Synthesis - James Swallow [9]
“I find mathematical conundrums quite stimulating, actually,” said Y’lira.
“Oh, for blade’s sake.” Pava’s face flushed indigo, and she shoved the rest of her coins into the middle of the table. “There. All in.”
“Reveal,” said Tuvok, ignoring the Andorian’s emotive reaction, nodding to Y’lira.
The Selenean bowed her head and turned her second card, bringing out a Prylar in a monk’s habit to go with the Kai already before her.
“Ah, ‘The Passing of Knowledge,’ an eight-point pattern,” Torvig noted brightly.
Y’lira raised her golden hands from the table in a gesture of surrender; with no stake left, she was out of the game. Her last gesture was to denote the next player to reveal, and she nodded at the lieutenant.
The others turned to watch Pava without comment. The lieutenant’s lips curled, and she snapped over her other oval card with a hard flourish, nailing it to the table with her finger. A Ranjen, the mirror of Tuvok’s shown card, stared back up at her. She felt a sudden surge of excitement. Torvig had a Ranjen showing as well, and the poor second-rank card offered him as little chance for a win as the commander.
“Ten points for Kai and Ranjen, ‘The Answered Question,’” said the Choblik. “The lieutenant leads.”
Pava immediately pointed at Tuvok, whose irritatingly composed manner had been grating on her as he had siphoned off her coins throughout the game. “Reveal!”
Without a glimmer of concern, the Vulcan displayed a Ranjen. At only two points, “The Bearers of Truth” was the lowest-scoring hand that had appeared all night. Pava immediately clamped down on the beginning of the grin that threatened to race across her lips, and she had to place her hands flat on the table to stop herself from preemptively reaching for the pot.
“Ah, me, then.” Torvig’s tail manipulator looped over his right shoulder and delicately flipped the last oval onto its face. Pava’s moment of anticipation disintegrated so decisively that for a second, she was sure she could hear it shatter like breaking glass. The dark complexion and gold-haloed face of an Emissary card lay there, silently announcing her failure.
“The Emissary and the Ranjen,” Tuvok intoned, in case Pava wasn’t clear on how badly she’d been beaten. “Eleven points scored for ‘The Learned Ones.’ Well played, Ensign.”
Torvig’s augmented eyes blinked, and he reached out with his forepaw cyberlimbs to draw the pile of Bajoran coinage to him. “That was quite engaging. It’s a shame these are only score markers. I imagine on Bajor, I’d be quite wealthy.”
Pava grumbled something under her breath and stood up. “I think next time I play, it won’t be against people with calculators in their heads.” Of course, intellectually, she knew that the coins were valueless tokens replicated just for the sake of the game, but that didn’t soften the blow of losing. And losing to a diminutive ensign who resembled the snowskippers she’d hunted in her teens on Andor just rubbed ice into the wound.
Torvig paused. “I’m the only one here with neuralprocessing circuits in my cranium.”
Y’lira smiled serenely. “There’s always Chief Bralik’s floating Tongo tournament, if it’s high emotion you’re looking for, ma’am. Although it’s mostly greed, not passion.”
Pava shot her a glare. She was never really clear on the cryptolinguist’s grasp of sarcasm. “My meaning is, games of chance should be exactly that, random and chaotic, just like real life! It’s the thrill of the roll of the dice, the turn of a card. It’s not something to be bled dry of all emotion, just reduced to equations and probability graphs.”
“In all systems, even those that appear to be chaotic in nature, there is a form of order,” Tuvok replied. “If it can be determined, then it can be emulated and predicted. I would submit to you, Lieutenant, that the element of chance is illusory. It simply requires a means of computing robust enough to transcend it.”
Ensign Torvig’s robotic fingers had made quick work of dividing his pile of winnings into four identical towers