Hard Bargain, page 13
“I hope I’m not interrupting?” Dave suddenly called out.
Valentinian saw Kyriaki blushing almost as hard as he felt himself doing, as they both turned to face the hatch, still carefully not touching.
Dave had a mean grin on his face, which suddenly morphed into utter innocence.
“So, you’ve always told me that when one of the feed line markers goes yellow to come grab you, at least until you’re confident I’m ready to take part of the engine apart,” Dave drawled in an off-hand manner. “So starboard secondary went dark yellow in the last day or so. Figure we should fix it now, since we might have to pull a Bohrne getaway later. You got some free time, Vee?”
Valentinian wasn’t sure if he wanted to thank the man for the interruption, or punch him. Maybe both. But at least the mad current of energy between he and Kyriaki had been broken, before he did something he lived to regret. Or worse, didn’t regret.
He nodded to the woman and listened to her own breathing trying to ratchet down to merely normal.
“Now’d be better, Dave,” Valentinian said, moving forward to where the big guy was carrying the toolkit easily in one hand. “Then some food and all the adventures.”
He paused as Dave started forward, turning just enough to look at Kyriaki. She was blushing, but smiled at the little secret they shared. Maybe not so little, since Dave had probably been standing there watching for a while before he said something.
But yeah, now was not the time to get entangled with that woman. At least any more than he already was.
23
Dave
He had never really been a poker player, but Dave already knew he didn’t have the temperament for it. Poker was a game of subtlety and guile, generally with strangers. Living inside the bubble of the Dominion Household, there hadn’t been any strangers. Ever.
As a result, he had gravitated towards all manner of board game combat simulations instead, from full electronic fleet maneuver games down to squad-level, tactical stuff with inch-tall, hand-painted miniatures. Things that kept a warrior like the Dominator sharp.
Vee was an exceptional poker player. That much was obvious, both from the records of the man and from Dave’s personal experience. Even the crooked game on Bohrne had shown how well the man could adjust things to his preference.
Dave had listened to Valentinian explain it all, and followed maybe a third of the details. But he didn’t need to really understand, as he wasn’t about to start playing with card sharps like you found on a space station. At least until he found someone playing Support Squad War Patrol on a one-by-two table. Then he might break out the old skills.
But it was amazing to watch Vee set somebody up.
Dave had gone in early, finding a spot on one end of the bar and getting a burger. Vee had wandered in later, grabbing a mug of beer and setting himself up at a table in the corner that seemed, of common consent, to be dedicated to card games on just about every station.
Maybe the poker players had trained everyone else to drink elsewhere?
Valentinian had settled down, sipping his beer and pulling out a deck of Arcades cards. He was quickly playing some local version of solitaire, but hadn’t gone more than three minutes when another player wandered over to watch. And then a third.
Seriously, was Vee broadcasting pheromones or something? Putting out a hypersonic call that only card players could hear? A fourth arrived about the time Valentinian had shuffled all the cards back together, his solitaire forgotten.
Dave was reminded of making rock candy with his daughter, when she was about six. Nothing but watching, and then magic happened. Bang, you had a card game.
“Gentlemen,” Valentinian acknowledged the men in a friendly drawl. “Did you have the table reserved?”
“No,” one of them spoke up. “Was wondering about perhaps playing some Arcades in a low-buy, table-stakes kind of game.”
Dave processed the words. Low-buy meant small bids and a small game. Table stakes meant you put your cash on the table at the beginning, and stayed with it. If you lost that, you were out, unless the rest of the players decided to let you buy back in, but any of them could veto such a move.
It was, as much as a group of strangers met in a bar could assemble, a friendly, neutral game. Killing time amiably, as Vee had explained it, rather than cutting out a mark and fleecing him for everything he was worth, like had happened on Bohrne. Or when Vee first got the funds to buy the Longshot Hypothesis.
A way to pass the evening, on a cold night on the ranch with some friends.
Dave shrugged internally as he watched, learning a whole other side of human nature in the process.
In his head, he was watching the clock. He had always been able to tell time internally to a withering degree of accuracy. The Caelons frequently used such measures in missions and raids, and required every trooper do it without assistance.
Butler Vidy-Wooders came into the bar less than a minute early, according to the schedule Valentinian had built for everyone. The four players in the corner were only just pulling up chairs and ordering drinks when the M’Rai captain walked over, a keen smile on his face.
“Were you gentlemen about to set up a game?” the giant asked in a companionable voice.
“Just getting to that point, sir,” Valentinian said in a quiet, careful tone. “Hadn’t even agreed to our table stakes, yet, but the consensus is a low-buy game. At least at first. Haven’t played with any of the others here, so I don’t know how long it might go, or what their comfort level is. Gentlemen?”
Dave was amazed at how Valentinian played a group of men who had a decade or three on him. Dangle the bait out there like he was the mark, to use the term Vee had taught him. Watch the others circle like curious sharks.
“One thousand Union Krodageni?” one of the men suggested.
He had the look to Dave of a semi-successful merchant. It was in his clothing and carriage. Forty, perhaps. Not fabulously wealthy, but successful enough, at least for this sector, to play poker in a bar with strangers for a reasonable amount of money.
The others hemmed and hawed for a bit. One thousand was at the high end for friendly poker, especially with five players, but it also would make the game more interesting.
And that was a pot that seemed to draw Vidy-Wooders in like flame led a moth. He quickly pulled up a spot and ended up more or less across from Valentinian. The merchant was between them on Vee’s right, and two other men who looked like spacers or low-end captains ended up on Valentinian’s left.
The layout reminded Dave of the game where the Sheriff had set the loud boy up to be swept.
They could have played with Valentinian’s deck, but courtesy called for them to use a clean one, so Vee dropped the three Union Krodageni to have a new box delivered instead, still wrapped in plastic film. Nobody could mark them easily, that way.
An honest, wholesome way to spend an evening.
Dave smiled and pulled out his card-reader, sending a message to Kyriaki as the first ante went round the table and the first cards were dealt.
24
Kyriaki
Technically, she was the expert, but that just meant she had done this once before. Kyriaki wasn’t sure that the other woman with her didn’t have far more experience sneaking into dark, quiet starships, but Bayjy had never had to work on the possibility of live defenders suddenly appearing and opening fire. Just booby-traps and faulty reactors acting up.
Kyriaki didn’t figure that the captain of Hard Bargain would leave bombs on his ship, but her raid onto Longshot Hypothesis had been planned by the Widow for a lethal encounter. She had carried detonators and a flamer on that mission, rather than stun grenades and a shock pistol.
Bayjy had said she had never shot anyone in her life. So maybe that did make Kyriaki the expert.
She had shot a number of people over the years. And she was pretty sure most of them had deserved it.
So they were up tight to the outside of the station, moving like ghosts on the outer skin, with radios turned to the lowest transmitting power and magnetic boots holding them in place, just waiting.
Dave’s message came through as a text on the Heads Up Display in her spacesuit. She had borrowed this one, and it was a clumsy fit, even with everything pulled in with straps. Artaxerxes had been only a little taller, but so much larger around the middle.
Poker game begun, it read.
Kyriaki reached out a hand and gave Bayjy a thumbs up signal. They had time, hopefully, to be methodical. That was Bayjy’s expertise, getting around antique security systems to steal treasure.
Hard Bargain wasn’t an antique, but Bayjy had spent the better part of three years aboard, before this, so she hopefully knew all the tricks necessary to get in. If Vidy-Wooders was playing poker, they had time, assuming they didn’t set off an alarm.
And Dave would be able to warn them, hopefully.
Bayjy led her forward, towards the bow of Hard Bargain, docked snugly on the cargo deck. The higher deck on the station was where passenger transports would load, and it had wide portholes for people to watch ships come and go. Down here the walls were flat steel plates with cargo transports stuck out from them like thumbs.
Like Longshot Hypothesis, Hard Bargain had airlocks at either end. The big one where cargo came and went, plus a small personnel airlock, were nose in. They walked quickly up the side of the salvage vessel to get to the port access lock. Kyriaki had her fingers mentally crossed that nobody would happen by in a station-flitter and see them. Or if they did, the watcher would assume they were doing external maintenance.
The alternative would be a quick call to station security to have them arrested for burglary. Which would cost them their only chance to do this to the man short of an armed confrontation later.
This airlock looked unused as she and Bayjy approached it, just like Valentinian’s forward lock had been. Most people went in and out on a station while docked, so they tended to use the same paths on the surface of a planet as well. Muscle memory.
Hard Bargain was also a perfectly weird layout for a ship. Both ends of the big cargo bay forward had oversized airlocks. When the crew was working, they left the entire bay in vacuum for weeks on end, only closing up and pressurizing when they were ready to leave. As a result, the crew had the habit of going in and out through the cargo bay hammered into them, because that was where the valuables and tools were.
Kyriaki moved to one side and turned to watch as much sky as she could while Bayjy worked. The silence would probably eat at most people. Kyriaki had frequently gone days without saying a word, especially if she was on a case.
Silence was her friend.
Bayjy worked. Kyriaki watched. Time passed.
Bayjy turning got Kyriaki’s attention. Thumbs up.
Hopefully, she had disabled the outermost layer of security. And hopefully, Vidy-Wooders wasn’t as paranoid as Valentinian had been, and so hadn’t built an entire second system that wasn’t connected to the first one. Any other vessel, any other captain, and Kyriaki would have had to face the hard decision of shooting those two men, because she could have snuck up close enough, probably.
She was pleased that they were friends now. Maybe she’d survive.
Kyriaki typed out a quick message to Dave from the keyboard on her left forearm.
Stage one complete.
Dave knew what that meant. Nobody else would.
Kyriaki returned the thumbs up to Bayjy and watched the woman push a big, green button on the keyboard. Internally, the airlock would make sure the inner door was sealed, and then evacuate all the air and prepare to open the outer door to a pair of cat burglars in matching vermillion T-shirts. With whiskey logos between their breasts.
And if it set off an alarm, Dave would see the man who owned the ship do something. Maybe he’d suddenly run away from the game. Maybe he would call station security.
They were on shaky legal ground if they got arrested, but not completely lost. Kyriaki was all set to make a case to a magistrate that they were just reclaiming Bayjy’s gear. Then Vidy-Wooders would have to explain to a court what he had done to his previous crew, after which his name wouldn’t be worth warm spit to competent spacers anywhere.
You think cops are clannish and unforgiving? Piss off spacers in a public way by mistreating them, Butler.
Finally, the outer hatch opened. Kyriaki watched her screen, but no emergency abort messages came through. She let go the tense breath she had been holding as Bayjy watched, and then moved.
Inside, the airlock was in poor shape. Like it hadn’t been cleaned in years. And it needed it. Grease from something had oozed down a wall and then crystalized into a layer of armor over the gray steel. Two suits were on racks, but both had been cannibalized for spare parts at some point, with someone, somewhere needing both right arms, plus a left hand and a right boot.
Must have been one hell of a party.
Bayjy worked while Kyriaki managed communications security.
Nothing. Hopefully, that meant no alarm, instead of an automated system that notified the station rather than the captain.
Vidy-Wooders, from Bayjy’s stories, didn’t strike Kyriaki as the type to rely on unknown Stationmasters doing their jobs for him.
The outer hatch closed. The system began to pressurize with flashing lights and slowly-growing sound as the vacuum abated.
Still, no alarms.
Now the fun part.
Bayjy unlocked her faceplate and opened it, so Kyriaki joined her. No radios unless necessary.
“Ready?” the mauve woman asked.
Kyriaki drew a heavy stun pistol and pointed it at the inner hatch.
“Go,” she said.
They were sort of trapped right now, if the inner hatch had an alarm on it. It would require precious minutes to cycle the airlock such that they could escape back into vacuum, if something went wrong at this point.
25
Valentinian
Arcades is a game of chance, mixed with skill and luck.
That had been the first lesson Valentinian’s dad had taught him, when he sat his young son down to teach him the game.
Nikephoros Tarasicodissa had started a family late, already in his fifties and largely ready to settle down. Valentinian’s disgrace had ricocheted back and pretty much pushed Nikephoros into permanent retirement from the tentative state he had occupied before.
But he had taught his son how spacers killed time between runs and while alone in the isolation of a warpbubble.
Turned out Valentinian was pretty good at it.
Most of a card game like Arcades poker was learning the unconscious fidgets another player telegraphs when the cards are good or bad. When he’s bluffing or when he’s sandbagging you. Professionals learn to suppress them entirely, and then offer up false signals that make suckers out of amateurs.
The man on Valentinian’s left, the one who looked like a middle-aged captain, was a pro. The merchant on his right was a studied amateur. The other spacer with them was a mark.
Butler Vidy-Wooders was a card sharp. And a bully, but Valentinian knew that already.
A man who had been bigger than anyone but immediate family while still a kid, and grew into a monster who could push anyone around as an adult.
Of course, the shock pistol on Valentinian’s right thigh today was a different model than he normally carried. For some reason, he’d gone into the armory and pulled out the heaviest version he had and strapped it on. It might kill the average human, if he had to shoot someone, even in self-defense.
It would work just fine on a M’Rai bodybuilder with a chip on his shoulder.
Hopefully tonight was just a long con, a shell game where things weren’t what they appeared.
Valentinian really didn’t care if he ended up losing the table stakes he had put down. Right now, he was still playing with profits from that punk back on Bohrne.
Twenty minutes in, and the mark was toast. It was almost a blessing to the man to wipe him out quickly and let him sit back to watch. Maybe he would learn a few things about the game from expert players.
Valentinian and Vidy-Wooders had pretty much split the mark’s funds between them, with the other two running about even from where they had started.
With an honest deck, people get lucky, and this early in the night, nobody was betting huge amounts to try to force hands and pots.
Mostly a friendly thing. Without the M’Rai glowering at people, it might have even been a pleasant evening with strangers. Many poker games turned out that way, if nobody had an axe to grind.
The deal was back to Valentinian. He shuffled the cards a little sloppy, just because he could, and kicked a chip into the pot for an ante. Arcades was a game of seven cards. He dealt everyone one card up, one down, and one up, nodding to the man on his right to bid, sitting on an unmatched pair of Wedgestones, one granite and one bronze.
A Perfect Arcade had six cards, all in one suit: Capstone, both Wedgestones, both Columns, and the Threshold. If you built from more than one suit, you had a Mixed Arcade. Without a Capstone, you had a Hallway, for the third best hand you could Build. With everything but a Threshold, you had a Tunnel.
It went down from there, with a Corridor being just Wedgestones and Columns, and then you got into Patterns of Six of a Kind, down to Four. It could be a complicated game to learn all the ways winning hands balanced against each other, but mostly it was a game of people.
Watching them. Learning how their mind worked from the way the eyes dilated. It would have been most fun to have Sheriff Bolat-Nurlan here at the table tonight. But that man was a storyteller with a violin for a voice. Take you up or down, as the story unfolded.
“Two,” the merchant bid, kicking in a pair of chips to the pot.
It was early in the hand. Nobody was going to go all in at this point. Certainly not on three of seven cards. The best hand you could have right now would be matching up a Capstone with both Wedgestones. And that only gave you a High Stack. Four of a kind could beat that, and wasn’t hard to draw when there were twelve Columns or Wedgestones in the deck.
