The asteroid Pallas floats in the void, a haven for the desperate and the damned. Here, far beyond the reach of Earth's laws, outlaws rub shoulders with gamblers, and a peculiar race called the Kiddies run the most infamous casino in the solar system. The mining town is a pressure cooker of violence, ambition, and bad choices, where everyone has a gun and nobody trusts anyone. MacCauley comes to Pallas looking for one man: a crime lord who destroyed his life with narcotics. But as he hunts his prey through the asteroid's neon-lit tunnels and shadowed cantinas, he discovers the Kiddies hold secrets that could change everything. Frederik Pohl delivers a lean, hardboiled tale of moral compromise on the frontier of space, where the only law is survival.
