And my kind of business was the dirtiest, lousiest, most thankless racket in the world.
The bartender moved up to where I was sitting. "Have another one, Ash?" he asked.
"Yeah, sure, Ming," I said. "You still make the best Stingers in the System. Maybe that's because you don't brew your own gin."
"Could be, Ash, could be," he laughed. He shook up the drink and poured it in my glass. "How'd it go on Venus?"
"It went," I said.
Ming was one of the few people who admitted knowing I was a D.O.—a Detached Operative. It was a crummy job, but it suited me.
We were the hired-gun rabble of the System, thrown together into the damnedest police force there had ever been. Spacial expansion hadn't really gotten underway until after the Terro-Martian War, and after it ended every would-be bigshot there was had realized that all he really needed to set himself up as a pocket-size dictator was some salvaged gear from the mess the war had left, a crew that wasn't too particular, and a good-looking piece of territory in the practically limitless areas of space. Most of them had picked slices of Venus. There were a few in the Asteroids, hooked up with renegade Marties, and one or two that had actually grabbed sections of Mars.
Sending regular law enforcement officers or Marines after each one of these boys would have been physically impossible. Earth government had come up with a cuter idea.
It was a lot more economical to fight one big decisive battle than to endure a series of inconclusive skirmishes. There were a lot of us boys out in space, most of us just drifting from one port to the next, picking up a living by our wits, and by our skill with a gun, some of us. Earth government had quietly picked out the ones they considered trustworthy, sworn us in, and turned us loose with a few standing orders and a lot of dependence on our discretion.