Death Match nfe-18 Read online

  The orange ball slammed into the white-lit hex, and the score froze it, half-illuminated, in the very act of precessing.

  The roars were making it impossible to hear anything, and when the ball impacted just inside the goal hex, there was no hearing even the usual earsplitting hoot of the scoring alert. It seemed only a few seconds more before the injury-time clock expired, and there was another howl of alarm meant to signify the end of the game, but it was completely lost in the collective howl of the crowd, frustration on two sides, absolute triumph in the third. Suddenly the volume was occupied by a scrum of another kind, one in which George Brickner was completely buried, and deafened by his own hollers of delight and those of his teammates. The world dissolved in yellow.

  Catie took a deep breath and brought the menu back, selecting GENERAL and ANNOUNCER. The familiar dulcet voice of the Flyers’ home-game announcer was saying, “…astonishing comeback from three hexes down, just one more in a series of hairsbreadth saves for South Florida Spat, but a sad moment for San Diego fans, and also for the Seattle High Flyers, after a season that began with such promise but seemed to go rapidly downhill due to injuries and player-contract issues. Again the score, the San Diego Pumas three, the Seattle High Flyers three, and the new interregional title six champions, the South Florida Spatball Association, the ‘Banana Slugs,’ five—”

  Catie blinked to kill her implant. Everything went white, but before she was allowed to shut the feed down completely, a sweet female voice said, “The preceeding expericast is copyright 2025 by the World Spatball Federation. All rights reserved. Any reexperience, pipelining, or other use of this material is restricted to personal use only by international law, and unauthorized transfer of content is strictly prohibited. This is the WSF Net.”

  The whiteness went away, leaving Catie looking at the far wall of the family room — the bookshelves, her dad’s easy chair, the Net computer in its low case, and the place over to one side of the last bookshelf to the right, near the corner of the room, where a crack running down from the ceiling had become apparent in the plaster last week. Her mom had been complaining about the increase in heavy traffic down the street that ran parallel to theirs. It seemed there might be something in what she’d been saying.

  “Time?” she said to the clock on the wall.

  “Eight fourteen P.M.”

  “Oh, good,” Catie said, glancing out the window at the backyard. The sun was nearly down behind the fruit trees that mostly hid the back wall. Dimming yellow light danced and glittered through their leaves. It had been a nice day, but she hadn’t done what she’d first been tempted to, go out and have a few goals with her “casual” soccer team. Instead she had elected to stay home and get the homework done, so that she would have tomorrow and Sunday free. And then Hal had shanghaied her into watching “The Game” with him. The best-laid plans…Oh, well.

  She got out of the implant chair and stretched, and was grateful she didn’t have the muscle strain right now that poor Brickner did. If he was smart, his team trainer was putting him into a hot whirlpool bath right about now. Catie stretched again, trying to get rid of a crick in her back that wasn’t really there, and glanced around. She had promised her mom that she’d clean up a little in here this evening, but Hal had sidetracked her into watching this game, and now the serious cleaning was going to have to wait until considerably later. For which I will probably catch a certain amount of grief. Oh, well…

  Catie sighed and spent a minute or so moving around the family room, making a desultory attempt to pick up some of the books and magazines and dataflips that had been left lying around. When her little brother caught an interest, he caught it completely. He ate and slept and breathed it…until something more interesting came along. Right now it was spatball, and his enthusiasm had been sufficiently contagious, today, to pull her in, too.

  For her own part, Catie had to admit that there was something there worth being interested in. Her own acquaintance with the game had been strictly theoretical until the last couple of weeks. Now she knew more about it than she had ever really intended to. And yet at the same time, there was no pretending that the sport wasn’t intriguing. Hybrid descendant of soccer in a spacesuit it might be, but—

  “Wow, huh?”

  The non sequitur had come from Hal, who was standing there now in the doorway of the family room. He apparently hadn’t bothered with the postgame show. He was breathing hard, too, which hardly came as a surprise to Catie.

  “Wow, yeah,” she said. “I didn’t think they were going to make it.”

  “Yeah, it was intense. But the Slugs are go for the eighth-finals!”

  Catie chuckled as she watched him wipe the sweat off his forehead. “Were you ‘being’ George Brickner, too?”

  “Who else?”

  “There were five other people. That cute brunette you were blathering about last week, for example.”

  “Oh, her.” The tone of voice was dismissive. “Day-strom. She’s okay, but she’s not as sharp as Brickner is….”

  Catie raised her eyebrows at that. “A captain can’t be a team all by himself,” she said. “Isn’t that what you were saying the other day?” She grinned at him as she slipped past him, dropping into his hands some of the books and flips she had been picking up, the ones that were his. “I think it’s just a case of hero worship.”

  “Not a chance!”

  She went out into the hall and glanced up and down. “Mom get back from the mall yet?”

  “If she did, I didn’t hear her.”

  “I don’t think either of us would have heard much if she came in during the last few minutes of that,” Catie said, “whether she used the ‘outside-in’ circuit or not. That crowd was pretty worked up. Where’s Dad?”

  “No idea.”

  “Mmf. Probably in the studio.”

  “Better leave him alone, then.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Catie made her way down to the kitchen. It was small for the house, but then, compared to the other houses in their little suburb of D.C., the whole house was small. This was something which Catie’s father had of late been complaining about more or less continually. He worked at home, and had been muttering about building another extension onto the house for the past year or so, since he had extended his studio two years ago and then found that what seemed like ample square footage on the plans had turned out too small. Catie turned on the cold water in the sink and let it run for a while, looking around her and wondering how they would all cope when the renovations finally started and left them with no back to the house for a couple of weeks (an image which her mother had been repeatedly invoking in an attempt to get the project put off for a few more months).

  She got a tumbler down out of the cabinet and filled it, and drank thirstily. Even though Catie hadn’t actually been playing, the mind was still able to fool the body into feeling thirsty sometimes…and this was one of those times. Hal came in from the hall and got himself a glass, too, filled it. “He’s in the studio,” Hal said. “I can hear him scraping on the canvas.” Their father was a professional artist, and a quirky one — as talented with old-fashioned media, like paint, as he was with computer-“generated” art and Net-based installations, and sometimes showing what seemed an odd preference for the more archaic media simply on account of their age.

  “Right,” Catie said. Her dad hadn’t been in there yet when she came home, which meant he was good for at least a few hours in there now. She would have time to get a little more of the cleaning-up done before her mom got back and before she had to “go out” herself.

  “So let me get this straight,” she said, leaning back against the sink and looking out the window of the kitchen at the backyard again. The sun had now gone down behind the wall. “Brickner is the friend you’ve been telling me about? ‘The Parrot’?”

  “No, Mike’s the friend — I met him on that research project for school last year, the geology thing — he was a research assistant at the Smith
sonian for the summer. The Parrot is Mike’s friend; they know each other from college. I haven’t actually met George yet, but Mike says he’s going to get us together sometime in the next couple of weeks, if they have the time.”

  “From the sound of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if that team doesn’t have much time for casual meetings in the next couple of weeks,” Catie said, eyeing her brother. “They’re going to have the media all over them, I bet. They’re pretty hot. They play like, I don’t know, like a bunch of astronauts.”

  Hal laughed. “Yeah, they do…. Though I bet if the astronauts had known what kind of salary people would start making from this kind of thing, ten years ago, they all would have quit NASA and gone right into the majors.”

  “The majors don’t seem to be the only way to go,” Catie said, “if your pet team is anything to go by.”

  “No,” Hal said, “they’re kind of a special case.”

  Catie laughed. “With a name like The Banana Slugs, I guess they’d have to be.”

  Her brother gave her a look. “It’s just a nickname. Anyway, it’s not half as stupid as some of the team names these days.”

  He had a point there. “Still,” Catie said, “they’re really good. Better than I thought they would be.”

  “Why shouldn’t they be?” Hal said, getting himself another glass of water, and pausing to drink it right down. “It’s not like this is a game where you have to have a lot of money to be good at it, or have corporate sponsorship patches plastered all over you. Skill and speed and brains are everything. Doesn’t matter whether you’re big or small. If you’re quick and smart, and fairly well coordinated…that should be enough. But there’s more to it than just that.”

  “A certain elegance of execution,” Catie said. “One that looks like telepathy sometimes.”

  Her brother looked at her with some surprise.

  “Didn’t think I could appreciate the higher aspects of the game?” Catie said mildly. “Well, that’s okay. It’s healthy for you to underestimate me.”

  He poked her in the ribs…or started to. Abruptly Catie wasn’t there anymore, having neatly sidestepped him as soon as he moved. A moment later she was sitting at the kitchen table, giving him an amused look. Her own skill at soccer had not left her entirely without abilities useful for dealing with a rogue brother…. Not that Hal needed a lot of dealing with, thank heaven. Their relationship was amiable enough, generally. And the resemblance between them was strong. They could have been twins. They should have been twins, Catie sometimes thought, except that Hal was always late, and had apparently managed this stunt even as regarded his birth, turning up a year after a proper twin would have. Regardless of the delay, Hal had come out about the same height as Catie, about the same weight, blonde and blue-eyed like her; and their general build and carriage were like enough that sometimes people mistook them for one another from a distance, especially in the winter when they were bundled up. This could have been a pain, except that Catie was continually amused at being mistakenly hailed as “Hallie” by her brother’s would-be girlfriends…and it gave Catie endless ammunition to use on him later, while doing her best to make sure that he never had the chance to do the same to her. The situation was entirely satisfactory, as far as she was concerned.

  “How am I supposed to discipline you if you won’t stand still?” Hal said, getting one more glass of water.

  “You’re not,” Catie said. “Learn to live with your sorry fate and like it.”

  Her brother made a face eloquent of his opinion of such a philosophy. “You should see yourself,” Catie said. “If only you could get stuck that way, Dad could frame you and hang you as a fake Picasso.”

  “Yeah, right. So, do you want to come watch the post-game show?”

  “Can’t,” Catie said. “Got a Net Force Explorers meeting tonight.”

  Her brother looked at her incredulously. “You sure that’s more important?”

  “Yeah. And isn’t the postgame show on right now, anyway?”

  Hal rolled his eyes. “What planet have you been living on? We get twenty minutes of commercials first. But they’re interviewing Brickner. I thought you’d want to see that.”

  That made Catie pause for a moment. Insight into another athlete’s head was always welcome, especially after a game like that. But after a second’s thought she shook her head. “Naah,” Catie said. “Look, save it for me, okay? Just read it over to my Net space when you’re done.”

  “I can’t get into your space.”

  She smiled sweetly. “Which just proves you’ve been trying to again. Without asking.”

  Hal gave her a rather cheesy but completely unrepentant grin.

  “One of these days,” Catie said, “you’re gonna do something on the up-and-up and then be shocked to find that it worked better than making convoluted plans and plots and sneaking around.” Then Catie grinned. “But when that happens I’ll probably expire of shock, so don’t rush, okay? Just ask the space to let you in…it’ll make an exception for once.”

  “Okay.”

  He sounded unusually meek. Catie started wondering what he was up to. She went over to the sink, rinsed her glass out, and opened the dishwasher.

  “I’m clean! I’m clean!” the dishwasher shrilled.

  “That’s more than I can say,” Catie muttered, realizing afresh how sweaty even a virtual game of spatball had left her. Her T-shirt was sticking to her. She shut the dishwasher and put the glass aside on the counter. “I thought you were supposed to empty this thing all this week.”

  “I was busy—”

  “Get on with it,” Catie said. “If you hurry, I won’t have to tell Mom about it when she gets back.”

  “And if you hurry, I won’t have to tell her you didn’t clean up the family room.”

  Catie rolled her eyes. “Blackmail,” she said. “Empty threats. I need a shower. And then I’m going to go do adult things.”

  “I’ll get you your cane, O superannuated one.”

  Catie smiled a crooked smile and went out, rubbing her neck, then caught herself massaging the sports injury she didn’t have, and smiled more crookedly still as she went down the hall to the bathroom.

  Somewhere else entirely a meeting was taking place in a bar. It was a virtual bar, and the drink was virtual, and the customers were all wearing seemings, which well suited their purpose, in most cases, since most of them were intent on keeping their business to themselves.

  Under a ceiling of blue glass, a tall, blunt-featured man with hair cut very, very short was sitting at one of the tables nearest the big central fountain, a bowl of tan, blue-veined marble. The man was dressed in an ultrablack single-all of extremely conservative cut, with a white silk jabot at the throat, and he was turning a martini glass around and around on the matte white marble of the tabletop. His face was very still, giving no indication of the turmoil of thought presently going on inside it. His mouth twitched once or twice, an expression that could have been taken for a smile, but that impression would have been very incorrect.

  Outside the bar it was afternoon, or pretending to be. The light lay long and low and golden over the pedestrianized street outside, as people strolled up and down it with shopping bags and small children in tow. Something came between the afternoon light pouring through the windows and the man sitting by the fountain, blocking away the golden glint of the afternoon light on the martini glass. The man in the ultrablack single-all looked up and squinted slightly at the second man standing there.

  The newcomer sat down casually enough in the other chair. The first man looked at him for a few moments. The second man was small, broad-shouldered but thick around the waist, and dressed in slikjeans and a dark blazer with a white T-shirt underneath, a look that suggested the wearer was caught among several different eras and trying to fulfil fashion imperatives from all of them. Scattered, thought the first man. Don’t know why I’m bothering—

  “Thanks for coming, Darjan,” said the second man, and looked
the first one casually in the face, then glanced away again.

  “Don’t thank me, Heming,” said Darjan. “We have a problem.”

  “Yeah, I heard the results,” Heming said.

  “A big problem,” said Darjan. “We started hearing from the syndicate’s backers within about ten minutes of the win.”

  “They’re just nervous, I can understand wh—”

  “You can’t understand what they understand,” Darjan said, “which is that the pools projections never indicated anything like this happening, and a lot of people are going to be out a lot of money unless something’s done.”

  “It’s luck,” said Heming, shrugging. “The kind of thing you can’t predict.”

  Darjan laughed harshly. “With the computers you people have, with probability experts who can even get the weather right, nowadays, five days out of six, you’re telling me this kind of ‘luck’ couldn’t be predicted? You people were so sure that your prognostication algorithms were foolproof. Well, we’re about to be the fools. And the booby prize has more zeroes after it than you’re ever going to want to see. Something has to be done!”

  “Look,” said Heming, starting to look alarmed for the first time, “it really is just a run of luck. It can’t last. If they—”

  “You’re damned right it isn’t going to last,” said Darjan, going suddenly grim. “Accidents are going to start happening. Their luck’s run out.”

  Heming looked more nervous still. “Listen,” he said. “There are ways…You wouldn’t want to ruin everything by getting too…you know…overt. If someone should suspect—”

  “Suspicion we can live with,” said Darjan, pushing the martini glass away from him in disgust. “Losing one point five billion dollars or so, that we can’t live with for a second…and no one else is going to be allowed to live with it, either.”