Immunity (Book 3 of the Dana Halliday series)

FEEL SOFTLY. SOLNECHNOGORSK. MENTAL BANK VAULT.

"I'll fold."

Flynt made a sweeping motion, as though convincing a group of stormtroopers these weren't the droids they were looking for. The two virtual cards floating before him vanished into the ether, as did the two in front of me, and the four between us.

"Oh, come on," I muttered, too disgruntled to celebrate winning the hand. "I was totally composed."

Yuri floated behind me, keeping himself in place with a hand on the ceiling. Flynt hovered about ten inches over the padded bench, nearly immobile with legs curled beneath him in his usual sitting position. I kept myself in place across from him by bracing my knees under the table. Why we were facing each other over a table in zero gravity was anyone's guess; I supposed old habits did die hard.

"Good choice," said our pilot. He had been looking over my shoulder.

"Yeah," I agreed. "I had a damn full house. Whose side are you on, Yuri?"

"I thought it was something good." Flynt shrugged. "I had three aces." He smiled at Yuri. "I could barely sense any reaction from him, actually."

"Hmmph." I pretended to glare at my fellow Earther. "Played much poker?"

"Along with every other card game and board game and video game in the known galaxy, I think." Yuri smoothed his slightly drifting hair. "I was never great at strategy, but I've got a good poker face."

"Me too."

"It's not your facial expressions," Flynt said, for probably the hundredth time.

"Yeah, I know."

This was maybe the twentieth game of Texas hold'em we'd played in the day and a half we'd been traveling. The goal was teaching psychically loud Earthers such as myself to mask their emotional responses. I hadn't managed to out-bluff Flynt, though Yuri was a bit better at it.

Yuri excused himself to take a nap. We were about six hours from our destination. I sighed, and Flynt told the computer to halt the game.

"It's not your fault," he said. "You'll always be louder to me. But I'd be loud to you if you were a Fenn, so don't feel too badly. You're improving."

"Hmmph."

But I told myself to take his advice. I'd only been consciously trying to mute my emotions for a few hours, after all, and it was a difficult skill to learn.

Besides the fact that we were close, Flynt couldn't quite articulate what to him was an intuitive process. "Just...feel softly," was the best he could do.

The best I could do was imagine a barrier in my mind, a mental bank vault. Unfortunately, my particular mental vault was made of cardboard and Elmer's glue.

"Want to switch to ejomsop?"

Ejomsop was a Cennett game, ostensibly a card game. In actuality, it made me think of a combination of chess, Magic, and Monopoly, with a heaping spoonful of Calvinball.

"Is it easier to mask confusion and frustration?" I asked.  "Then let's do it."

* * *

Solnechnogorsk was one of the drearier places I'd been, and I lived in the Pacific Northwest for multiple winters. The colony existed on the moon of a rocky planet similar to Earth circa three billion years ago, and was enclosed under a forcefield of the kind we'd seen in the Port of Sard's hangar.

The population consisted of only a thousand-ish people, mainly miners, on the moon's icy surface. Dull in places, glittery in others, the ice formed tall peaks and deep fjords, and Solnechnogorsk made a gray clot in a deep, irregular crevice.