Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [1]
Beads of moisture had condensed into a solid sheet on the container’s outer surface and trickled down his wrist into his gold-braided uniform sleeve.
What a way to live! Oseon 2795 was a pocket of penury in a plutocrat’s paradise. The drab mining asteroid, thrust cruelly near the furnace of furnaces, orbited through a system of pleasure resorts and vacation homes for the galaxy’s superwealthy, like an itinerant junkman.
The gambler was wishing at the moment that he’d never heard of the place. That’s what came of taking advice from spaceport attendants. A trickle of moisture ran down his neck into the upright collar of his semiformal uniform. Who said hardrock miners were always rich?
He shuffled the oversized deck once, twice, three times, twice again in listless ritual succession, passed it briefly for a perfunctory cut to the perspiring player on his right, dealt the cards around, two to a customer, and waited impatiently for the amateurs to assess their hands. Real or imagined, the heat seemed to slow everybody’s mental processes.
Initial bets were added to the ante in the middle of the table. It didn’t amount to a great fortune by anybody’s standards—except perhaps the poverty-cautious participants in the evening’s exercise in the mathematics of probability. To them the gambler was a romantic figure, a professional out-system adventurer with his own private starship and a reputation for outrageous luck. The backroom microcredit plungers were trying desperately to impress him, he realized sadly, and they were succeeding: at the present rate, he’d have to drain the charge from his electric shaver into the ship’s energy storage system, just to lift off the Core-forsaken planetoid.
Having your own starship was not so much a matter of being able to buy it in the first place (he’d won his in another sabacc game in the last system but one he’d visited) as being able to afford to operate it. So far, he’d lost money on the deal.
Looking down, he saw he’d dealt himself a minus-nine: Balance, plus the Two of Sabres. Not terribly promising, even at the best of times, but sabacc was a game of dramatic reversals, often at the turn of a single card-chip. Or even without turning it—he watched the deuce with a thrill that never staled as the face of the electronic pasteboard blurred and faded, refocused and solidified as the Seven of Staves.
That gave him a minus-four: insignificant progress, but progress nevertheless. He saw the current bet, flipping a thirty-credit token into the pot, but declined to raise.
It also meant that the original Seven of Staves, in somebody’s hand or in the undealt remainder of the deck, had been transformed into something altogether different. He watched the heat-flushed faces of the players, learning nothing. Each of the seventy-eight card-chips transformed itself at random intervals, unless it lay flat on its back within the shallow interference field of the gaming table. This made for a fast-paced, nerve-wracking game.
The young gambler found it relaxing. Ordinarily.
“I’ll take a card, please, Captain Calrissian.” Vett Fori, the player in patched and faded denyms on the gambler’s left, was the chief supervisor of the asteroid mining operation, a tiny, tough-looking individual of indeterminate age, with a surprisingly gentle smile hidden among the worry-lines. She’d been betting heavily—for that impecunious crowd, anyway—and losing steadily, all evening, as if preoccupied by more than the heat. An unlit cigar rested on the table edge beside her elbow.
“Please, call me Lando,” the young gambler replied, dealing her a card-chip. “ ‘Captain Calrissian’ sounds like the one-eyed commander of a renegade Imperial dreadnought. My Millennium Falcon’s only a small converted freighter, and a rather elderly one at that, I’m afraid.” He watched her for an indication of the card she’d taken. Nothing.
A nasal chuckle sounded from across the table. Arun