Long Shot

by David Mack

  If a few guests won big from time to time, that was good for business, too. It encouraged the others to keep pushing their luck, to keep thinking that they would be the ones to defy the odds rather than prove their merciless arithmetic. So it went, with flashing lights and armfuls of cash for the winners, luxurious consolations for the most lavish losers, and heartbreak and self-loathing for the masses. Was it cruel? Of course. But it was a living, and it was legal.

  Kleftis strolled across the center walkway of the casino’s main room, his three-layered tunic of metallic fabrics shimmering from the flicker of electronic game displays. Wheels spun in hypnotic blurs. Cards darted across felt tabletops to waiting hands. Metal ingots clinked into betting pots—music to Kleftis’s tympanic membranes. Automated match-and-win machines teased patrons with one near miss after another, paying out minor sums to string along the stubborn for a few rounds more. Hunched backs huddled around the bar at the end of the casino, while wide-eyed newcomers streamed in from the lobby and turned the corner onto the gaming floor, where the lack of windows and clocks made time seem to fall away.

  All was well. There was no sign of the usual cadre of cheaters, con artists, or hustlers who made the city’s casinos their hunting grounds. As usual, there were a few overconfident youths trying out some system or other for counting cards. As long as they kept on losing, Kleftis was happy to let them blunder along. If they should start winning? He made a mental note to check back on those tables in a few minutes’ time, just to make sure they weren’t playing dumb to mollify the dealers and the pit bosses.

  He paced back to the center of the room and lorded over it, a monarch surveying his domain. Assured that the gaming floor was operating smoothly, he plucked from a pocket inside his tunic a slim steel case filled with rolling papers. He held a paper in one hand while he procured a flip-top vial of minced sweet leaf from another pocket and thumbed it open. A few shakes deposited a small mound of the aromatic herb on the paper. Kleftis closed the vial and put it away, then spread the minced leaves across the paper. A slow, deliberate caress of his long tongue moistened one edge of the paper, which his nimble fingers twisted into a tight cylinder. He pulled his platinum-­plated lighter from his belt, put the cigarette in his mouth, and lit it.

  Kleftis inhaled. His vocal sac expanded until its skin grew taut and almost transparent, so that he could see the smoke swirling within. Then the sac contracted and forced the smoke into his lungs. He felt his pulse slow and his senses sharpen. He became aware of the pungent fumes rising from his cigarette, the cologne of the elderly patrons at the nearest table, the clangor of electronic machines, the mad chatter of voices pitched with excitement—

  Then he became aware of something else, something he dreaded.

  Someone was winning, and winning big.

  He pivoted, his sharp eyes searching the sea of faces. Who was it? Where were those howls of joy coming from? To his horror, he discovered there was more than one source.

  At one card table, every player had beaten the dealer. At a spinner table, a player who had placed an outrageous wager cackled madly as the wheel master pushed a fortune in ingots across the table to her. Then everything went haywire, and Kleftis’s blood ran cold.

  Laughter pealed and drowned out the diabolical machines. Joyful whoops of celebration came from all directions. At every table where guests played against the dealers, the dealers lost. All the automated machines landed on jackpot payouts. Even the most outlandishly rigged games, the ones at which the house commanded a thirty-percent edge, were giving up their profits to the players. In a matter of seconds, before Kleftis could raise his voice above the bedlam, a year’s worth of profits had vanished.

  There was nothing else he could do. He pulled his personal comm from inside his tunic and triggered the emergency alarm. The overhead lights snapped off, and the automated machines went dark. Sirens blared, and from the lobby came the resounding crash of the reinforced security gates slamming into place.

  Confident the casino and hotel were locked down, Kleftis patched his comm into the house’s public address system. “Attention!” His amplified voice boomed back at him from the speakers embedded in the ceilings and walls. “As of this time, no one may enter or leave the casino or the hotel. The authorities have been summoned, and whoever committed this act of sabotage and fraud will be found and prosecuted. Until then, all winnings from the last round of each game will be confiscated by members of the casino staff as evidence.”

  If the mood had been wild before the lights went out, now it was utter mayhem. Patrons assaulted the casino workers who tried to carry out Kleftis’s orders. Bellows of fury mixed with the shattering of glass to create a riot of destruction.

  The mob surged toward Kleftis. He ran. By the time his security personnel arrived in force to contain the brouhaha, the crowd had beaten him bloody and laid waste the Chrimata’s gaming floor and bar. Kleftis cracked open one swollen eye to see his once-pristine gaming floor aflame. It had to be sabotage, he told himself. There’s no way that many people can win at once.

  That was what he told the constables when they arrived half an hour later.

  They dashed his hopes for justice with two cruel words.

  “Prove it.”

  He raged, he cited statistics, appealed to math, to logic, to common sense. But it made no difference. Without evidence of wrongdoing, all the constables could say for certain was that Kleftis’s luck had finally run out—and as far as they knew, there was no law against that.

  • • •

  The romance of elected office had long since faded for Tribune Tiras Saranda. She had begun her political career just after she finished her education, serving as an aide to council members at the local level. Only after years as an underling had she mustered the gumption to run for her own seat. After that, it had taken her decades to claw her way up through the seemingly endless layers of bureaucracy that had come to define Anura’s global government. By the time she had achieved sufficient public notoriety to make a bid for the world’s highest executive office, an arrogant chorus of pundits and many of her peers had protested she was too old, that she would be physically unequal to the unique stresses of serving as tribune.

  Tonight was the first time she wished she had listened to them.

  Ensconced behind her amoeba-shaped desk of carved white stone, she pressed her bulbous fingertips to her throbbing temples and tried to wrap her mind around the news she had just been given. “Are you trying to tell me that you might have just caused a global disaster?”

  On the other side of her desk, Doctor Pren Kavalas at least had the courtesy to hang his head and half-close his eyes in shame. “It hasn’t become one yet, Madam Tribune. But it might.”

  Determined to project authority and confidence, she set her hands on the desktop and straightened her back. “How did this happen?”

  “We’re still analyzing the data. It might have been a miscalculation of the dark energy potential, or a materials failure in our capacitance system.”

  It was all gibberish to Saranda, but she nodded as if she understood. Using the holographic interface projected onto the surface of her desk, she called up news reports from around the planet. Bewildering patterns of freak accidents, unexplained disruptions in the laws of chance at multiple casinos, channels once full of random static transmitting pulses in ever-increasing prime number ­sequences without apparent origin. She let it hang in midair until she was certain Kavalas had taken note of it. She gestured at the evidence. “Your work, I take it?”

  He did his best to sound calm. “It might be an unintended consequence of it, yes.”

  “Am I supposed to be grateful it wasn’t deliberate?” She waved one hand to forestall a reply. “Never mind. Just tell me this: Can you shut it down?”

  A crooked grimace played across Kavalas’s face. “Not at this time.”

  Her patience expired and her c
ountenance grew stern. “Why not?”

  Kavalas folded his hands together as he concocted his reply. “We tried to shut it down as soon as our primary experiment failed. The main generator is refusing to accept new input. We think something may have severed its hard-line command systems. Further analysis—”

  Saranda raised a hand to halt the technobabble. “Just pull the plug, Doctor.”

  “We did, ma’am. It didn’t work.” He used his portable comm to call up a holovid from the Science Ministry’s secure servers. It showed a multi-limbed robot slicing an insulated bundle of wires with a laser. “As you can see, we triggered the fail safe power cutoff, and our remote observation circuit confirms the main line between the fusion core and the quantum fluctuation generator was physically severed at nine minutes past the hour.” He paused the vid’s playback. “Unfortunately, this measure came too late to shut down the generator.”

  There were few things Saranda hated more than feeling like the dumbest person in the room, and the scientist’s briefing was accomplishing exactly that. “How can the generator still be operational when your robot literally cut its link to the plant’s fusion core?”

  “Because achieving energy autonomy was the core function of the QFG. The impetus for the project was to tap into an extra-dimensional source of dark energy. Which it’s just done.”

  “So how do you interrupt that connection?”

  The scientist’s shoulders slumped into a pose of humility. “We don’t know.”

  She appreciated his contrition, but she had no use for it. “What about these wild epidemics of circumstance? Were they part of its core function?”

  A shake of his head. “No, Madam Tribune. Only the most extreme simulations suggested such effects might be possible. We discounted them as statistical improbabilities.”

  “Improbable or not, they’re here. How long do we expect them to last?”

  “That’s hard to say.” He entered commands into his personal comm as he replied. “Based on our post-event analysis of the QFG’s output, my colleagues and I project that the intensity of the generator’s improbability field will continue to increase on a logarithmic scale over the next day. The first waves will be a few hours apart, and then they’ll recur at ever-shorter intervals. By midday, the effects will likely be potent enough to be felt in low orbit. After that, the pulses will continue to grow until they propagate throughout our solar system.”

  “What effect will that have on our space station?”

  Kavalas blinked and froze for a second. “It’s impossible to predict.”

  “And we return to my original question: Did you just spark a global catastrophe?”

  He puffed out his vocal sac, then croaked, “Maybe.”

  Saranda was aghast. “Maybe?”

  He started to pace. “All I can say for certain, Madam Tribune, is that as the pulses from the improbability engine intersect with one another, the laws of probability within those zones of confluence will become chaotically disrupted, perhaps even inverted.” He paused beside her window and gazed out at the capital city of Mitsaro. “Over the next several hours, events that under normal conditions would be considered astronomically unlikely will suddenly become commonplace, and outcomes we take for granted will elude us in apparent defiance of logic.” He turned back toward her, his tone grave. “This will be a day of miracles and disasters.”

  The tribune absorbed his warning with horror. “In other words, anything can happen.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And I guarantee that it will.”

  4

  No place had ever felt so right to Clark Terrell as the captain’s chair of the Sagittarius. That hadn’t been the case when he had been the ship’s executive officer, under the late Captain Adelard Nassir. In those days, he had never lost sight of the fact that the Sagittarius was Nassir’s command, and that even when it was entrusted to his care, he was only its temporary steward. Ever since Nassir’s death during the Battle of Vanguard, however, Terrell had come to view the center seat as his, rather than his former captain’s. He knew that one day he might be asked to relinquish it to another officer, should he and the ship both be so fortunate as to remain in service that long. But until that day came, he planned to enjoy feeling at home in this, his first command.

  Around him, his bridge crew worked with quiet efficiency. Nizsk occupied the combined helm and navigation console directly ahead of him. Behind him, along the aft bulkhead, to the left of the off-center door, Sorak manned the tactical station. Seated to Terrell’s left, operating the communications console, was Chief Razka. On the opposite side of the bridge, Lieutenant Sengar Hesh busied himself collating data from the ship’s sensors at the science console.

  Roaming from station to station was Lieutenant Commander Theriault. She claimed she had picked up the habit of supervising on the move from watching Terrell, but it was a common enough practice in Starfleet that he sometimes suspected her of currying favor by crediting him with more influence than he’d actually had.

  Can’t fault her for being a charmer.

  Thanks to the slight elevation of his chair’s dais—thirty centimeters, just enough to give it a place of prominence in the confined compartment—Terrell had an unobstructed perspective of the main viewscreen, which dominated the curved forward bulkhead. Now that the ship had dropped out of warp and returned to impulse power, its virtual window to the universe depicted an orange orb of light surrounded by a halo of blackness and, beyond that, an increasingly dense dusting of stars.

  Terrell swiveled his chair a few degrees to starboard, toward his science officer. “Mister Hesh? Any luck pinpointing the source of those dark energy fluctuations?”

  Hesh lifted his three-lobed forehead from the blue glow of the sensor’s hooded display. “Affirmative, Captain. Sensors confirm the fluctuations are emanating from the surface of this system’s fourth planet. To be precise, a single location in its northern hemisphere, close to its arctic circle.” He turned his solid green, iris-free eyes toward the viewscreen. “However, there appears to be a new complication in our mission profile.”

  Theriault wasted no time picking up the slack. “What would that be?”

  “The planet is inhabited,” Hesh said. “Biomass readings are significant. If its dominant species is humanoid, I estimate its population is roughly eight point four billion people. There are several active fusion reactors on the planet’s surface. Furthermore, electromagnetic signal emissions suggest this planet has robust, hard-wired information and power networks that encompass all populated areas of its surface. Lastly, it has what appears to be a manned facility in low orbit—possibly for astronomical observation, perhaps for commerce.”

  The news drew a sigh from Terrell. “Who wants to say my two favorite words?”

  His executive officer put a musical spin on them: “Prime Directive!”

  “Thank you.” He turned his chair toward Razka. “Chief, monitor all communications to and from their space station. If there’s even the slightest indication we’ve been spotted, I want to know immediately.”

  He looked up from his console just long enough to nod and say, “Aye, sir.”

  Terrell stood and walked aft to stand beside Sorak. “Any sign of Klingon or Romulan activity in this sector?”

  Sorak flipped toggles and keyed switches to put the latest tactical data on the displays above his station. He and Terrell watched the screens flicker and stutter. The controls on the tactical panel cascaded on and off in a bizarre repeating pattern—and then everything reverted to normal, and the sector maps appeared as intended on the overhead screens.

  Wide-eyed, Terrell waited for the system to malfunction again. “What was that?”

  “Running a diagnostic,” Sorak said. A few seconds later, he cocked one eyebrow. “The system has no record of the malfunction, sir.”

  It took only one hairy-eyeball glance from Terrell
to prompt Theriault into action. “I’ll have the Master Chief look at it right away.”

  “See that you do.” He turned back to Sorak. “You were saying?”

  “No sign of hostile contacts in this or adjacent sectors, Captain. At the moment, we appear to be the only vessel within twenty-five light-years responding to the event.”

  That was good news, always a rarity in Terrell’s experience. “Glad to hear it, but that could change. Keep a close watch on the long-range scans. The last thing we need is a visit from someone looking to weaponize a dark energy technology.”

  “Understood.”

  Terrell left Sorak and circled around the center seat to stand behind Nizsk. Theriault fell in beside him on his right, just as Terrell had always done for Captain Nassir.

  Maybe she did learn by watching me. He folded his hands behind his back. “Okay, Number One—how do we check out these readings without violating the Prime Directive?”

  “How about a stealth trajectory? Nizsk, pull up a system map.” Nizsk switched the main viewscreen’s image to an overhead diagram of its eleven planets orbiting its star. “Zoom in on the fourth planet and its moons.” The requested portion of the image enlarged and filled the screen. Theriault gestured at its details as she continued. “The fourth planet has two moons, in different orbits. Based on their current positions and motion, we could adjust our course to approach the planet from behind them, as their paths intersect relative to the planet.”