Free The Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton Page B

were driven by a variety of reasons; some (mostly the younger ones) thought
     it was adventurous, some did it because they had no choice, for some it was a last resort gamble. But all of them kept going
     in the hope of that one elusive Big Find. Intact Laymil artefacts raised huge prices on the collector’s market: there was
     a limited and diminishing source of unique alien
objets
, and museums and private collectors were desperate to obtain them.
    There existed no prospecting technology which could sift through the Ruin Ring particles and identify the gems amid the dross;
     scavengers had to don their spacesuits and get out there amid the hurtling shell splinters and go through it all one piece
     at a time, using hands and eyeballs. Most of them earned enough from what they found to keep going. Some were better at it
     than others. Luck, they called it. They were the ones who found a couple of the more intriguing pieces each year, items which
     would tide them over in high style for months at a time. Some were exceptionally lucky, returning time and again with pieces
     the collectors and research project simply had to have. And some were suspiciously lucky.
    If pressed, Joshua Calvert would have to admit membership of the second category, though it would be a self-deprecating acknowledgement.
     He had pulled six decent pieces out of the Ring in the last eight months; a pair of reasonably intact plants, a couple of
     circuit boards (fragile but OK), half of a rodentlike animal, and the big one, an intact egg, seven centimetres high. Altogether
     they had brought in three-quarters of a million fuseodollars (the Edenist currency, used as a base currency by the Confederation
     as a whole). For most scavengers that would have been enough to retire on. Back in Tranquillity people were shaking their
     heads and wondering why he kept returning to the Ring. Joshua was twenty-one, and that much money could keep him in a satisfactorily
     high-rolling style for life.
    They wondered because they couldn’t feel the intense need burning in him, surging down every vein like a living current, animating
     each cell. If they had known about that tidal-force drive they might have had an inkling of the unquiet nature lurking predator-fashion
     behind his endearing grin and boyish looks. He wanted one hell of a lot more than three-quarters of a million. In fact it
     was going to take nearer five million before he was anywhere near satisfied.
    Living in a high-rolling style wasn’t even an option as far as he was concerned. A life spent doing nothing but keeping a
     careful eye on your monthly budget, everything you did limited by the dividends of prudent investments? That sounded like
     living death to him, suspended inanimation, strictly loser’s territory.
    Joshua knew just how much more to life there could be. His body was perfectly adapted to handle free fall, a combination of
     useful physiological traits geneered into his family by wanderlust ancestors long distant. But it was just a consort to his
     mind, which was hardwired into the most riotous human trait, the hunger for new frontiers. He had spent his early childhood
     listening to his father telling and retelling stories of his own captaincy: the smuggling flights, outsmarting Confederation
     Navy squadrons, the fights, hiring out as mercenary warriors to governments and corporations with a grudge, of travelling
     the universe at will, strange planets, fanciful xenocs, willing women in ports scattered across the colonized galaxy. There
     wasn’t a planet or moon or asteroid settlement in the Confederation they hadn’t explored and populated with fanciful societies
     before the old man finally found the combination of drugs and alcohol which could penetrate the beleaguered defences of his
     enhanced organs. Every night since he was four years old Joshua had dreamed that life for himself. The life Marcus Calvert
     had blown, condemning his son to sit out his own existence in a