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More synthdroids guarded the door. He doubted that most of the people in the room realized that the guards weren’t alive or human. They were realistic to the smallest degree, though the hair was a giveaway—perfect, human, but with the oddly dead look that replants frequently had—and the smell. Everyone in the room smelled: of sweat, of beer, of coffeine; of the salt of work and life. Synthflesh, until it grows into organic matter as a patch, requires no nourishment and excretes no by-products. Luke recalled an article he’d read about Loronar Corporation’s efforts to make synthdroids that would be acceptable to scent-cued species like the Chadra-Fans and Wookiees. There were even humans who reacted badly to the deeply buried anomaly of something that looked like a human and smelled like nothing.

The conclusion of the article, as he recalled, was that the project was low on the Loronar priorities list. Chadra-Fans and Wookiees had little purchasing power and were considered an insufficient market to take the trouble over, even at a hundred thousand credits a throw.

“Arvid.” Gerney Caslo jostled over to them through the crowd as people began to settle themselves on the edges of the low daises that were scattered around the room and on the compressed chairs set between. The whole place had been carpeted in a kind of dense industrial weave, which lent it an odd hybrid look. What had been food niches were now filled with the sort of cheap knock-off artwork available to the wealthy on thinly settled worlds: bad holos of famous sculpture, sometimes edited to substitute the faces of the new owner and his or her family, or cheap little sixteen-color-lights displays that ran through their cycles in a minute and a half. Luke had seen some beautiful sand-glazed Oldtimer pottery, and wondered that neither Seti Ashgad nor his father, after all those years on the planet, had thought to include it in the house.

Had the elder Ashgad so much resented this world that he’d have none of its works? But surely the son, who had been born there, or at least raised there—he didn’t look more than forty—wouldn’t share the prejudice to the same degree? Or was Ashgad’s other house, his dwelling in the Mountains of Lightning, more his than his father’s?

“We’re looking for a couple of boys for a job,” Caslo went on, speaking from the corner of his mouth like a bad guy in a holovid. “There’s a drop coming in tomorrow night.”

“Where?”

“Ten Cousins.”

Luke had heard Croig speak of the place. The Cousins in question were tsils, the crystal chimneys standing in a ring instead of a line, markers of some unknown geological process. A smuggler’s dream, a formation easily identified on a scan but small enough to search in a night.

“Can you use Owen here, too?” Arvid nodded to Luke. “He’s working for Croig. He could use the cash.”

Booldrum Caslo, a thickset, smooth-faced little man with heavy sight-amplification equipment bolted into his head, grinned, “Anyone who works for Croig could use cash.”

Caslo studied Luke for a moment, then nodded. “We can use as many as we can. I hear it’s a good-size cargo. You got that speeder of yours running yet?”

Luke nodded, though running was a matter of interpretation.

“You’ll work pickup, then,” said Caslo. Arvid sniffed as the older man walked away.

“Doesn’t trust you as a perimeter guard.”

“Hunh?”

“To keep the Therans away,” explained Gin, coming over and perching on the edge of the dais where they sat. “Oh, the Listeners sometimes get word of drops and try to stop them, but mostly I think it’s just keeping tabs on whatever’s going on. Mostly they seem to concentrate on …”

The lights dimmed, save for a single one on the main dais, set unobtrusively in what had been an olympian feeding niche. A curtain at the back of the room parted, and Seti Ashgad stepped through.

Do not trust him, Callista had said. Do not meet with him, or accede to any demand he makes.

Why?

It was the first time Luke