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“Show yourself!”

He rose slowly, hands up. Half a dozen security guards surrounded him, their blasters pointed at his head.

Nandreeson leaned back in his baquor-lined couch. The top half had not been properly slimed. It felt damp and cold against his skin. His legs were warm, though. They were underwater. There the couch was covered in algae. That part, at least, had been tempered right.

He had left Skip 6 for three days to investigate the loss of one of his men in the Outer Rim. When he returned to Smuggler’s Run, someone had replaced his old couch with a new one, and had failed to condition it properly. When he was rested, he would check the rest of his quarters to see what other mistakes had been made.

So far things seemed fine. The air was so humid that it was almost visible. Tiny gnats gathered in a cluster, and Eilnian sweet flies swarmed on the far wall. The sweet flies were nearly ripe enough to eat. His mouth burned, just thinking about it.

The lilies had bloomed on top of the pond, and someone had scraped the algae to one side, probably for later conditioning. Bubbles rose in the middle, exploding into the air with the stench of sulfur.

Home. It felt good to be here. In a little while, he would go for a swim through the caverns and see if anyone had disturbed both his egg clusters and his treasure hordes.

First, though, he had business to take care of. He had sent all of his people to their pod beds, except for Iisner. Like Nandreeson, Iisner was a Glottalphib, only his snout was six inches shorter, and his teeth had worn to small nubs. His eyes rested over his snout like small beetles. His small hands floated on top of the water, and his tail was wrapped around the base of the couch. A strand of algae hung from his right nostril, remains of his underwater trip through the pond, making certain no one had poisoned it, bugged it, or rigged it harmfully in any way. His gills were still opening and closing, as if he couldn’t get enough air.

Nandreeson would have to replace him someday soon. Iisner was getting old. His scales were already falling after two or three days without water. He had built a slime pond into his quarters on the Silver Egg so that he wouldn’t lose too many scales during a long space voyage.

“Word is,” Nandreeson said, “Han Solo is on Skip 1.” A tiny flame emerged from the left side of his snout. He was hungrier than he had thought.

“Yes,” Iisner said. “He has quarters there. Jarril sent him.”

“Jarril.” Nandreeson dipped his snout into the warm, slick water. That cooled some of the burning. He didn’t feel like going to the sweet-fly wall and looking for the ripe ones yet. Maybe, when he swam, he would take a caver egg and eat it raw. “Jarril paid his debt to me last week. Thirty thousand credits. I was not pleased.”

“He has come into money, then.”

Nandreeson shook the water off his snout. “Everyone has come into money. I have not made a substantial loan in months. Jarril is one of many who have paid me off. I will have to go into another business if this doesn’t change.”

“Perhaps we should get off the Run,” Iisner said. “It’s changed too much for my tastes. I don’t like rich smugglers. They are no fun.”

Nandreeson smiled. “The challenge is gone, I’ll admit. And if I knew of a better place to go than the Run, I would. But this place still serves us, for now.”

“What about Glottal?” Iisner said.

Nandreeson frowned. His home planet, with its ponds and pads, its fronds and sweet bugs, its dark forests and its sticky, humid air, held a great attraction for him. But on Glottal, he would be one of a thousand rich ’Phibs. Here, he was the only rich ’Phib, and one of the most powerful crime lords in the galaxy. The second title would mean nothing on Glottal.

“I am not ready to go to Glottal,” he said. He would go there when he was going to die. He would spawn, and leave his fortune to the surviving offspring. “No. I need a new business. And a new diversion.”

“You could start dealing in Imperial equipment.”