Into the Black

The Smuggler’s Reach All Station Poker Tournament is held monthly, and is one of the main highlights of life aboard the station. It is, of course, purely coincidental that there is a regular monthly event happening each week on the station. The cycle, for those who didn’t know, went as follows: the All Station Poker Tournament, the Centauri General Slave Auction, the Gladiator’s Arena, and the Centauri Stakes, a race made with ‘small ships’ (because no one could see that they were clearly fighters).

Anyways, there was a purely coincidental circuit of events that kept money and influence constantly circulating through the station, which was, in general, a good thing for everyone. For me, that meant that I had a nice, convenient way to score some serious credits. Oh, not at the tables. It was one thing to play cardsharp in a single game, cheating the whole time. Doing it in a tournament on a station of mobsters was something else. When said mobsters were very open about the fact that they had Psy-detectors, and had no qualms about showing cheaters to the nearest airlock, whether a ship was there or not, it became a rather foolish idea.

So no, I wasn’t going to try and cheat my way through the tournament. Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t be participating (it was still fun to gamble, after all). But my money-making scheme for the evening had less to do with winning the tournament, and more to do with going home with the tournament’s winner, or at least one of the high rollers. Away from the psy-detectors, and with the help of a couple drugged drinks, I hoped to ‘convince’ some of the big fish to hire an ‘escort’.

In other words, I wanted to catfish them and rob them blind, like Lord Kickass. In honor of that thought, I brought back an old friend.