Star Wars_ X-Wing 08_ Isard's Revenge - Michael A. Stackpole [121]
“And this information about a convoy, it was leaked to you through a previously reliable source?”
“Yes, though no report goes unverified.” She pressed her hands together and rested her chin on her fingertips. “This is why I have noted the problems to you.”
“I gathered that, thank you. I suspect, if we check the course of that convoy, there is really only one good spot for an ambush, and we would have been hit there ourselves. Two days, is it, when they expected to hit us?”
“Two days, yes.”
“Good.” Krennel stood and punched a button on his desktop comm unit. “Captain, have my shuttle standing by, I will be heading up to the Reckoning. Issue recall orders for all crew on leave. That recall applies to Binder as well. Have Captain Phulik meet me on Reckoning. Krennel out.”
Isard nodded her head at him. “You’ll be striking somewhere in the New Republic.”
“I will. Once on Reckoning I will call for Emperor’s Wisdom and Decisive to join me here to stage our raid. They should get here in four hours or so. From here we will be ready to launch the boldest raid yet, one that will show the New Republic as the sham it truly is. Eighteen short hours after we leave here, they will learn the folly of attacking me.”
Isard’s eyes glistened. “Eighteen hours. You’ll strike at Coruscant?”
“Yes. It’s a lesson the New Republic has never learned.” Krennel gave Isard a thin-lipped smile. “To kill an enemy, the quickest method is always to strike at the head.”
Corran Horn had actually gotten to like some of the pilots in Krennel’s employ. The nicest were the guys drawn from the Hegemony itself. They seemed interested in defending their homes from encroachment by the New Republic, and Corran had to respect that. Still, their motivation wasn’t the main reason Corran liked them.
He looked down at his sabacc hand and stifled a smile. These guys from the Hegemony must be the worst sabacc players I’ve ever met. The stack of credit chits in front of him dwarfed the piles before the other three men playing. Better yet, he had the ace of flasks down on the table, in the interference field, and the flux had shifted the two cards in his hand into the ace of coins and the court card endurance, which was worth negative 8. Since each ace was worth 15, this left his hand with a total of 22, which was only one shy of the 23 total to win.
A grizzled older pilot looked at him. “Your bet, Klick.”
Corran slid his other two cards facedown on top of the ace of flasks. “I’m locked. I’ll bet two hundred credits.”
Two of the pilots tossed their hands in, but the older man squinted at his cards, then tossed two gold credit chits onto the hand pot pile. “I call.”
“Twenty-two.” Corran slowly flipped his cards over so the others could read them. “Can you beat it?”
“No.” The older man snarled. “Emperor’s Black Bones, you are the luckiest cardplayer I’ve ever met.”
“Not luck, skill.” Corran glanced at the sabacc table’s data readout. It indicated the pot contained 2,500 credits, 250 of which he skimmed off and fed into the sabacc pot, which currently stood at 15,000 credits. A two-card 23—which was known as a pure sabacc—or another three-card combination of 0, 2, and 3—the idiot’s array—would win that pot and end the game. “My deal, I believe.”
Corran gathered the cards and reached up to feed them into the LeisureMech RH7 Cardshark dealer-droid. The dealer-droid—which hung down from the ceiling—shuffled the cards, then extended its body so its manipulator arms could drop a card before each player. It swiveled around noiselessly and the twin stun pikes—which most players called “cheater prods”—remained retracted. After a second circuit, the cylindrical body withdrew into its base. Its with-drawal triggered the flux, shifting the value of the cards.