Ceteroquin: A Twisted Casino Royale (in space)
This is the seventh part of The Trapping of the Ceteroquin. This story appears in full in M/U's 2020 speculative fiction anthology, Demiurges and Demigods in Space, Vol. 1 and will be run as a serial online every Tuesday and Thursday for the next couple of months and each entry can easily be found here. To read this in its entirety, along with all of the other brilliant pieces included in the collection, you can obtain paperback and PDF copies in our store, with Kindle versions available on Amazon.
The Blue Striper was immediately unsettling, both on the level of their nerves and also in terms of the practical. Almost as soon as the meeting had adjourned, the plan changed significantly; upon receipt of some message or other, Hancock called everyone back to announce that they’d be staying in one of the hotel towers in the nearby megacasino, not aboard the ship. Instead of meeting in the morning and the evening in the control room, they would meet at the same designated times in the Captain’s suite. (Even off ship, captaincy still came with some perks.) He sent them off to pack a few days’ worth of personal supplies.
Nobody was really disappointed. Such casinos were known for their premium amenities, and a few nights’ respite with a level of luxury almost certainly higher than what they were used to was hardly cause for complaint. If they were forced to go into a dangerous orbital station for a doomed mission, they might as well do it in style. They’d have even greater opportunities at the tables – and with whatever other vices were on offer.
And what was the use in being an entertainer without the ability to delight your own self?
It was early afternoon, local time, by the time they checked into their rooms and made their way down to the main floor, and this first partial day was pretty much all fun. The crew scattered to make merry like ants at a picnic of alcoholics, while the three officers went off to mix their own, more toned-down, pleasure with a little necessary glad-handing with local politicians and arts bureaucrats. They anticipated – and hoped – that somewhere in the course of the great schmooze, their counterpart would make contact.
Everyone dressed to the nines. The inexplicable sense of confusion and lurking chaos only grew as they descended from their rooms in a glass elevator – even though, of course, nothing whatsoever had happened yet. But if they were going to lose their minds, they all knew, it was better to do it in style.
*
They met as planned in the Captain’s suite, all but the three officers in various states of disarray as they sat in an informal circle on nice upholstered real-wood chairs. Hancock resisted the urge to sigh. We all have our crosses to bear, he thought to himself. He supposed it had been fortunate that everyone had made it; though, they were all highly trained and theoretically disciplined, casinos were known from back in the forgotten past to be masters of distorting time, and some among them were known to hit the tables hard. He could get away with making this a short debriefing. They hadn’t been there long and there wasn’t much to talk about.
Well, there wasn’t much to report. The crew certainly had plenty that they wanted to talk about.
“Father Nick, what’s with the long face?” Frank Mario asked across the circle.
Nick did have such a long face that his sharp blue ensemble almost looked drab and faded. “I went at it a little hard,” he admitted shamefully. “Got taken for a ride. Lost more than I should’ve.” He trailed off for a moment. “More than I can remember in a long time.” Nick had long been known – at least to anybody who’d ever seen him at a casino – to abstain until after his fourth drink before making a beeline for the poker tables. He had long been known, in fact, as a ruthless shark.
Frank backed off. “My condolences,” he said.
“My ass,” Molly laughed scornfully, the left strap of her red dress flopping off of her shoulder as she slouched in her seat, turning toward Nick. “Lost what?”
The priest looked confused.
“No need to be mean to the poor bastard,” the Doctor. “He just lost at poker.”
“He did not,” Molly replied. “I was there!”
“You were?” the priest asked.
“How dare you forget? What do you mean, ‘You were?’? I got bored, you know, since partying it up while waiting for a trap isn’t very fun. That’s when I found you. I watched you play and cheered you on for hours – you even called me your good luck charm! How dare you forget?”
Molly wasn’t usually ever belligerent like this, but it was excused – trying times and all.
Nick seemed genuinely bewildered. “I – I’m sorry, but for some reason I just…remember it differently. You were my good luck charm?”
“You kept kissing my hand and telling me the ripeness of my beauty was opening the path to your victory. You’ve never talked to me like that before!”
“I did? But…wait – are you suggesting I didn’t lose all my money?”
Whereas just moments earlier, everyone mostly wanted to get all this over with, now everyone was at least half-riveted by this exchange.
“Check your credit accounts,” she gestured confidently at the pocket in which he likely had his communication device. “We cashed in the chips together and walked up here…together. What is wrong with you?”
Everyone watched and waited eagerly while Nick clumsily tapped the screen. His eyes grew wide. “I don’t believe it…”
Molly was waving her arms around at this point, no longer slouching. “You took everyone at that table for all they were worth – it was legendary.”
Nick looked at the Captain, suddenly summoning a pinch of sobriety. “A memory discrepancy that might be worth noting.”
Hancock nodded. “It might be.” Or, he knew, it could be the product of a drunken, depressed, and lonely clergyman. He held up his hands to bring things back around. Since they were outside the security of the ship, they were employing a scrambling device that would present any electronic surveillance with endless hours of very convincing innocent conversation in their real voices, but this meeting didn’t seem to require fake nonsense. He finally let himself sigh. “Anything worth discussing before we end this shameful excuse for debriefing?”
“Well yes – there’s the obvious,” said Ben as though quite surprised the Captain would not immediately get into the obvious thing.
Hancock now stopped a second or two, blinking. “I legitimately have no idea what you are talking about.”
“What do you mean? The contact? The message?”
The Captain looked at Laura. “What is he talking about?”
Laura shook her head. “Don’t look at me.”
He looked back at Ben (everyone did). “What are you talking about?”
“You saw the whole thing,” Ben looked back and forth between the Captain and Laura, but they both just looked at him blankly. “Both of you did. When we were waiting around for that one arts guy who wanted to see us early because he was going to be busy later. You know?”
“I do remember the arts guy,” the Captain said. “But what are you saying?”
“Some dirty hippie-looking kid at a slot machine was giving me eyes and—”
“That’s because you’re pretty,” Frank Mario interrupted. The three officers glared at him and he shut up.
Ben continued. “I took the seat two down from the guy. He flashed me the right signs, whispered the countersign, then gave me rendezvous coordinates and a time for tomorrow. I swear – you looked right at me and nodded while this was going on. Both of you did.”Neither Laura nor the Captain remembered any such thing. Now there were two memory lapses – Hancock knew it actually was something he had to keep an eye on, if only to watch for more examples. Ben revealed the coordinates and designated time he had committed to his own, hopefully not lapsed memory. The Captain agreed that they would follow the instructions, but his intuition told him something about this was off. But the plan for the remainder of the evening would remain unchanged. Everyone was to remain as vigilant as possible while exhibiting an authentic libertine spirit.