As for Black Orpheus himself, he went directly to the source, as always. It took him almost a month to track her down after he’d reached the Altair system, and then he had to wait another week before she would agree to see him. When they finally met face to face, he took one look at her and decided that she was the most beautiful woman he had seen since the death of his beloved Eurydice.

By the time he left some twenty minutes later, he wasn’t even sure that she was a woman—but he knew that she was the most formidable killer he had ever encountered.

He never spoke of her again, although he did write a couple of verses about her, and when others asked about Altair of Altair he always found a way to change the subject. Nobody knows what happened during their one brief meeting, but it obviously had a profound effect upon him, one that lasted for the remainder of his life.

One of the people who wished that Black Orpheus had written a little more about her was Sebastian Cain, if only so he would have some idea of what to expect when he finally reached her.

It had taken him two weeks to discover that she did not live on Altair III, but rather under it, and now he stalked, gun in hand, through the labyrinthian network of tunnels and corridors that led to her chamber. It had cost him ten thousand credits just to find out how and where to enter the seemingly endless maze, and he had then spent the better part of two days losing the trio of men who had been tailing him since he had touched down. Finally, reasonably certain that he was no longer being followed, he had entered the subterranean world of Altair of Altair.

That had been two hours ago. Since then the temperature had dropped somewhat, and the air had become dank and stale. The corridors themselves were illuminated by diffuse blue light that gave them a surreal glow, but none of them were marked or labeled, and after he found himself back where he had started, he withdrew a small knife and began carving crude directional symbols at every intersection.

He paused, wiped some sweat from his face, and cursed under his breath. There had to be a quicker way into her headquarters, and he decided to give himself one more hour. If he found her by then, well and good; if not, he would retrace his steps, return to the surface, take his money back from the man who had sold him his information and possibly kill him as well, and start his search all over again from scratch. If he went back to his hotel, he was sure to pick up his troika of followers once more; possibly he would separate one from the others and find some means, painless or otherwise, of extracting the information he needed.