Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [76]
One of the troopers in his unit had gotten engaged, however, and the shift had an excuse to celebrate, so Nova had gone along, since the man was also a student of his.
It was a nice enough joint. Clean, well ventilated, the crowd noisy but not over the top. Obviously the place to be off-hours in this sector, as it was standing room only. And the ale was cold.
He noticed a security guy watching things, and after a few minutes of surreptitiously watching him watch the crowd, Nova had marked him as a player. He stood head and shoulders over most of the crowd, but he wasn’t dependent just on his heft—that was obvious. The man was a fighter. Nova didn’t know which art he favored or what kind of combat moves he had, but there was definitely something there. After so many years of dancing the dance, you could tell, just by the way a man stood or leaned against a wall. It was subtle—there was an attention to balance and stances, a way of shifting weight that, if you knew what to look for, was easy to see. This guy could take care of himself and anybody else in here who might want to give him trouble as well.
Except for Sergeant Stihl, of course.
He smiled into his ale. It was only his second in two hours, and there was still three-quarters of the purple liquid left. He’d already burned up the alcohol from the first mug, and he had no intention of continuing to drink enough to dull his wits. His days of getting hammered in public were long past—what was the point in having skills in a martial art if you were too fuzz-headed to use them when the need arose? He’d once seen a Bunduki player, a guy who had won top-level matches, get soused at a cantina in a dirtside dive. The player had gotten into a tiff with a local, and because he was drunk had gotten his butt thumped pretty good—despite his skill. Nova wasn’t going to find himself in that position, not if he could help it. And he didn’t go to cantinas to fight—that was just plain stupid. You never knew who had a vibroblade tucked away in a back pocket, or a couple of friends who would jump in unexpectedly to help out when you squared off.
Nova was to wonder, later, if there really was anything to the metaphysical theory that thinking such thoughts gave them a higher probability of actually occurring. Maybe if he’d been thinking about doing his laundry or herding workers into the mess hall, the guy walking past wouldn’t have stumbled at that moment. Maybe. Or maybe it had something to do with Blink.
Blink was his private name for a knack he had for anticipating things, particularly movements of opponents. Many times, during a fight, he would know somehow, before the movement began, that the other guy was going to throw an elbow or a kick. Of course, being able to anticipate your rival’s next move was the essence of good fighting, but Blink went beyond that. Not even years of practice could tell you, for example, if an antagonist was about to activate a hidden portable confounder, a sensory scrambling device that could momentarily throw you off-balance. Or if another fighter was coming around the corner as backup to the first. But these things, and others, had happened to Nova. And he’d known. Somehow.
Whatever the reason, he saw the man, who was carrying a platter of mugs filled with ale he had collected at the bar, catch his boot on a stool leg, and because the stool was locked down, the leg didn’t move. The guy started to fall, directly toward Nova who, without thinking, stood, reached out with his left hand, and tapped the falling man on the shoulder, deflecting him to the side so that instead of dropping the platter of mugs into Nova’s lap, the man fell past him half a meter to the right.
The mugs flew, showering fizzy ale in gouts every which way. The platter hit the floor well ahead of their former owner, who managed to break his fall with his hands. Then, big, drunk, and really irritated, he shoved away