Well armed, well armoured and too confident by half for strangers at night in the darkest corners of the Warrens.'

'Mercenaries? Bounty hunters? Hired thugs?'

'Yes. Maybe.'

'Which?'

'Maybe all three. Not locals. One of them had Killean tattoos covering his whole face and head. Hands too, arms most like as well coz I could see two dragons disappearing up his sleeve. No Medusan would go in for diose. Too proud of their fair skins to mark them.'

'Plenty of off-worlders in the Freeport, Weez. Lots of them live here.'

'I would know any hard-boy that looked like that, captain. Muscle like that is hard to miss.'

'Maybe you would at that. You said there was more than one.'

'Aye. Tall man, massive, garbed all in grey. Robes, boots, tunic, cloak. Only thing that wasn't black was his hand. All silver it was - prosthetic gauntlet of some sort, I guess. Expensive by the look of it, forge world stuff, maybe even Old Terran. He was a monster - bigger than Dugan by a half, and maybe there was something wrong with his mouth. He left the talking to the tattooed man.'

Janus liked the sound of this less and less. In a long career in the darker corners of the Imperium, he had made too many enemies. When his star had been in the ascendant it had not mattered. Nobody would touch a man with his reputation, particularly not a man with the backing of the Medusan syndics and one of the big Navigator Houses, but lately things had been different; he was not a force to be reckoned with any more. He had heard it said that not a few of the syndics wanted him dead. He had laughed those rumours off. The syndics after all were merchants, and they did not murder men when there was no profit in it. Not unless those men had cost the syndics a great deal of money, and were privy to all manner of disturbing knowledge, the more cynical part of his mind whispered.

Who were these men then? Heavies from the syndics sent to teach him that failure did not pay? Or were they from Fat Roj, trying to find out when he was going to pay off his gambling debts? He did not relish the prospect of explaining to the Fat Man that the last of his money was to be found floating in that goblet there. Roj had been known to pull men's fingers off with a pair of pincers for doing things like that. He didn't even get his muscle boys to do it, because he liked doing the bloody work himself.

How had things gotten so bad, so quickly, Janus asked himself? Not so long ago he had been at the top of the world, a rogue trader whose services were sought out by half the wealthy merchants of the subsector, an explorer who was known to always come back wealthy, whose backers always got at least a four or five hundred per cent return on their investment.

He already knew the answer: Typhon. That hellworld had changed everything. It had cost him more than half his crew and nearly his whole complement of mercenaries. It had damn near cost him his life and almost certainly cost him his soul. He should never have gone there, but he had been a different man then, filled with confidence, his ego bloated on a decade of success.