Deep-Fried Black Diamonds

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“What’s a truffle?”

“You don’t know what a truffle is?” Ling Wong Guoy looked at me in astonishment, then reached into his shoulderbag. He pulled out a wrinkled, prune-like object the size of a grapefruit. It was the color of an old black boot that has been worn by a nickel-iron miner in the far reaches of the Belt for twenty years or more without ever being polished. He set it gently on my desk, careful not to let it bounce in the nominal .04 gravity of Ceres. “Here, taste.”

Now it was my turn to gape. “You want me to taste that?”

Ling Wong Guoy gestured at the miserable cubicle that Hartman, Bemis & Choupette laughingly called my office. “Would I come here to poison you? Would my kinswoman Jin Tshei allow me to poison you?”

Looking down at the strange black object on my desk, I actually considered his two ridiculous questions for a fleeting moment. Jin Tshei is my girlfriend’s wife and—I thought—a close friend of mine. Could she finally have decided that she wanted Isabel all for herself, and this was her way of—

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