine line of one-tonne ice cubes flung out from Lazaro's equatorial mass-driver, gliding inertly up to the Lagrange point for collection. The same inexhaustible source which allowed Sonora to have its unique sea.

  All the asteroids in the cluster had benefited from the plentiful ice, their economic growth racing ahead of equivalent settlements. Such success always bred resentment among the indigenous population, who inevitably became eager for freedom from the founding companies. In this case, having so many settlements so close together gave their population a strong sense of identity and shared anger. The cluster's demands for autonomy had become increasingly strident over the last few years. A situation agitated by numerous violent incidents and acts of sabotage against the company administration staff.

  Ahead of the Lady Mac, Marcus could see the tidal hurricane Lazaro stirred up amid the wan amber and emerald stormbands of Zacateca's upper atmosphere. An ocean-sized hypervelocity maelstrom which followed the moon's orbit faithfully around the equator. Lightning crackled round its fringes, 500kilometer-long forks stabbing out into the surrounding cyclones of ammonia cirrus and methane sleet.

  The starship was accelerating at two gees now, her triple fusion drives sending out a vast streamer of are-bright plasma as she curved around the bulk of the huge planet. Her course vector was slowly bending to align on the star which Antonio intended to prospect, 38 light years distant. There was very little information contained in the almanac fileother than confirming it was a K class star with a disc.

  Marcus cut the fusion drives when the Lady Mac was 7,000 kilometres past perigee and climbing steadily. The thermo-dump panels and sensor clusters sank down into their jump recesses below the fuselage, returning the ship to a perfect sphere. Fusion generators began charging the energy patterning nodes. Orange circles flashing through Marcus's mind were illustrating the slingshot parabola she'd flown, straightening up the farther the gas giant was left behind. A faint star slid into the last circle.

  An event horizon swallowed the starship. Five milliseconds later it had shrunk to nothing.

  "Okay, 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 50 percent, 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 Ayachcho 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 burned at the centre of a disc 160 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 20th 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 disc. 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?"

  Jorge Leon was the second companion Antonio Ribeiro had brought with him on the flight. He'd been introduced to the crew as a first-class hardware technician who had supervised the construction of the magnetic array satellites. As introverted as Antonio was outgoing, he'd shown remarkably little interest in the arrays so far. It was Victoria Keef who'd familiarized the crew with the systems they were deploying.

  "We should bung him in our medical scanner," Karl suggested cheerfully. "Be interesting to see what's inside him. Bet you'd find a whole load of weapon implants."

  "Great idea," Roman said. "You ask him. He gives me the creeps."

  "Yeah, Katherine, explain that away," Karl said. "If there's no gold in the disc, how come they brought a contract killer along to make sure we don't fly off with their share?"

  "Karl!" Marcus warned. "That's enough." He gave the open floor hatch a pointed look. "Now let's get the array launched, please."

  Karl's face reddened as he began establishing a tracking link between the starship's communication system and the array satellite's transponder.

  "Satellite systems on line," Wai reported. "Launch when ready."

  Marcus datavised the flight computer to retract the satellite's hold-down latches. An induction rail shot it clear of the ship. Ion thrusters flared, refining its trajectory as it headed down towards the squally apricot surface of the disc.

  Victoria had designed the satellites to skim 5,000 kilometres above the nomadic particles. When their operational altitude was established they would spin up and start to reel out 25 gossamer-thin optical fibres. Rotation ensured the fibres remained straight, forming a spoke array parallel to the disc. Each fibre was 150 kilometres long, and coated in a reflective, magnetically s
ensitive film.

  As the disc particles were still within the star's magnetosphere, every one of them generated a tiny wake as it traversed the flux lines. It was that wake which resonated the magnetically sensitive film, producing fluctuations in the reflectivity. By bouncing a laser pulse down the fibre and measuring the distortions inflicted by the film, it was possible to build up an image of the magnetic waves writhing chaotically through the disc. With the correct discrimination programmes, the origin of each wave could be determined.

  The amount of data streaming back into the Lady Macbeth from the array satellites was colossal. One satellite array could cover an area of 250,000 square kilometres, and Antonio Ribeiro had persuaded the Sonora Autonomy Crusade to pay for 15. It was a huge gamble, and the responsibility was his alone. Forty hours after the first satellite was deployed, the strain of that responsibility was beginning to show. He hadn't slept since then, choosing to stay in the cabin which Marcus Calvert had assigned to them, and where they'd set up their network of analysis processors. Forty hours of his mind being flooded with near incomprehensible neuroiconic displays. Forty hours spent fingering his silver crucifix and praying.

  The medical monitor programme running in his neural nanonics was flashing up fatigue toxin cautions, and warning him of impending dehydration. So far he'd ignored them, telling himself discovery would occur any minute now. In his heart, Antonio had been hoping they would find what they wanted in the first five hours.

  His neural nanonics informed him the analysis network was focusing on the mass density ratio of a three-kilometer particle exposed by satellite seven. The processors began a more detailed interrogation of the raw data.

  "What is it?" Antonio demanded. His eyes fluttered open to glance at Victoria, who was resting lightly on one of the cabin's flatchairs.

  "Interesting," she murmured. "It appears to be a cassiterite ore. The planetoids definitely had tin."

  "Shit!" He thumped his fist into the chair's padding, only to feel the restraint straps tighten against his chest, preventing him from sailing free. "I don't care about tin. That's not what we're here for."