“Well, we’d better hope you, Norrin and Slak are...hey, where’d Slak go?”
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The tension at the Sabacc table was thick enough that it could be cut with a knife. Slak had joined the game barely fifteen minutes ago, finding some members of Two Flight in the cantina during a shorter round of free time.
Slak had recognized the game- it was a game of cards, skill and some chance. The kind of combination that suited Slak perfectly.
Besides, he needed to make some extra cash to make it through the next few weeks; he’d been offered a business opportunity that was going to take a little capital, and this was just the place to do it.
“Fourth round, gentlemen,” said the dealer, a lanky fellow named Wass. “Bet!”
Starting with Wass, each of the five other players tossed in a chip.
Slak, though, stretched a bit in his unbuttoned tunic, and tossed in four.
Another pause at the table. Everyone looked at Slak, who regarded them and his hand without any expression.
“Well?” said Slak. “Guys, I don’t know how they play this where you’re from, but on Corellia when a man raises the bet, everyone else does, too, or they give up and walk away from the table until the next hand.”
The five other players looked at each other. In the last three hands, Slak had managed to amass a surprising number of chips, and each hand had ended with Slak raising a daunting amount, and having better cards than the rest of them.
Two players put their cards down. That left Slak up against Wass the dealer and the other two.
“Alright, gentlemen! Time for the shift! Rolling...”
Wass rolled a die. The number five came up. Starting with the dealer, each one drew a card from the other’s hand at random. The other players winced as the draw broke up their hands.
The cards the players had drawn from each other went to the bottom of the deck, and Wass drew four more and distributed them face down to each of the players. Slak’s expression alone did not change.
“Hah!” yelled the player to Slak’s left. “I call hand! I call hand! Look, look what I got! I got...Commander of Flasks showing for Twelve, and...” he flipped over the two cards that had been hidden, “Eight of Flasks, and Two of Flasks, for Twenty-Two! Nearly a Perfect Sabacc! Let’s see one of you beat that!”
The dealer looked glum as he flipped over his cards. “Seven of Coins, Eight of Coins, Mistress of Coins. Over twenty-three, and I bomb. What about you, Hurly?”
Hurly, his wide face smiling even wider, Flipped over his cards. “Ace of Sabres for Fifteen, Ten of Sabers to make it Twenty-Five, and...Queen of Air and Darkness for minus two! Perfect Sabacc, Rilly! Ha! Now give me my money...”
Slak reached out to touch Hurly’s wrist.
“You haven’t seen my hand,” he said slowly.
“But...you’ve got nothing, Four Flight! I can see you’ve got The Idiot card showing. What, you got a perfect 23, or a negative 23 on two cards?”
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“Kind’ve,” Slak said. He flipped over his cards, revealing a Two of Staves and a Three of Coins.
“What the heck is that?” Hurly laughed, though without much humor, and reached again for the money in the center of the table.
“That,” said Slak again, his voice calm and his face relaxed while reaching for and holding Hurly’s wrist a little tighter than he had before, “is an Idiot’s Array. The Idiot, and a Two and a Three from any suit beats even a perfect Sabacc. Look it up if you don’t believe me.”
All five players at the table tapped at their wristpads. One by one they looked up with glum expressions on their faces.
Slak smiled, and started slowly scooping up his chips. “Gentlemen, I want to thank you for the most enjoyable couple of hundreds of credits I’ve gained in the shortest amount of time yet. But I’ve got a few other commitments today, and...”
Wass had his hand on Slak’s wrist.
“How’d you do it, Four Flight?” Wass asked.
“What, win?” Slak said. “Against you guys? It was easy. I’ve been playing this game and seeing other guys play it since I was a youngling. Some nights I knew if I didn’t win, I wouldn’t eat. Makes you pick up a few things.”
“You got a Twenty-Two first hand,” Wass said, looking evenly at Slak. “Then a perfect Twenty-Three Sabacc, then a perfect negative Twenty-three, and then you got the Idiot’s Array. I say you cheated.”
“Where I come from that’s a pretty serious accusation,” Slak said quietly.
“Where we are now, it’s a pretty serious crime,” Wass said. “If we were to look up your sleeve and see a few cards, the Grey Room would be the least of your worries. Maybe that fancy new silver eye you’ve got has a little X-ray action behind it.”
“Well, if you’re going to accuse me, you better bet or fold. But if you pull that, you’re going to be accusing Doctor Kor of helping me cheat as well.”
Things had already been tense at the table, but they ratcheted up several discernible notches with Slak’s last words. He looked around at the members of Two Flight- young men not quite good enough for the top tier and knew it. Young men who had to constantly be told in dozens of small ways that they were second, number two, a step behind the elite and likely to stay that way. Eating second, playing second, and usually getting the second round of the few pretty females in this bunch of cadets gave folks like Wass a very unique set of resentments and anger issues that even Slak could only guess at.
And in the second or two that Slak looked at the five Two Flighters at the table, he realized the advantage of being at the bottom of the heap in a group:
Since they had no other place to go, Slak and his fellow Four Flighters had all bonded together. Had they been in any other environment, like school or a small town, they would not likely have had much use for each other. Two Flighters were all about being in competition with each other for places that occasionally opened up in One Flight. And there had been some shifting of place in the past few weeks among all the flights, both up and down. One cadet who’d started out in One Flight had been shifted first to Two, then Three Flight as his mess-ups mounted. Another from Four Flight had jumped up to Three Flight in the first week, then Two, and was now the Flight Senior of Two Flight.
Four Flight knew that the top of the heap was too far away to realistically achieve, and they became a close-knit group. But a Two-Flighter was always a hair’s breadth away from the big golden cup of victory. It made them less likely to trust each other, more prone to bouts of anger, and maybe even more paranoid.
And now they’d been beaten by someone who’d come to the table acting as if he’d known nothing about the game, and then beaten them all handily. On Corellia, Slak would have had to worry about a ganger going for their blaster. But these guys were different. They didn’t know where the choice to violence might lead. They might have seen too many holovid movies, and they might think themselves in the right for starting something they couldn’t finish.
But Slak knew that in Four Flight, he had the equivalent of a winning card up his sleeve.
“Now, gentlemen,” Slak began, “Let’s face facts. I won that fair and square. I’ll take off my jacket and play in my shirt if it helps you feel better. You can even search my tunic for hidden compartments. But I will be taking the money I won, unless anyone feels I don’t deserve it. In which case, I’ll play any of you one-on-one, four hands, for double the pot. What do you say?”
The five Two Flighters looked at each other.
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TO BE CONTINUED...