The Velvet Comet spun slowly in space, resembling nothing more than a giant barbell.

Its metal skin glistened a brilliant silver, and its array of flashing lights could be seen from literally tens of thousands of miles away.

It orbited about the planet Charlemagne, a tepid green-and-blue world that was barely visible beneath a layer of swirling white clouds, but it was owned by the Vainmill Syndicate on the distant world of Deluros VIII. Seventeen different engineering firms had worked on its design, thousands of men and machines had spent literally millions of hours on its construction, and it housed a permanent staff of more than six hundred men and women.

During its brief twelve years of existence it had become a byword for opulence and elegance, a synonym for hedonism and dissipation.

Its fame quickly spread throughout the worlds of the Republic, and while its Sybaritic luxuries and even its air of exclusivity were often imitated, they were never equalled.

The Velvet Comet, after more than three decades of gestation, had been born in space, and less than a century after its birth it would die in space, mourned by few and forgotten by most. But in the meantime, it did its living with a grace and style that would not be seen again for many millennia.

It was the crown jewel in the Syndicate's Entertainment and Leisure Division, a showplace where the rich and the famous--and occasionally the notorious--gathered to see and be seen, to conspicuously consume, and to revel in pleasures which were designed to satisfy even the most jaded of tastes. For while the Velvet Comet housed a compendium of the finest shops and boutiques, of gourmet restaurants and elegant lounges, while it boasted a fabulous casino and a score of other entertainments, it was first and foremost a brothel.

And it was the brothel, and the promises of secret delights that it proffered, that enticed its select clientele out to the Comet. They came at first by the dozens, then the hundreds, and eventually from both nearby and distant worlds.

Money was no object to these men and women; they came to play, and to relax, and to indulge.