The captain saw right through me, I’m sure. So instead I pretended to struggle a little, losing a few hands before I started to win some, and kept to a balance that left me winning just a little more than I lost. But poker turned out to be just random enough to make that hard, and it occurred to me that the stuff the techs had been teaching me about misdirection and con jobs would apply to this too. It was tempting to just win every hand, and show her up. The abstract patterns on the backs looked the same at first glance, but they weren’t all evenly worn. For that matter, it wasn’t hard to tell which card was which either.
Well, then I just wouldn’t tell her how obvious the probabilities were to me.
Aren’t senior crew members supposed to look out for their juniors? At least the captain shut down her suggestion of ‘usual stakes’, whatever that was, but I still ended up with more credits in the pot than I really wanted to lose. Then I was annoyed that she actually thought I was a mark. The gleam in Beatrice’s eye confused me, until I found out that card games involve bets. “Have you been introduced to card games, Alice?” “All the more reason to cultivate politeness,” the captain said serenely. It makes us wait longer if it thinks we’re being rude, or some shit like that.” Probably not days, but some things are not to be rushed.”īeatrice snorted. Then he closed the hatch, and ran us through a decontamination cycle before we headed back to the bridge. I followed Captain Sokol back to the airlock, where he handed off the carrying cases to a surprisingly normal-looking bot. I wasn’t that sure about trusting Beatrice yet, even if she and the captain did seem to be pretty close. I’d tell the captain, if he asked about it. Should I tell him about the private com call? The shuttle’s systems would have logged it, but there’s no way anyone else would be able to make sense of that data stream.ĭid I want Beatrice to know I could follow that kind of conversation? If my natural thought speed was that fast I’d pass off the message management to a chatbot or something. That probably wasn’t even Sleuth on the com. More like, doesn’t enjoy waiting millions of microseconds for every reply. “It doesn’t talk much, so you have to pay attention to details like that.”ĭoesn’t talk much. “Guess that means both of them,” the captain said. “Agreed,” the emotionless voice of the human-speed comlink said. I hadn’t even realized I could run that fast.
I looked around, and realized that the whole conversation had taken less than a millisecond. I will examine the damage, and determine whether repairs are feasible. Opportunities for mutually beneficial exchange are highly probable. “My temporal discount rate is vanishingly low, Alice Long. I don’t know what favors I could do for someone like you, but if you’ll help me with this I’ll owe you a big one.”
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