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

"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," 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."
"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