Planet Hustlers

by J. S. Morin

  “C’mon,” Carl said. “It’s a game. Let’s have some fun with it. Who likes playing with wild cards?”

  “No wild cards,” Tanny snapped from the spot she chose to lean against the wall.

  “You’re having fun because you’re winning. Nothing more,” Chisholm said.

  Carl shrugged. “It’s all fun and games until someone loses a planet.”

  Gale dealt the cards once more. Blinds were anted. The game slowly fell into a rhythm once again.

  A stack of real estate chips changed colors with a purpose. Carl bet only green chips whenever possible, and he hoarded the red chips that represented New Garrelon. No one seemed surprised. He’d made it clear as far back as his proposal for the game that he was willing to stake his claim in Ithaca to get the stuunji their planet back.

  As Carl watched a small stack of chips head into Enzio’s pile, he decided to let Mort back in to uneven the playing field.

  “Go get ‘em,” he said to Mort once the wizard was back in charge. “None of this namby pamby crap of losing two-thirds of the hands. Don’t make it obvious, but let’s wring these two for all they’re worth.”

  And so Mort did.

  He won the next three hands, then decided to make a noisy but tiny loss. The cards were all down, and he had two pair. There were thirty or so chips in the middle, and Chisholm glared at him like a statue of one of those ancient smiting gods.

  “The bet is twenty to you, Mr. Ramsey,” Gale reminded him.

  Mort could have called and won. He’d given her a high pair, but he had her beat. This was merely a matter of whether to keep rubbing the puppy’s nose in the shit or let her run off with his slippers.

  Pointing to one of the chips in the pile of green he was about to lose, Mort made a sneer. “That one’s got poisonous vines. You can have it.” He pushed his cards toward Gale.

  After that, Mort pushed and bullied, using the threat of his larger stack of chips as a headsman’s axe held high. He bet when he sensed weakness, always prepared with a winning hand unless it was a hand he chose in advance to lose.

  “I don’t remember you being this good,” Tanny said with menace from the back of the room.

  Mort reached out a hand as if to slam it down on the table. “Want me to set off the tattletale again? Maybe you want to scan me. I might consent to a strip search, but I’m afraid I’d have to ask you to leave the room first. You know I’m spoken for now.”

  “She could stay,” Carl said. “Let her know what she’s missing. I’ve been getting a good workout lately.”

  Mort issued perhaps the softest harrumph of his harrumphing career, trying to direct the effect to his mental passenger. Like hell Carl was in any kind of enviable shape. Who did he think he was fooling? Someone who wasn’t piloting his body at the moment, certainly. No man with an ass that itched as much as Carl’s had any business displaying himself au naturel.

  Gale cleared his throat. “The bet, Mr. Ramsey.”

  “Oh, that. I fold.”

  Tanny was glaring at him. Did she suspect collusion? Certainly she couldn’t imagine what was truly taking place.

  # # #

  The Carl in the holovid field slapped his hand down on the table. Chips jumped. Spectators around the room covered their ears in eerie unison as the magic detector shrieked.

  Roddy hit mute.

  “Now we can’t hear what they’re saying,” Archie complained. “This thing isn’t accurate enough to read lips from.”

  Roddy pressed another button on the remote, and floating bubbles appeared over speakers’ heads.

  In the dealer’s speech bubble, the words appeared. “Hand is nullified. Everyone stand away from the table.”

  As Gale swept up the cards in play and began inventorying them, Carl spoke up. Even in text, Roddy could envision the wheedling tone Carl’s voice must have taken on. “Hey! I bumped the table. You think I wanted to set the fucking thing off? I had that hand won!”

  “Physical jarring won’t set off the machine,” Gale said via overhead bubble.

  “Unmute it,” Yomin said. “The thing shut up. Everyone’s got their hands off their ears.”

  “It gains something without the simulated voices,” Shoni said next to Roddy on the couch. “Without appropriate inflection, the meaning is muddied. More natural to treat it as text, the way the stuunji are reporting it.”

  Roddy reversed both the captions and muting.

  “Why should we believe that?” Carl asked in a monotone. He slammed a hand down on the table. The whole table shook, and the machine went wild.

  Instantly pained by the horrible sound, Roddy muted the feed again.

  “That’s it. I’m done with the audio unless you filter that shit out,” he said to Yomin. “This news feed interpreter is annoying.”

  On holo, Tanny covered her ears. “You said it was shock resistant,” her speech bubble read.

  Gale replied, “It was certified.”

  Amy shook her head. “This isn’t good. I’m going to do a pre-flight check. We might be leaving here in a hurry.”

  “With a whole fleet out there?” Yomin asked.

  “Hey, we’ve got wizards. They’ll get here at a dead run. I’ll use the Clapton as cover. We drop to the purple end of the astral and vamoose. Not like that plan hasn’t been in our back pocket since the Mort days.”

  Amy disappeared up the corridor to the cockpit.

  With a sigh, Roddy drained his beer. “I’ll run a check on the engines. And the shields.”

  He glanced back at Shoni before he headed into the cargo bay. “I’ll be all right, kid. I’ll get you someplace safe once we’re done here.”

  Shoni took custody of the remote for the holo-projector but said nothing.

  # # #

  The pile in front of Mort was growing fat. Though none of the three worlds in question was entirely within his control, he had the dragon’s share of the chips from each, as well as a number of tidbits the other two had thrown in to help balance out the perceived value of Ithaca—even at half a share.

  “I raise,” Mort said languorously. He didn’t even count the chips he shoved forward to topple over toward the center of the table.

  “Fold,” Enzio and Chisholm said in quick succession.

  “Um, Mort,” Carl said. “I think I’m picking up on a problem here. Come inside a minute. We need to talk.”

  Carl Who Is Just Biding His Time took over the poker game while the original and Mort met in the crowded confines of Carl’s mind.

  “What?” Mort snapped. “I’m bowling them over like a pin sweeper. We’ll be rich as sultans by the end of the evening.”

  “No, we won’t,” Carl said firmly. “Look at them. Look at those eyes. Tanny and Chisholm aren’t thinking how to win a poker game anymore. They’re plotting ways to eliminate us and still walk away with their shares intact.”

  Mort scratched his chin. In this imaginary space, it didn’t itch, but the scratching helped him think. “I suppose we aren’t exactly at a regulated casino…”

  “We need to lose some chips back or your get-out-of-purgatory-free card is going to expire in a cloud of dust.”

  The crowd of Carls nodded their heads in agreement.

  “Isn’t this about the time you start coming up with wacky plans to get us out of this?” Mort asked. “My way could still work, but we’d have to leave a lot of bodies to cover this up.”

  It was. That was how Carl had made his living. It was his bread and butter. It was his beer and nachos. It was the starport docking clamp keeping him from being a success.

  “No. We’re up by twenty pins and facing a split. We don’t need to get cute and fuck up trying for the spare. Let’s just knock over a couple pins and walk away.”

  “We could walk away right now,” Mort said, pointing out the enormous windows of Carl’s eyes. “That Gale fellow’s been tracking the hands. We’re at 195. Five more hands and we can call it a day.”

  “And take a blaster to the gut
,” Carl said, drawing an involuntary cringe from the wizard.

  “That’s just a low blow.”

  “Whatever gets the job done. Let me handle the losing.”

  Mort shook his head. “Never you mind about that. I’ve got a job to finish here. I’ll make sure we lose and that we look good losing.”

  It was a wry grin that made it onto Carl’s face. “How could you not? You look like me.”

  With a parting snort, Mort wrested control from Carl Who Is Just Biding His Time. “I fold.”

  “But you raised,” Enzio said. “You can’t take that back.”

  Mort eyed the chips before him. “Well, fine. But don’t expect much out of me this hand. I don’t know what I was thinking raising with this dangling pair of bull ornaments. Well, other than thinking I still had the cards from last hand.”

  At the next opportunity, Mort folded.

  Then he won a hand that no one seemed interested in. Then he folded again. In and out. In and out. Mort entered hand after hand with probing bets that he backed away from at the first sign of resistance.

  Unlike how Carl might have done it, Mort carefully invested blue chips when facing off against Chisholm and green against Enzio. He made sure the piles mixed a little so that it wasn’t blatant, fiddling with his stacks constantly, but he kept the overall flow.

  When red chips came up for grabs, Mort made sure to win.

  From the time Carl Who Is Just Biding His Time departed onward, there wasn’t an honest hand played. Poker had ceased being a game and turned into a charade of wealth redistribution. The closest things ever came to an actual game were the hands Chisholm and Enzio played against one another, and even then Mort guided the green and blue chips to their preferred destinations.

  By his count, Mort had all but five red chips remaining in the game, and those belonged to Chisholm—her last bulwark of defense against being ousted from New Garrelon entirely.

  Around the time hand 223 was swept up by the dealer, Mort concluded things had gone on long enough. “I’d like to cash out. And by cash, I mean land.”

  “None of you has exclusive claim to any but the minor holdings at stake,” Gale announced formally. “Per the stated rules, there can now be negotiations for parcels of land that would render sole ownership.”

  Internally, Carl cleared his throat.

  Mort declined to step aside.

  “How much you want for those last chips?” Mort asked, crooking a finger at Chisholm’s last reds.

  “This is what you wanted all along, isn’t it?” she asked with a twisted smile. “You tried to win all three planets, but now that it’s slipping away, you want to free these silly stuunji from their servile bonds? You’re just going to give it back to them.”

  “At least tell her you plan to take the money and run,” Carl implored. “She’s expecting something poetic from me.”

  “I have my money,” Mort said with a spread of his hands. “Might as well run while I still have enough left.”

  “Very well,” Chisholm agreed. “You own two planets in the Freeride system. I want them in exchange.”

  Mort sorted through his piles and identified the chips in question. There were eight in total that met her demand. It was a lopsided deal, but it included everything he wanted.

  “No!” Carl shouted. “Get that Galek System mining operation thrown in. Don’t be a pushover. It’s only two chips. She’ll still be coming out ahead.”

  Mort wasn’t big on this sort of mercantile claptrap, so he followed Carl’s advice. “Looks a little uneven. How about you throw in that asteroid mine in Galek, and we call it close enough.”

  Chisholm located the two chips in question, weighed her total of seven against Mort’s eight. “Deal.”

  The chips exchanged hands.

  It was done. New Garrelon belonged to the stuunji once again. Or at least, it would once the pirates got their interloping keesters back to Carousel where they belonged.

  But matters weren’t closed yet. Tanny and Enzio pored over their chips, inventorying the largest of the piles leaving the table.

  “You’re missing these,” Mort said, sequestering four green chips from among his stack.

  “I’ll take what I’ve got,” Tanny said. “We’re not negotiating with you. I kind of like the idea of you on Ithaca with a doormat-sized piece of jungle to call your own while I own 48 percent of it.”

  Mort smiled sadly. “I’ve kept the city where you lived under Devraa’s power. You were happy there, I think, until Mort tore a moon from the very firmament of the heavens and flung it to its doom.”

  “Nice. Good for you,” Tanny said brusquely.

  Mort slid the tiny pile toward Enzio, who had kept his seat while Tanny loomed behind him. “A peace offering. No hard feelings. I got what I came for. Me and Chuck were never meant to be on the same planet together. Too alike. Neither of us likes to be reminded.”

  “Because we’re not!” Carl protested. “Chuck’s a greasy-smiled grifter who pretends to be everyone’s best friend. He can’t fly a ship worth a damn, won’t get his hands dirty in a fight, and can’t play guitar to save his life.”

  Enzio reached across for the chips, but Mort drew them back. He stuck out a hand to shake. “No hard feelings?”

  When Enzio hesitated, Mort opened his hand and turned it this way and that, demonstrating no concealed gizmos or gobs of spit.

  The rapscallion had a firm handshake. Mort had to give him credit for that. And he was willing to look a man in the eye when he shook his hand. For a wizard, it was a show of trust letting him look you in the eye. The Carl impostor was letting down his guard before a man he knew to have not only been a wizard but a Yale wizard.

  Those Ivy League sorts were so notoriously dangerous.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me,” Carl said, pushing back from the table. “I have some good news to deliver. News teams are already on board. How’s my hair?”

  # # #

  The revelry lasted long into the night. Carl had been sitting at a poker table for so much of the day that his ass couldn’t take much more sitting. Even the relatively comfortable stuunji-made chairs couldn’t make up for the kink in his back.

  Of course, with Amy going light on the booze—that is to say, having none—Carl kept himself moderately sober throughout the night. If there had been any residual buzz from his earlier imbibing, it boiled away.

  In the middle of a throng of stuunji well-wishers down on the planet, a path opened up. Tuu Nau made his way through and bowed to Carl, who returned the gesture. “Savior Carl, could we have a word in private?”

  Rai Kub was following the leader of his people like a puppy. He, in turn, was pursued by a number of stuunji women—which Carl could honestly only tell apart from the men by their propensity for wearing rings around their nose horns. If that wasn’t a gender-specific fashion trend, Carl was bound to get himself in trouble one day over it.

  “Sure thing, boss-man,” Carl replied. He turned to Amy with a kiss. “You hang here. Have ‘em find me if you need me.”

  The trio retired to a nearby office building. Carl was surprised to find Keesha Bell and her butler, Hobson, there waiting. Something was off here. Had these two done something wrong? Was he going to have to straighten them out?

  “Thank you for all you have done, Savior Carl,” Tuu Nau said, taking a seat behind a stuunji-sized desk that came as high as Carl’s shoulders.

  “You know me. Anything for the stuunji people,” he replied with a polite smile.

  “This whole incident has cast a grim light across our planet, like an eclipse from a dead moon,” Tuu Nau said gravely. “Though the eclipse has now passed, we know it’s only a matter of time until the cosmos aligns against us once more.”

  Carl held up his hands. “Whoa, there, High Councilor. That’s a bit of a downer for a celebration. I can go back for my guitar and—”

  “No need,” Tuu Nau said quickly. “One small performance was more than enough.”

&
nbsp; Damn right it had been enough. He’d brought the house down. Drunk stuunji may have been an easy audience, but they’d loved his Data Era rock medley.

  “What’s the deal, then?” Carl asked. “And why are these two here. No offense. Hi, Ms. Bell, Hobson. Nice to see you’re doing well.”

  “They’re evicting us,” Keesha said with bottled-up indignation.

  Tuu Nau’s hands clenched. “And I am so, so sorry. But it was part of the terms of our arrangement.”

  “What arrangement?” Carl demanded. “We dropped them off here as asylum seekers. You granted asylum. Dust hands. Walk into sunset. The end.”

  “Our deal with the Eyndar,” Rai Kub said in a low voice.

  Carl must have misheard him. “The who now?”

  “The Eyndar,” Tuu Nau restated. “The Clapton is a fine ship, but it can’t protect a planet with this large a population. We are too large a target, too delicious a meal, too soft an underbelly to resist.”

  “And you’re feeding yourselves to the dogs!”

  Tuu Nau patted the air with his hands. “Please try to remember. The Eyndar are your enemies, not ours. As victims of human expansion, we were a sympathetic case. Just minutes ago, the high council came to terms on a trade agreement that includes military support if human or other ARGO aggressors try to take over.”

  How was that for thanks? Carl lost years of his life to fighting the Eyndar. The EADZ was a no-man’s land for both them and ARGO. Sure, both sides were lax about regular trade and a little colonial action, so long as nothing official or military took place. But to think that the stuunji would turn to them for help…

  “What’s that got to do with these two?” he asked, hooking a thumb at the wizardess and servant.

  “Part of the arrangement,” Rai Kub said. “We open ourselves to the Eyndar and close to humans.”

  “You were already pretty fucking closed to humans,” Carl pointed out.

  “It’s you.” Tuu Nau’s words hung suspended in air as if a thick fog carried them.

  “Me?” Carl echoed.

  “You make little effort to disguise your identity,” Rai Kub said. “And all the crew had heard the stories about you fighting the Eyndar when you were in Earth Navy. They are aware as well. They’re not going to hold it against us, but you aren’t going to be allowed on the planet during the treaty’s duration. No humans will be. No exceptions.”