
It didn't amount to a great fortune by anybody's standards except perhaps the poverty-cautious
participants in the evening's exercise in the mathematics of probability. To them the gambler was a
romantic figure, a professional out-system adventurer with his own private starship and a reputation for
outrageous luck. The backroom microcredit plungers were trying desperately to impress him, he realized
sadly, and they were succeeding: at the present rate, he'd have to drain the charge from his electric
shaver into the ship's energy storage system, just to lift off the Core-forsaken planetoid.
Having your own starship was not so much a matter of being able to buy it in the first place (he'd won
his in another sabacc game in the last system but one he'd visited) as being able to afford to operate it. So
far, he'd lost money on the deal.
Looking down, he saw he'd dealt himself a minus-nine: Balance, plus the Two of Sabres. Not terribly
promising, even at the best of times, but sabacc was a game of dramatic reversals, often at the turn of a
single card-chip. Or even without turning it-he watched the deuce with a thrill that never staled as the face
of the electronic pasteboard blurred and faded, refocused and solidified as the Seven of Staves.
That gave him a minus-four: insignificant progress, but progress nevertheless. He saw the current bet,
flipping a thirty credit token into the pot, but declined to raise.
It also meant that the original Seven of Staves, in somebody's hand or in the undealt remainder of the
deck, had been transformed into something altogether different. He watched the heat-flushed faces of the
players, learning nothing. Each of the seventy-eight card-chips transformed itself at random intervals,
unless it lay flat on its back within the shallow interference field of the gaming table. This made for a
fast-paced, nerve-wracking game.
The young gambler found it relaxing. Ordinarily.
“I'll take a card, please, Captain Calrissian.” Vett Fori, the player in patched and faded denims on the
gambler's left, was the chief supervisor of the asteroid mining operation, a tiny, tough-looking individual of
indeterminate age, with a surprisingly gentle smile hidden among the worry-lines. She'd been betting
heavily - for that impecunious crowd, anyway - and was losing steadily, all evening, as if preoccupied by
more than the heat. An unlit cigar rested on the table edge beside her elbow.
“Please, call me Lando,” the young gambler replied, dealing her a card-chip. “‘Captain Calrissian'
sounds like the one-eyed commander of a renegade Imperial dreadnought. My Millennium Falcon's only
a small converted freighter, and a rather elderly one at that, I'm afraid.” He watched her for an indication
of the card she'd taken.
Nothing.
A nasal chuckle sounded from across the table. Arun Feb, the supervisor's assistant, took a card as
well. There was a hole frayed in the paunch of his begrimed singlet, and dark stains under his arms. Like
his superior, he was small in stature. All the miners seemed to run that way. Compactness was
undoubtedly a virtue among them. He had a dark, thick, closely cropped beard and a shiny pink scalp.
Drawing on a cigar of his own, he frowned as he added what he'd been dealt to the pair in his hand.
Suddenly: “Oh, for Edge's sake, I simply can't make up my mind! Can you come back to me, Captain
Calrissian?” Lando groaned inwardly.
This was how the entire evening had gone so far: the speaker, Ottdefa Osuno Whett, for all his