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“You wouldn’t!”

Lando smiled sweetly. “Try me.”

Breathing heavily, and from more than exertion, Bassi Vobah struggled among the pipes and wires in the cramped, disorganized space beneath her. She fetched up a bundle, threw it at Lando’s feet.

“Take it then, you mercenary anarchist!”

“That’s me all over,” he agreed charmingly, counting the credits. One hundred seventy-three thousand, four hundred eighty-seven of them. Well, at least Lob Doluff was an honest criminal. Better than that, by returning everything he’d won to Lando, the Administrator Senior had, in effect, underwritten the gambler’s expenses on the mission.

“Thanks, fuzzikins. Try and understand it takes all kinds. I certainly do.”

Bassi Vobah slumped back into the floor space, slammed the improvised lid down on top of herself. Lando took an angry step forward, stamping on the slab, ostensibly to seat it flush with the rest of the floor, but more as if afraid that some vindictive spirit would rise from its grave to haunt him.

Then he chuckled at his own annoyance with the lady cop, dismissed it, and continued along the passageway. A few meters farther, he bent again, tapped the beginning of shave-and-a-haircut on the deck, got the final two notes from Waywa Fybot, straightened, and went on.

Near the ship’s main entrance, he used a screwdriver to good effect, stashing the wad of money behind an intercom panel. He let down the boarding ramp and stepped onto the “soil” of Oseon 5792.

Bohhuah Mutdah met him halfway.

The trillionaire’s private planetoid, while more than a dozen kilometers in diameter, was less than three in thickness. Like nearly every other human-developed rock in the system, it had been steadily honeycombed over the decades of its occupation with storerooms, living quarters, utility areas, and spaces for every other conceivable use.

Two armed guards in stylish livery—and heavy body armor—met Lando at the foot of the boarding ramp, each stationing himself at one of the gambler’s elbows. For what had appeared to be a bustling port facility from a few thousand meters overhead, the place seemed remarkably deserted just then. No one else was about, organic or mechanical, as far as the eye could see.

The guards bracketed Lando for a brisk walk across the ferroconcrete apron, into a corrugated plastic service building, through the door of an industrial-grade elevator, and down into the innards of the asteroid. He needn’t have bothered with his helmet. There was enough artificial pull to hold a generous atmosphere. The helmet’s transparent bubble made a not too terribly convenient receptacle and carrying case for the package of lesai.

“Well, fellows,” Lando offered conversationally halfway through the elevator ride, “everybody here enjoying Flamewind? Where is everybody, by the way?”

A stony silence followed, during which the gambler spent a futile several moments attempting to peer through the mirror-reflective visor on the riot helmet of the guard at his left elbow. Instead, he saw the swollen and distorted image of a gambler with a mustache, lamely trying to make conversation.

The elevator halted with knee-bending alacrity, its door whooshed open, the guards escorted Lando into what appeared to be a titanic library. The spherical chamber, half a klick from wall to wall, was lined with every known variety of book produced by any sentient race anywhere in the galaxy: chips, memory rods, cassettes and tapes of various compatibilities, bound and jacketed hard- and soft-cover publications, scrolls, folios, clay, wood, and bamboo tablets, stones, bones, hides stretched wide on wooden poles, clumps of knotted rope, and a good many other artifacts whose identity the young captain could only infer from their presence with those other objects he did recognize.

The only things missing were librarians and browsers. The place seemed utterly devoid of life.

Bohhuah Mutdah, Lando surmised, was addicted to the printed (written, punched-in, hieroglyphed) word as much as to lesai—either that or he had carried pretension to a new extreme.