THE ALL-PRO (40 page)

“Gredok, we are
not
going to meet you in the middle,” Danny said. “You might as well get that through your thick head and see it with your inky-black eye. We
will
get a fair offer.”

Gredok stared. Danny stared back. Quentin wanted to crawl under the pedestal of the armless lady, hide there until this passed.

“Dolphin,” Gredok said, “you are testing the last shreds of my leniency.”

“No, I’m testing your bank account, buddy. I can’t take offers from Tier One teams yet because we’re in the season, but Tier Two teams don’t have that restriction. I have an offer from the Mars Planets. I also have one from the McMurdo Murderers and the Buddha City Elite has new management.”

The Buddha City Elite? The Purist Nation’s only upper-tier team. Danny hadn’t mentioned that.

“Tier Two, all of them,” Gredok said. He turned his black eye on Quentin. “Barnes wants a trophy too much to settle for that.”

“He’s young,” Danny said. “Only twenty years old, guy. He has time to build an entire franchise. And, Mars was in Tier One just last year, did you forget? They can come back with the right talent. Quentin and I are actually going to visit Mars and Earth during the bye-week.”

“Mars is
not
Ionath. I will not take your bait, Dolphin. Unless you have an offer from a Tier One team that is close to your ridiculous demands, I will wait for your
real
proposal.”

Danny lowered back down to Quentin’s level. “Barnes, this is a waste of your time. Your boss wants to wait until after the season, when the offer from the To Pirates comes in? Well, then you’re just going to be worth that much more when it happens. Good day, Gredok.”

Danny turned and walked out. Quentin did the same and with each step, he felt the hateful stare of Gredok the Splithead burning into his back.

• • •

AH, THE TRAINING ROOM
. Quentin’s home away from home, the place where Doc Patah tended to his numerous injuries. This room connected to the central locker room. It was much smaller than the full hospital located under the stands of Ionath Stadium. In here, just four multi-species rejuve tanks. Surgery clamps and device racks lined the tanks. Each tank was big enough for a Ki lineman to squeeze in, so Quentin could lie back in the pink fluid with plenty of room to spare. Those four tanks, along with four tables, were where players could sit or lie back, be examined and repaired. The room also contained Doc Patah’s work area — racks of drawers, benches packed with diagnostic gear and dozens of holotanks to see what was going on inside his patients. Usually after a game, the room filled with players needing fixes for cuts, scrapes, breaks, contusions and lacerations. Today, however, Quentin had needed more work than the others. He stayed longer and now found himself alone.

He relaxed in the tank’s thick, warm, pink gel. His knee screamed at him, trying to tell him the error of running the ball up the middle on a quarterback draw, where 365-pound linebackers could knock the tar out of you. His shoulder made similar complaints, using bone-grinding agony to explain to Quentin that if he insisted on staying in the pocket that long, he would be hit by large sentients that seemed intent on tearing his still-beating heart from his chest. He’d taken more punishment than usual. Starting left offensive tackle Kill-O-Yowet was still out due to injury. Backup Shut-O-Dital — a fourth-year player who had never started — wasn’t good enough to consistently stop defensive tackles. Fortunately, Doc Patah said that Kill-O would be back for the Week Six game against the Orbiting Death.

Quentin told his knee and shoulder to shut their traps. You can do that when you put together an 80-yard, fourth-quarter drive to beat the Alimum Armada. Sure, he’d taken some damage on that final drive, but it had been worth it. Arioch Morningstar’s 25-yard kick as time expired meant the Krakens were 4-1, tied for second place in the Planet Division.

The soft fluttering of wing-flaps announced Doc Patah’s presence moments before the mandatory lecture began.

“My analysis is finished,” he said. “I need to operate on your knee and your shoulder.”

“Is it bad?”

“Bad is a relative term,” Doc Patah said. “You will need to go easy tomorrow, but you should be fine for Tuesday’s practice. You are lucky it’s not worse. Really, Young Quentin, it’s like you
want
to get hurt. Do you like the pain? Because you certainly eat it like candy.”

“C’mon, Doc. We won.”

Doc Patah’s mouth-flaps slid into the pink goo. He gently lifted Quentin’s swollen knee. He placed a large clamp around the joint, then sealed it shut. Quentin felt the initial pain of needles sinking through his skin, deep into the cartilage and ligaments, then the numb feeling of his nerves being shut off by a combination of chemicals and electrical impulses.

“Yes, we have victory,” Doc Patah said. “And I will give credit where credit is due. You stood in the center of the ring and took your punches. I salute you.”

Quentin opened his eyes and looked up at the floating Harrah. Doc Patah did not give compliments lightly.

“Doc, are you telling me that I won you over?”

Doc’s speakerfilm let out his Human-like sigh of annoyance. “Hardly. You still need to learn how to slide. I’m a doctor, Young Quentin, not a mortician.”

The Harrah fluttered back to his area, picked a clamp out of one of the equipment bins, then flew back and connected the clamp to the edge of the rejuve tank. Signal lights on the clamp lit up, showing a proper signal from the main computer. Doc Patah affixed the clamp to Quentin’s shoulder, bringing, perhaps, a little more pain than was necessary. Doc flapped a few feet to the left, to the bank of monitors. He examined various holographic models of Quentin’s bone, his ligaments, his muscles.

“Any problems, Doc?”

“There could have been,” he said. “You were only a few newtons away from having your patella shattered, but why should my expert analysis have any impact on your playing behavior? I am, after all, only the galaxy’s foremost sports medicine surgeon, so there’s no reason you should listen to me.”

Quentin smiled and closed his eyes, letting the rejuve tank’s heat sink into his battered body. “Ah, there’s the Doc Patah I know and love.”

“You will need to sit here for the next hour, then give me full bed rest tonight. I will now leave you in peace so that you can, as usual, pretend that I didn’t give you any advice at all, as I’m sure we’ll have this same post-game repair session next week against the Orbiting Death.”

Quentin heard the soft flutter fade as Doc left the room.

Maybe he fell asleep, he wasn’t sure. A new voice called to him.

“You’re a bastard.”

The voice of Don Pine. Quentin’s eyes fluttered open. He looked left to see Pine, standing there, wearing his street clothes — in this case, the same kind of immaculate, tailored suit he always wore on game-day. The blue-skinned Pine looked more like a model or a picture-perfect pitchman than he did a quarterback.

All of him, except for his eyes, which were narrowed in hateful aggression.

“I’m a bastard? Do you mean
orphan
?”

Don shook his head. “Not that kind of bastard. I mean the kind that would undercut my chances to get out of here.”

Quentin tried to sit up, but the brace on his knee and shoulder kept him locked in place. “You talked to Hokor?”

Pine nodded. He took a step closer. Quentin was surprised to feel a bit of shame, of embarrassment — shutting down Pine’s trade chances seemed justifiable in the confines of Hokor’s office, but now he was face-to-face with the man.

“It’s a bad trade,” Quentin said. “We need you.”

“Yeah? Tell me who they were going to trade me for, specifically.”

Quentin opened his mouth to talk, then paused — he’d never asked that. He started to think through the defensive backs of the—

“Don’t bother,” Pine said. “If you knew, you would have rattled it off right away. Now you’re just remembering what d-backs play for what teams.”

Quentin closed his mouth, said nothing.

“Why?” Pine said. “I could have been
gone
. I could have started again. You
want
me gone, so why would you backstab me like that?”

“Backstab
you
? You self-righteous ass, are you kidding me? Look at what I have to go through every road game.”

“Who cares? You
start
every road game. You lead your teammates onto the field. So people are angry at you for something you didn’t actually do? Get over it.”

Quentin automatically started to get up again, his temper driving him, again making him briefly forget the unforgiving clamps. His brain swam in an uncomfortable mix of emotions: anger at Pine’s lack of responsibility, anxiety that the decision had been made for the wrong reasons.

“You’re a fool,” Pine said. “You’re the best quarterback in the game, but you’re an immature fool.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because you had a situation where everybody wins and you pissed it away because it’s more important to teach me a lesson, because it’s more important to show how you’ve been wronged.”

“I
have
been wronged.”

Pine shook his head. “You don’t even know what the word means, boy. Sure, I haven’t bailed you out of Yolanda’s article, but everything you have now? That’s because of
me
. I coached you, nurtured you, I—”

“So what I do on the field has nothing to do with my success? Is that what you’re saying?”

Pine shrugged. “Yeah, you’re crazy talented, I won’t deny it, but if it wasn’t for me, Barnes, you would have washed out in your rookie season and been sent back to the PNFL. I gave you
everything
. And despite all I taught you, you still act like everyone is out to get you, like you have to hit them back for every slight instead of thinking strategically.”

Quentin had wanted to screw Pine out of a chance at redemption. Pine didn’t
deserve
redemption. “I’m supposed to ignore what you did?”

“
Yes!
So your archenemy gets to go start for another team, so what? Do you realize you have one of the worst defensive backfields in the league? You could have fixed that.”

“We’re four-and-one with the defense we have,” Quentin said. “I think we’ll be just fine.”

Pine smiled, shook his head. “That’s because we haven’t faced a top-notch quarterback yet. Renaud was only in for one quarter. You saw what he did to us in that time and that was when we still had our starting cornerback. We just beat a pair of teams with one win
between
them and we
lost
to the one-and-four Cloud Killers. Next week we have the Orbiting Death and you’re going to see what a guy like Condor Adrienne can do to your awesome backfield.”

“The d-backs will do fine.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” Pine said. “Your emotional decision is going to cost Ionath the playoffs.”

Quentin leaned his head back, closed his eyes. “We’ll see about that.”

“We will. And if the d-backs that you could have had don’t cost us, your ridiculous feud with Rick Warburg will. If you want to win games, you better get rid of this chip on your shoulder, get rid of this idea that people need to
obey
your every whim.”

Quentin’s eyes stayed closed, but he felt his face flush red. Not throwing to Warburg had seemed like the right thing to do, seemed ...
justified
 ... but was that just a childish decision like Don said?

“We’re even now,” Pine said. “I burned you. You burned me back. We’re even.”

“You think I care if we’re even?”

“You should,” Pine said. “Because the way you play, you’re going to get hurt and when you do I’m coming back in. You stopped me from getting a starting job? That’s fine, Barnes, because I’ll just get my starting job back right here in Ionath. You think about that the next time you scramble.”

Pine turned and walked to the door.

“I’m better than you,” Quentin shouted at his back. “You told me that yourself.”

Pine stopped and turned. “You’re one play away from finding out if I’m right. I’m done trying to make you my legacy. Now? Now all I want is the ball.”

Quentin tried to act bored, like the words didn’t bother him, but Pine didn’t say anything else. When Quentin opened his eyes, Pine was already gone, leaving Quentin alone with his thoughts, alone with his decisions.

And he didn’t know if either was right.

Courtesy of Galaxy Sports Network

BYE WEEKS
:
Wabash Wolfpack, Sala Intrigue

AS WE CLOSE IN
on the season’s halfway point, the battle for the Planet Division is shaping up to be anyone’s game. Ionath (4-1) edged out a 24-23 win over Alimum (1-4) to remain tied for third with the Isis Ice Storm (4-1), who dropped a 31-10 hammer on the Hittoni Hullwalkers (0-5). Ionath and Isis are a half-game behind Wabash (4-0), which had a bye this week and one game behind the first-place To Pirates (5-0), who embarrassed the Lu Juggernauts (0-5) by a score of 52-14.