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Lando shook his head. “You know the Navy: ‘hurry up and wait.’ ”

Again the knowing, comradely nod. Lando had a friend, now; he revised his prices upward 20 percent. “Sounds like you were maybe a Navy man yourself,” the chief suggested.

Lando returned the nod. “Just a swabbie, when I was a kid,” he lied. “Never made it big, like you, Chief.”

“Well, we all have our place in the scheme of things, son. They also serve who only—”

“Sell cigars? And while we’re speaking of cigars, why don’t you have half a dozen of these for later, Chief. A man only gets so many luxuries, out here on the front line.”

“Sabacc!” the excited rating cried, gathering in a pot that wouldn’t have paid for one of Lando’s cigars. The gambler made a practice of losing loudly on the small bets and raking in the winnings as inconspicuously as possible when the stakes were high. Now he was following a policy of steady losses on nearly every hand, in order to win the larger game that awaited him in the ThonBoka.

It was the fourth cruiser he and Vuffi Raa had visited in as many days, using the original warrant officer’s connections. Each transfer, ship-to-ship, with its attendant docking and security procedures growing laxer and more perfunctory, brought the Millennium Falcon and her real cargo closer to the StarCave and its waiting denizens.

The freighter hadn’t been immune to searches, but nobody wastes much time—or olfactory sensibilities—on the trash and toilet recyclers, especially when they were genuinely full of substances that everyone heartily regarded as filth. And especially when no one below the rank of admiral seemed to know the reason behind the stupid blockade.

Lando was rapidly coming to love military security procedures.

With inexpert hands made clumsier by petty greed, the rating dealt the cards out. There were seventy-eight of them, divided into five suits: Sabres, Staves, Flasks, and Coins, arrayed from Aces to Masters, and a special suit of face cards with negative values and more profound meanings. The object of the game was simplicity itself: acquire cards until the value of your hand was exactly twenty-three, or as close as you could get without going over. A perfect zero or a minus twenty-three was as bad as a twenty-four, and there were certain special hands, such as that combining a Two of anything, a Three of anything, and an Idiot from the special suit, which ritual decreed were the equivalent of twenty-three.

The game being played in the cruiser Reliable’s MessRec area included Lando, two cooks, and a pair of low-ranking gunners. Lando wore his most tattered clothing, pressed with razor creases, for the occasion.

What made sabacc really interesting—and destroyed the nerves of most amateurs who tried to play it—was that each card was an electronic chip, capable of changing face and value at random any moment until the card-chip was lying flat on a gaming table or upon the electronic mat Lando had provided. Thus a winning hand, held too long, could change spontaneously to garbage, or, more rarely, a mess of meaningless numbers could become a palladium mine.

Lando found the game relaxing and a welcome change from the exigencies of interstellar freight-hauling. He’d always enjoyed it, no matter the stakes, possibly because he found it quite difficult to lose. Even honestly.

The older of the two cooks took the hand and the deal shifted to him accordingly. He’d won perhaps half what the previous winner had and was looking inordinately pleased with himself. Lando inwardly shook his head, remembering times when the ransom for a princess or the price of a starship had rested before him on a table in the most exclusive and luxurious settings imaginable. It was difficult to keep the right perspective, to remember from moment to moment that the real stakes here were the highest he’d ever played for: the survival of an entire race, and whatever he might demand in fabricated precious stones indistinguishable from nature’s best.

With pitiable awkwardness, the cook