Star Wars

The Adventures of

Book 1

Lando Calrissian and the Mindsharp of Sharu by L. Neil Smith updated : 11.XI.2006

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Based on the characters and situations created by George Lucas A Del Book BALLANTINE BOOKS, NEW YORK

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

"SABACC!"

It was unmercifully hot. Tossing his card-chips on the table, the young gambler halfheartedly collected what they'd earned him, an indifferent addition to his already indifferent profits for the evening. Something on the unspectacular order of five hundred credits.

Perhaps it was the heat. Or just his imagination.

This blasted asteroid, Oseon 2795, while closer to its sun than most, was as carefully life-supported and air- conditioned as any developed rock in the system. Still, one could almost feel the relentless solar flux hammering down upon its sere and withered surface, feel the radiation soaking through its ironnickel substance, feel the unwanted energy reradiating from the walls in every room.

Especially this one.

Apparently the locals felt it, too. They'd stripped right down to shorts and shirt-sleeves after the second hand, two hours earlier, and looked fully as fatigued and grimy as the young gambler felt.'He took a sip from his glass, the necessity for circumspection regarding what he drank blessedly absent for once. No nonsense here about comradely alcohol consumption.

Most of them were having ice water and liking it.

Beads of moisture had condensed into a solid sheet on the container's outer surface and trickled down his wrist into his gold-braided uniform sleeve.

What a way to live! Oseon 2795 was a pocket of penury in a plutocrat's paradise. The drab mining asteroid, thrust cruelly near the furnace of furnaces, orbited through a system of pleasure resorts and vacation homes for the galaxy's superwealthy, like an itinerant junkman.

The gambler was wishing at the moment that he'd never heard of the place. That's what came of taking advice from spaceport attendants. A trickle of moisture ran down his neck into the upright collar of his semiformal uniform. Who said hardrock miners were always rich?

He shuffled the oversized deck once, twice, three times, twice again in listless ritual succession, passed it briefly for a perfunctory cut to the perspiring player on his right, dealt the cards around, two to a customer, and waited impatiently for the amateurs to assess their hands. Real or imagined, the heat seemed to slow everybody's mental processes. Initial bets were added to the ante in the middle of the table.

It didn't amount to a great fortune by anybody's standardsexcept 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 niicrocredit 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.

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