Whenever something brewed between two of these minor warlords, we'd come flocking in and hire ourselves out to whichever side we felt had slightly more justice. Sometimes we wound up shooting at each other, but you couldn't even be sure of that, since most of us didn't know, beyond a guess or two, who the other D.O.'s were. Usually, though, we had enough brains to pick the right side, and we'd make sure that was the one that came out on top.
It was a process of elimination, actually. The warlords were helped to knock each other off until, eventually, those who remained either proved themselves to be strong leaders, which was what frontier planets needed, or else megalomaniacs, in which case it paid to devote a full-scale military campaign to them.
It was a highly informal system, but it had worked. It was tough on us, but it wasn't any harder than freelance grifting had been. It left an awful lot to personal discretion, and we paid ourselves out of whatever came to hand, but there hadn't been any big totalitarian regimes lately, either.
"Yeah, I did pretty well," I repeated.
Ming puckered his mouth and winked. I used to try and figure out how he did it, standing behind his bar all day, never going out, never talking much except to a few people like me. But I knew for sure that he could have told me exactly how much I'd made on that Venus job—and the gimmick I'd pulled to get it past Customs, too.
But that was why I was in here. Something was up—something big, and I wanted to find out what it was before every grifter and chiseler in the System tried to cut a piece of it for himself.
"I got a note in my mailbox today," I said casually.
"Yeah?" he asked, just as quietly.
"Must have been put there as soon as I touched down this morning. Somebody wants me to go to work for them. They're paying high—too high, maybe. Hear anything about a big job coming off somewhere?"
Ming grinned. "If you mean that little letter from Transolar, yeah, I know about that." He got serious, and moved closer.