“Sounds reasonable,” Lando agreed grimly. “Does Leia know?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
He looked at the sabacc tables, the cheerful decadence of the whole scene suddenly grating against his mood. If Torve really was Karrde’s contact man, he wished the other would quit this nonsense and get on with it. It wasn’t like there were a lot of possibilities hanging around here to choose from.
His eyes drifted away from the casino, into the bar area … and stopped. There, sitting at a shadowy table at the far end, were three men.
There was an unmistakable air about a general freight port, a combination of sounds and smells and vibrations that every pilot who’d been in the business long enough knew instantly. There was an equally unmistakable air about planetary security officers. “Uh-oh,” he muttered.
“What?” Lando asked, throwing a casual glance of his own around the room. The glance reached the far table- “Uh-oh, indeed,” he agreed soberly. “Offhand, I’d say that explains why Torve’s hiding at a sabacc table.”
“And doing his best to ignore us,” Han said, watching the security agents out of the corner of his eye and trying to gauge the focus of their attention. If they’d tumbled to this whole contact meeting there probably wasn’t much he could do about it, short of hauling out his New Republic ID and trying to pull rank on them. Which might or might not work; and he could just hear the polite screaming fit Fey’lya would have over it either way.
But if they were just after Torve, maybe as part of that landing pit raid he and Lando had seen on the way in …
It was worth the gamble. Reaching over, he tapped the center of the table. “Attendant?”
The holo reappeared. “Yes, gentles?”
“Give me twenty sabacc chips, will you?”
“Certainly,” she said, and vanished.
“Wait a minute,” Lando said cautiously as Han drained his glass. “You’re not going to go over there, are you?”
“You got a better idea?” Han countered, reaching down to resettle his blaster in its holster. “If he’s our contact, I sure don’t want to lose him now.”
Lando gave a sigh of resignation. “So much for keeping a low profile. What do you want me to do?”
“Be ready to run some interference.” The center of the table opened up and a neat stack of sabacc chips arrived. “So far it looks like they’re just watching him-maybe we can get him out of here before their pals arrive in force.”
“If not?”
Han collected the chips and got to his feet. “Then I’ll try to create a diversion, and meet you back at the Falcon.”
“Right. Good luck.”
There were two seats not quite halfway across the sabacc table from Torve. Han chose one and sat down, dropping his stack of chips onto the table with a metallic thud. “Deal me in,” he said.
The others looked up at him, their expressions varying from surprised to annoyed. Torve himself glanced up, came back for another look. Han cocked an eyebrow at him. “You the dealer, sonny? Come on, deal me in.”
“Ah-no, it’s not my deal,” Torve said, his eyes flicking to the pudgy man on his right.
“And we’ve already started,” the pudgy man said, his voice surly. “Wait until the next game.”
“What, you haven’t all even bet yet,” Han countered, gesturing toward the handful of chips in the hand pot. The sabacc pot, in contrast, was pretty rich-the session must have been going for a couple of hours at least. Probably one reason the dealer didn’t want fresh blood in the game who might conceivably win it all. “Come on, give me my cards,” he told the other, tossing a chip into the hand pot.
Slowly, glaring the whole time, the dealer peeled the top two cards off the deck and slid them over. “That’s more like it,” Han said approvingly. “Brings back memories, this does. I used to drop the heavy end of the hammer on the guys back home all the time.”
Torve looked at him sharply, his expression freezing to stone. “Did you, now,” he said, his voice deliberately casual. “Well, you’re playing with the big boys here, not the little people. You may not find the sort of rewards you’re used to.”
“I’m not exactly an amateur myself,” Han said airily. The locals at the spaceport had been raiding landing pit sixty-three … “I’ve won-oh, probably sixty-three games in the last month alone.”
Another flicker of recognition crossed Torve’s face. So it was his landing pit. “Lot of rewards in numbers like that,” he murmured, letting one hand drop beneath the level of the table. Han tensed, but the hand came back up empty. Torve’s eyes flicked around the room once, lingering for a second on the table where Lando was sitting before turning back to Han. “You willing to put your money where your mouth is?”