Chapter 3
Des approached the sabacc table and nodded to the Beta-4 CardShark dealing out the hands. ORO preferred automated droids to organic dealers: no salary to pay, and there was no chance a wily gambler could convince a droid to cheat.
'I'm in,' he declared, taking the empty seat.
The ensign was sitting directly across from him. He let out a long, loud whistle. 'Blast, you're a big boy,' he shouted boisterously. 'How tall are you, one ninety? One ninety-five?'
'Two meters even,' Des replied without looking at him. He swiped his ORO account card through the reader built into the table and punched in his security code. The buy-in for the table was added to the total already owing on his ORO account, and the CardShark obediently pushed a stack of chips across the table toward him.
'Good luck, sir,' it said.
The ensign continued to size Des up, taking another long drink from his mug. Then he brayed out a laugh. 'Wow, they grow you fellas big out here on the Rim. You sure you ain't really a Wookiee somebody shaved for a joke?'
A few of the other players laughed, but quickly stopped when they saw Des clench his jaw. The man smelled of Corellian ale. Same as Gerd had when he'd picked a fight with Des just a few hours earlier. Des's muscles tightened, and he leaned forward in his chair. The smaller man let out a short, nervous breath.
'Come on now, son,' the commander said to Des in a calming voice, stepping in to control the situation the same way he'd been controlling the table all game long. He had an air of quiet authority, a patriarch presiding over a family squabble at the dinner table. 'It's just a joke. Can't you take a joke?'
Turning to face the only player at the table good enough to give him a real challenge, Des flashed a grin and let the tension slip from his coiled muscles. 'Sure, I can take a joke. But I'd rather take your credits.'
There was a brief pause, and then it was as if everyone had sighed in relief. The officer chuckled and returned the smile. 'Fair enough. Let's play some cards.'
Des started slow, playing conservatively and folding often. The limits on the table were low; the maximum value of any given hand was capped at one hundred credits. Between the five-credit ante and the two-credit 'administration fee' ORO charged players each time they started a new round, the hand pots would barely cover the cost of sitting down at the table, even for a solid player. The trick was to win just enough hand pots to be able to stick around long enough for a chance at the sabacc pot that continued to build with each hand.
When he first started playing, one of the soldiers tried to make small talk. 'I notice most of the human miners here shave their heads,' he said, nodding out at the crowd. 'Why is that?'
'We don't shave. Our hair falls out,' Des replied. 'Comes from working too many shifts in the mines.'
'Working the mines? I don't get it.'
'The filters don't remove all the impurities from the air. You work ten-hour shifts day in and day out, and the contaminants build up in your system,' He spoke in a flat, neutral voice. There was no bitterness; for him and the rest of the miners it was just a fact of life. 'It has side effects. We get sick a lot; our hair falls out. We're supposed to take a few days off now and again, but ever since ORO signed those Republic military contracts the mines never shut down. Basically, we're being slowly poisoned to make sure your cargo hold's full when you leave.'
That was enough to kill any other attempts at conversation, and they continued the hands in relative silence. After half an hour Des was about even for the night, but he was just getting warmed up. He pushed in his ante and the ORO cut, as did the other seven players at the table. The dealer flipped two cards out to each of them, and another hand began. The first two players peeked at their cards and folded. The Republic ensign glanced at his cards and threw in enough chips to stay in the hand. Des wasn't surprised, he hardly ever folded his cards, even when he had nothing.
The ensign quickly pushed one of his cards into the interference field. Each turn, a player could move one of the electronic chip-cards into the interference field, locking in its value to protect it from changing if there was a shift at the end of the round.
Des shook his head. Locking in cards was a fool's play. You couldn't discard a locked-in card; Des usually preferred to keep all his options open. The ensign, however, was thinking in the short term, not planning ahead. That probably explained why he was down several hundred credits on the night.
Glancing at his own hand, Des chose to stay in. All the rest of the players dropped, leaving just the two of them.
The CardShark dealt out another round of cards. Des glanced down and saw he had drawn Endurance, a face card with a value of negative eight. He was sitting at a total of six, an incredibly weak hand.
The smart move was to fold; unless there was a shift, he was dead. But Des knew there was going to be a shift. He knew it as surely as he had known where and when Gerd's thumb was going to be when he bit down on it. These brief glimpses into the future didn't happen often, but when they did he knew enough to listen to them. He pushed in his credits. The ensign matched the bet.
The droid scooped the chips to the center of the table, and the marker in front of him began to pulse with rapidly changing colors. Blue meant no shift; all the cards would stay the same. Red meant a shift: an impulse would be sent out from the marker, and one electronic card from each player would randomly reset and change its value. The marker flickered back and forth between red and blue, gaining speed until it was pulsing so quickly the colors blurred into a single violet hue. Then the flashing began to slow down and it became possible to tell the individual colors apart again: blue, red, blue, red, blue… It stopped on red.
'Blast!' the ensign swore. 'It always shifts when I have a good hand!'
Des knew that wasn't true. The chances of shifting were fifty-fifty: completely random. There was no way to predict whether a shift was coming… unless you had a gift like Des occasionally did.
The cards flickered as they reset, and Des scooped up his hand one more time. Endurance was gone, replaced by a seven. He was sitting at twenty-one. Not a sabacc, but a solid hand. Before the next round could begin, Des flipped his cards over, exposing his hand to the table. 'Coming up on twenty-one,' he said.
The ensign threw his cards to the table in disgust. 'Blasted bomb-out.'
