Star Wars: Path of Destruction: A Novel of the Old Republic Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.”
    Des collected the small stack of chips that were the hand pot, while the other man grudgingly paid his penalty into the sabacc pot. Des guessed it was closing in on five hundred credits by now.
    One of the miners at the table stood up. “Come on, we got to go,” he said. “Last speeder leaves in twenty minutes.”
    With grumbles and complaints, the other miners got up from their seats and trudged off to start their shift. The ensign watched them go, then turned curiously to Des.
    “You ain’t going with them, big fella? I thought you were complaining about never getting a day off earlier.”
    “I work the day shift,” Des said shortly. “Those guys are the night shift.”
    “Where’s the rest of your crew?” the lieutenant asked. Des clearly recognized her interest as an attempt to keep the ensign from saying something to further antagonize the big miner. “The crowd’s become awfully thin.” She waved her hand around at the cantina, now virtually empty except for the Republic naval soldiers. Seeing the open seats at the sabacc table, a few of them were wandering over to join their comrades in the game.
    “They’ll be along soon enough,” Des said. “I just ended my shift a bit early today.”
    “Really?” Her tone implied that she knew of only one reason a miner’s shift might end early.
    “Lieutenant,” one of the newly arrived soldiers said politely as they reached the table. “Commander,” he added, addressing the other officer. “Mind if we join in, sir?”
    The commander looked over at Des. “I don’t want this young man to think the Republic is ganging up on him. If we take all the seats, where are his friends going to sit when they show up? He says they’ll be along any minute.”
    “They’re not here now,” Des said. “And they’re not my friends. You might as well sit down.” He didn’t add that most of the day-shift miners probably wouldn’t play, anyway. When Des showed up at the table they tended to call it a night; he won too often for their liking.
    The empty seats were quickly filled