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care for another beer?"
    Wendy indicated the full glass in front of her. "No, thanks." She gestured towards the rest of the room. "Are you sure this visit is necessary?"
    Troon shrugged. He made the gesture seem elegant. "It's like my mother used to say. If you want to swim with the fish, then jump in the ocean."
    Wendy raised an eyebrow. "And if you drown?"
    Troon laughed. "Mother was an optimist. You have nothing to fear, however. I guarantee your safety."
    Wendy wanted to say that her desire to leave the bar had nothing to do with her personal safety, but that would seem ungracious. Troon was trying to help. The least she could do was wait the process out. Wendy hoisted her beer and forced a smile.
    "Here's to the fish."
    Pik Lando entered the bar and looked around. As Lando's eyes drifted over the crowd, he saw things that others might have missed. There were roid rats, rimmers, smugglers, bounty hunters, merchant marine, mercenaries, and more.
    Bounty hunters sat in corners with their backs to the wall, constantly scanning the crowd for fugitives. Mercenaries drank the same way they fought, taking possession of entire tables and defending them against all comers. And, with a few exceptions, roid rats drank alone, as suspicious of each other as they were of everyone else, glowering at people who came too close.
    Under normal circumstances Lando favored the bar, where he could watch the room in the large mirror, and leave quickly if the heat arrived.
    But tonight was different. Lando was hungry and they didn't serve food at the bar. The smuggler wound his way through the tables, chose one next to a group of reasonably sober engineering types, and activated the tabletop menu. Burning blue letters appeared under the table's plastic surface.
    Scanning through the menu, Lando saw steak, nearly rejected it due to the cost, but thought, What the hell, I'm fifty thousand to the good, and I haven't had a good piece of meat since my dinner with Inspector Critzer. God bless his greedy soul.
    Lando grinned and touched the word "steak," followed by "medium," and "coffee, Terran."
    He had just settled back, and was about to do a little woman-watching, when he saw one rise from her seat and turn his way. She was different. Not a spacer, not a bounty hunter, something else.
    The short hair would look terrible on some, but was perfect for her. It served to emphasize the soft symmetry of her face. A face that looked, well, determined somehow, as if on some sort of important errand.
    And then there was her body—a very nice body, which in spite of some shapeless clothes, managed to make itself known in all the right places. She wore a pin of some sort. A circle with a triangle mounted within. He'd seen that design before but couldn't remember where.
    Yes, the woman had both potential and an escort in the form of an upscale cyborg. A borg with a plastic smile, a rather obvious blaster tucked away under his left armpit, and something else. An attitude that said, "Screw with me and you could wind up seriously dead."
    What the hell? The unlikely pair were heading straight for his table. Heat? Competition? Clients? Lando had settled on the last possibility by the time they reached his table.
    "Good evening," the cyborg said smoothly. "My name's Jonathan Troon, and this is Dr. Wendy Wendeen. Could we join you for a drink? Or some dinner perhaps?"
    Lando made no attempt to rise. Troon, Troon. The name was familiar but he couldn't quite place it.
    The cyborg spoke as if reading Lando's mind. "Your father might have mentioned my name. We worked together many years ago."
    Jonathan Troon! Of course! Lando's father loved to tell the story of how he and a cyborg named Troon… had smuggled a quarter-million credits worth of black market biochips onto Terra by making it appear that they were part of the borg's motor control subprocessor.
    Lando smiled and got to his feet. His slug gun slithered into its holster. The smuggler held out his hand. "I'm