Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [80]
He’d used his own communications equipment, once they were out of the atmosphere of Dilonexa XXIII, saving several hundred credits in the process. Doluff was delighted that Lando was on the way, and promised a high-stakes game in the most luxurious of surroundings. Lando shaved and showered, dressed himself in civilian clothing, though they were still several days’ transit from the Oseon. He simply wanted to get the feeling back of doing what he was properly cut out to do. As Vuffi Raa droided the controls, Lando sat in the lounge practicing with the cards.
There were seventy-eight of these, in five suits: Sabres, Staves, Flasks, and Coins, plus the special suit of face cards with negative values. The object was to build a two- or three-card hand adding up to twenty-three, no more. What made it especially difficult was that the cards were “smart”—each was, in fact, a sophisticated electronic chip capable of changing randomly to another value, while the card it replaced changed to something else. This made for a fast-paced, nerve-wracking game combining elements of skill and fortune.
Lando thought of it as relaxing.
He held up a card, watched it blur and shift and refocus, from Commander of Staves to Three of Coins. In the surface field of a gaming table, the cards would retain their identities. This was necessary for scoring: imagine tossing down a perfect twenty-three, only to have it transmute itself into a losing hand.
Another card, the Seven of Sabres. It stayed its old familiar self for rather a longish time, finally changed into Endurance, one of the negative cards. Lando shuffled it back into the deck.
The Oseon, he thought: I should know a great deal more about it and its people. Principally, what the traffic will bear. He turned from the cards to a datalink, punched a few buttons. There it was: oh, yes! While it might be remarkable for its rich inhabitants, it was downright famous for its seasonally spectacular scenery.
Oseon was the home of the Flamewind.
Many stellar systems have asteroid belts, where whole planets have come unglued or never quite managed to coalesce. Circular zones occupied by rocks rather than worlds, their constituents could range in size from sand grains to objects hundreds—even thousands—of kilometers in extent. Some few systems had more than one such belt.
The Oseon had nothing else.
In the Oseon there were no planets at all in the proper sense of the word. Not even the Core knew what disaster had taken place there, perhaps billions of years before the advent of humankind. Maybe a rogue star had passed too close, its gravity well disrupting the planet-forming process. Maybe some unique element in the makeup of the system had caused the planets to blow themselves up.
Perhaps there had been an ancient, alien war.
Whatever the cause, the Oseon sun was now surrounded by seven broad bands of floating debris, billions upon billions of subplanetary bodies. The largest of these worldlets, Oseon 6845, was an artificially honeycombed mountain seven hundred kilometers in diameter, filled with luxury hotels, nightspots, and palatial residences. Other rocks in other belts had been converted into estates for the rich and superrich. There was plenty of room.
All of this, while quite extraordinary, was not in itself sufficient to turn the place into a five-star tourist attraction. But once a year (by what reckoning Lando forgot even as he read it), the Oseon System’s sun flared in a peculiar manner (giving rise to the theory about a unique element blowing up the planets). As the flares tore streamers of excited vapor from the nearest of the asteroids, the entire system fluoresced, pulsed, resonated, generating enormous bands of shifting color,