Prologue

Nothing is what it seems. Take space, for instance. Stars are separated by thousands of light-years, and yet you'd be mistaken to think that the vacuum between them is empty. In reality, it is full of atomic and sub-atomic particles, flying around, drifting, colliding, combining, forming.

And so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when Geelan, my new Sirian business partner, never showed up with our money. I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that the bubble-skinned good-for-nothing booked a private flight offworld, bundled up the cash, and conveniently lost himself in that great not-so-emptiness that we like to call space.

Y'know, now that I think about it, I guess all perception is some sort of self-delusion. I'm fifty-nine years old. Downsized into the unemployment line, I find I'm too expensive to be picked up by somebody else and too close to retirement to be taken seriously anyway. I know companies have to stay lean and mean; the Atlas Asteroid Mining Company was no exception. But I figured the 20% growth I supervised had been worth something to them. Ah, correction. The growth meant plenty to them; it was me they had lost the use for.

Six street-pounding months later, still unemployed and with my savings nearly spent, I threw in my last chips with a suave metals dealer who needed someone of my "caliber" to help him corner the Vegan market on nano-wrimonium. I guess by "caliber," he meant gullible.

I was proud of myself. I was being entrepreneurial...doing all the re-inventing people said you had to do in these nimble times. Even though I was a corporate veteran, Geelan promised to show me the twisting ropes of entrepreneurship. And what did I have to show for it? Standing outside the bank, alone on this busy street, I could point to a simmering fury, a repressed curtain of panic, and, twirling in my hands, a colorful dunce cap monogrammed with the word sucker.

If you've never been taken to the cleaners, I can't begin to tell you how humiliating it is. And when your antagonist makes off with everything you own, it gets downright frightening. But what's utterly intolerable is when you know better. It's one thing to be taken because you're ignorant. But, brother, I ain't ignorant. I managed a $100 million mining operation in the Asteroid Belt for 10 years, one I grew into an industry standard. I know metals. I know mining. I even know about the metals markets on Vega.

And along came Geelan...a metallurgist-turned-dealer who promised untold riches from a market I myself had identified a few years before as promising. And he wanted me, a washed-up but very capable expert, to help him reap the rewards.

Hey, what you call space, I call a particle-rich ether. And what I call a visionary investor, you would know to be a two-bit crook. In the end, you're the smarter one. And me? I'm about to learn how to live the rest of my life on the change in my pocket...