"Peter F. Hamilton - Escape Route" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

economic resource. So much so that the governments of Omuta and Garissa had gone to war over who
had that development right.
It was the Garissan survivors who had ultimately been awarded settlement by the Confederation
Assembly. There weren't many of them. Omuta had deployed twelve antimatter planetbusters against
their homeworld. "Is that what you're hoping to find, another flock of solid metal asteroids?"
"Not quite," Antonio said. "Companies have been searching similar disc systems ever since the
Dorados were discovered, to no avail. Victoria,my dear, if you would care to explain."
She nodded curtly and put her glass down on the table. "I'm an astrophysicist by training," she said. "I
used to work for Forrester-Courtney; it's a company based in the O'Neill Halo that manufactures
starship sensors, although their speciality is survey probes. It's been a very healthy business recently.
Consortiums have been flying survey missions through every catalogued disc system in the Confederation.
As Antonio said, none of our clients found anything remotely like the Dorados. That didn't surprise me, I
never expected any of Forrester-Courtney's probes to be of much use. All our sensors did was run
broad spectrographic sweeps. If anyone was going to find another Dorados cluster it would be the
Edenists. Their voidhawks have a big advantage; those ships generate an enormous distortion field which
can literally see mass. A lump of metal 50 kilometres across would have a very distinct density signature;
they'd be aware of it from at least half a million kilometres away. If we were going to compete against
that, we'd need a sensor which gave us the same level of results, if not better."
"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 20th century. Their military maritime aircraft were
equipped with crude arrays to track enemy submarines. Forrester-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 spectrographic sweep, not on the scale required. And a spectrographic scan would be
quicker."
"Unfortunate for Forrester-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 50
million kilometres above a disc, and it can spot a 50kilometer 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. I've 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 2,000 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 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