Read Online The Outpost by Mike Resnick - Free Book Online

once and for all who’s the best, I might as well let your boss pay for my transportation and drinks.”
    “He was hoping you’d feel that way, sir,” she replied.
    “By the way, where the hell is Monte Carlo IV?” I asked.
    “Out by the Lesser Magellenic Cloud,” was the answer. “Mr. Strongbow won the entire Cromwell system on a single flip of a coin last year, and officially renamed it about two months ago.” She paused. “May I help you pack?”
    I patted the pocket that held my wallet, and the one that held my lucky dice.
    “I’ve got everything I need,” I announced.
    “You might want a change of clothes,” she suggested.
    “I’ll buy some new clothes on Monte Carlo IV and charge them to your boss.”
    She shrugged and took me to her ship. The crew consisted of three other women in addition to the one who’d delivered the invite, and they called themselves the Queens of Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts and Spades, though truth to tell I never could tell which was which. I think they changed names every few hours just to keep me confused.
    It was a long flight to the Monte Carlo system, so I went into DeepSleep a few hours into the trip and had them wake me when we were about an hour from our destination. I’m always famished when I come out of DeepSleep, and that always surprises me, because as often as they explain it to me, I keep forgetting that my systems don’t actually stop, but just slow down to a crawl—and when you haven’t eaten in a few days, even with your metabolism working at one percent speed, you’re still hungry.
    By the time I finished eating, we’d touched down, and I was transported to a penthouse suite atop the biggest, glitziest hotel on the planet, which befitted a high roller like myself. There were maybe half a dozen bedrooms, and three of them came equipped with their own women, and there were eight or nine bathrooms and a bunch of fireplaces and holo screens and two well-stocked bars and a robot bartender (but not as friendly as Reggie) and even a library filled with real honest-to-goodness books rather than tapes and disks and cubes. I’d been in a few nicer suites in my time, but I had to admit that it was pretty impressive for as far outside of the Monarchy as it was.
    I’d just finished looking around and introducing myself to the three women when the Queen of Hearts (or maybe it was Diamonds) told me that my host was waiting for me downstairs. I bade the other ladies goodnight and followed her. There was a huge, elegant casino on the ground floor. It not only had the usual human and alien games, but it had real cards, real dice, and real live dealers and pit bosses—none of those computerized holographs that you see on worlds like New Vegas and Little Monaco. We walked right through the place without slowing down, and then came to a studded metal door that had guards the size of Catastrophe Baker standing on each side of it.
    “This is Mr. Strongbow’s private gaming room,” explained the Queen of Hearts as they opened the door for us. “It is reserved for himself and his personal guests.”
    High Stakes Eddie was sitting on a leather chair at the far side of a felt-covered mahogany table, a drink in front of him, a smokeless Brandeis VII cigar in his left hand. He was smaller than I’d expected, bald as a billiard ball, and wearing an outfit that couldn’t make up its mind what it wanted to be. One moment it looked like a toga, then it changed into a military uniform, then a Bendorian tuxedo (you ever see one of those things? The sons of bitches glow in the dark!), and then back to a toga.
    His outfit may have been the height of fashion, but his room was an anachronism. The chairs didn’t adjust to your body, they actually rested on the floor, and the lights were in the ceiling instead of floating over your right shoulder. Still, it was his place to decorate any way he wanted. “Bet-a-World O’Grady!” he said with a smile. “You can’t imagine how much