The bar was dank and smoky, lowlifes in every corner spiritlessly playing cards or drinking away their troubles. Special Agent Dorm Harkaway, formerly Captain Dorm Harkaway of the Alliance Army sat hunched over a cup of something that smelled like lamp-fuel and tasted even worse.

He wasn’t Dorm Harkaway today he was Dorm Rendell, a hard-nosed street tough from New Peking on the other side of the continent. If all went well he would be Dorm Rendell for quite a while. He knew New Peking well enough to pull of the persona he’d spent his first three years as a Federal Agent there before he got promoted to undercover work. He’d investigated organised crime, drug triads, rape gangs and a myriad of other scum until he knew the seedy underbelly of New Peking as well as any man. Indeed he believed he knew it as well as Blake Taylor, the leader of the gang he had come to infiltrate. Blake had gone to college in New Peking, graduating top of his engineering class, did some guerrilla work for the independence in the last days of the war, wrote for an underground resistance newspaper before that.

Then for some reason Blake had fled out here, away from the city where he became a man, across the other side of the planet to where he was born. There was nothing in the man’s file as to why he had left New Peking. Dorm supposed it didn’t matter. He knew more than enough to hold his cover and any moment now the bait he had been dangling for two days would be taken.

He was in the village of San Mark, where Blake’s Blades came for supplies, selling loot and entertainment. Two sundowns past he had ridden into town, hired himself a room on the floor above the bar and settled down to wait. He’d dropped a few hints about the shady past of Dorm Rendell, mentions of jobs pulled, of crime bosses worked for. It was never more than a few words, here or there, no boasting, only hints without elaboration. Enough to put the word out there that he was a useful man to have around in any sort of enterprise. He’d played various incarnations o