"Forget it, kid."
The Falcon finished the liquor in the first glass, sipped slowly at the fresh cahnde set before him by a noiseless waiter. Deep in his mind sang a tiny warning voice of danger. But he sat still, waiting for an opportunity to make a silent escape from the night club that was fast becoming an IP trap. His keen gaze flicked about the room, finding and identifying the agents scattered through the crowd.
He broke the pulnik capsule, rolled the fragrant tobacco in a fresh paper, lit it with his pocket lighter. He smoked slowly, the glow shadowing the flat planes of his face, lighting the rugged, almost brutal, sweep of his jaw. He edged his chair back quietly, tensing the great muscles of his legs, estimated the distance to the rear door.
Other than that, he didn't move, for he saw that he was watched by two agents converging on him from both sides of the swaying dancers on the floor. He smiled slightly, sat cool and debonair, the leather vest and silk singlet accenting the wedge of his deep chest and shoulders.
"Any minute now, Val," he said into his throat amplifier.
The Kaana four-piece orchestra swung into the soft lazy melody of a century before. Glasses clinked at the bar, and the soft rustle of laughing conversation made the room seem intimate and warm. Nostalgia bit at Curt Varga's heart, when he remembered the days not so many years before when his life had been an ordered thing, when he had not been a hunted outlaw prowling the spaceways, a price on his head.
In those days, before his mind had fully matured, he had thought his life full and untrammelled. He had worn his uniform as an IP Commander with the bullying swagger his superiors affected. With dis-guns and a brutal carelessness, he had enforced the commands of Jason Vandor, Dak Yar and Mezo Yong, the Food Administrators, had forced obedience from recalcitrant people of a dozen worlds, had been the leader of the shock-troops that pillaged city after city because they had incurred the anger of the Triumvirate whose hands controlled the food supplies of the Solar System.
Then in his twenty-fifth year, he had seen the foulness of the system that broke the lives and courage of the inhabitated worlds. He had seen his father blasted to death for daring to raise his voice against the tyranny of the Food Administrators. He had seen his older brother die while fighting to save their father. And a conflict had raged within him for days; he had fought against the training that had been instilled within him from the day of his birth.
From musty records, he had reread the histories of the worlds, had really understood for the first time the true meaning of freedom. And in that hour, he had thrown aside all that had been his life, and had striven to build a new one. In a stolen Kent-Horter, he had prowled the spaceways, striking at small freighters for supplies and wealth. In the cold of space, he had stooped like the Falcon for whom he had been named, and stolen the Food Administrators' supplies time and again.