Virtue MacKenzie was one of those people. She didn’t know that Father William was preaching on Goldenrod, and wouldn’t have cared even if she had known. Her only interest was in finding the outlaw known as the Jolly Swagman, and, through him, Santiago.

She landed her ship on Goldenrod, a temperate little world that was owned by a cartel of farming syndicates. The crops were harvested by robots, which worked under the direction of a handful of men and women who pretended that they were executives but knew in their hearts that they were only mechanics and caretakers. There was only one city, an ancient Tradertown that predated the farms and had expanded to the point where it now housed almost eight thousand inhabitants; and, like so many Tradertowns on the Frontier, it bore the name of the planet.

She had a feeling that she wouldn’t be staying there long, so rather than reserving a room at a hotel, she left her gear in her ship and took a shuttlecart into the Tradertown. When the cart came to a stop, she found herself in the middle of a town square, surrounded by long, low buildings and standing next to a monument of the planet’s founder.

Unlike Cain, who had spent two decades traveling from one Tradertown to the next and usually sought his information in bars and brothels, she hunted up the local news office—the world was too small to possess its own network and in fact employed only one stringer—presented her credentials, and asked for the Jolly Swagman’s whereabouts.

“You’ve got more important things to worry about than meeting the Swagman,” said the middle-aged man who had greeted her.

“Such as?” asked Virtue.

“You might start by giving some serious thought to getting off the planet alive.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well,” he said, “it’s not news, so we haven’t released it—not that any other world would give a damn about what goes on here anyway—but the word on the grapevine is that you made a certain party on Pegasus very angry with you. He thought it might be bad for business to redress his grievances too close to home, so he chose Goldenrod as a more fitting setting.”

“He’s put a hit out on me?”

“I understand that he’s hired three killers to see to it that you don’t leave Goldenrod.”

“Who are they?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Wonderful,” she muttered. She glanced out at the street, trying to guess which of the many people that she could see looked like hired killers, then turned back to the stringer. “How do I apply for police protection?”

The man shook his head. “You’re not in the Democracy any longer: We don’t have a police department.”

“You must have some way of protecting your citizens,” she persisted.

“Goldenrod is the Swagman’s world—he protects it.”