THE ALL-PRO (5 page)

“Fred, are you okay? I know how much you like to play dressup and all, but is something wrong?”

The janitor nodded. “Yeah. Someone doesn’t want me to find out about your family. I’ve spent the last few weeks ducking some pretty heavy hitters.”

Heavy hitters. And who could that be? The same group that bombed the victory parade? Or maybe sentients who worked for the owner of the Ionath Krakens?

“Who were they? Gredok’s gang?”

Frederico shook his head. “I wish I knew. I can’t say for sure if they’re his goons. And they’re not the only ones. That little reporter piece of fluff was also on Micovi, digging away.”

“Piece of fluff? You mean Yolanda Davenport?”

Frederico nodded. “That’s the one. I was at Micovi Stadium, seeing if the Raiders had any info on your past. She was there.”

“Did she see you?”

Fred laughed. “Quentin, please. I’m a professional.”

“What was she doing on Micovi?”

“Digging into the history of Quentin Barnes, just like me. Just like the heavies I ran into.”

“She find anything?”

“I don’t know,” Frederico said. “I don’t think she found much. She seemed to be looking for real specific stuff, stuff about your time with the Raiders, not about your childhood. The hitters, on the other hand? They wanted the same info I found. They always seemed to be just a step behind me.”

“So ... you
did
find something?” Quentin waited for him to speak, but the man seemed to have trouble finding the words. “Well? Come on, Fred. Out with it.”

Frederico looked at the ground, shrugged his shoulders. “You
sure
you want this, Quentin?”

It had to be bad news. But was it
all
bad news? Was Quentin really alone? He took a breath, let it out slowly and tried to brace himself for the words.

“Yes. I want to know. All of it.”

“Okay,” Fred said. “I managed to find a family record based on DNA. I used some of your blood.”

“You didn’t ask me for my blood.”

Frederico shrugged. “You’re religious. Who knows what you superstitious primitives think is sacred?”

“I bleed all the time on the field, Fred. You really assume I would think blood is sacred?”

“There’s no logic in religion, Quentin. Anyway, if you said
no,
I would have been out of an option, so I went with it.”

“And where, exactly, did you get my blood?”

“Nanocyte patch back in Ionath Stadium,” Frederico said. “Not hard to come by, Quentin. As you mentioned, you bleed a lot. You knew a guy on Micovi named Sam Sargsyan? Ran a barbecue restaurant?”

Sam Sargsyan.
Mister Sam
. That brought back memories. “Yeah, what’s he got to do with it?”

“Nothing,” Frederico said. “I met him though. He said you liked to eat. A lot.”

“I weigh almost four hundred pounds, Fred. Of course I eat a lot. You’re stalling. Come on, tell me.”

Fred chewed on his lip for a second, then nodded. “You’re right, I’m stalling. The Purist Nation records are scattershot at best. Their technology is about four hundred years behind everyone else’s, but I found the death record for your older brother.”

Quentin nodded. No news there. When Quentin had been five, he’d watched his brother hang for the horrendous crime of stealing bread.

“Turns out your name isn’t
Barnes
,” Fred said. “At least, not originally. Looks like your family changed names. I’m not sure why.”

“So what’s my real name?”

“Carbonaro,” Fred said. “I found it on your brother’s death record.”

Carbonaro. Quentin wasn’t even Quentin Barnes? He’d never heard the name Carbonaro before. Maybe that was his birth name, but he’d been Barnes all his life and would continue to be so.

“Your brother’s death record led me to your mother and father,” Frederico said. “I could find no official death record of your father.”

Quentin felt a stab of excitement in his chest, but he tempered it — no record of death did
not
mean his father was alive. “What’s my father’s name?”

“Cillian Carbonaro.”

A name. Such a simple thing and yet it made the man somehow real. There was no proof that Quentin’s father was dead. He might be out there. Maybe.

“That’s a start,” Quentin said. “And my mother?”

Frederico paused, then shook his head slowly. “Her name was Constance Carbonaro.”

Wisps of memory bubbled up. A woman with tight, curly, black hair. Smiling down at him. Quentin couldn’t quite form her face. His
mother
.

“And she’s ...”

He couldn’t say the words.

“She’s dead, Quentin. I found her record. It’s accurate, no question. I’m sorry.”

Quentin had felt elation at learning his father’s fate was unknown. The news of his mother made that feeling fade, then sink. His mother.
Gone
. The woman he suddenly remembered: young, too young to have children but that was how it went on Micovi — children by fourteen, or you were a sinner. There were other memories, little bits and pieces that didn’t connect — brief recollections of being held, being talked to in a voice that made the monsters go away, a voice that made everything all right.

“There’s more,” Frederico said. “You told me about your brother, but you said you didn’t have any other siblings.”

Quentin nodded, finding it was hard to move even that much. The remote possibility that his father
might
not have died on Micovi couldn’t blur the hammer-thud pain of knowing his mother was gone forever. Everything felt heavy. It even hurt a little to breathe.

“Why did you tell me that?” Frederico asked. “Why didn’t you tell me you had a sister?”

Quentin stared at the smaller man. The words didn’t seem to make sense. “I ... I don’t have a sister.”

Frederico smiled. “Well, if the records are accurate, you do. Jeanine Carbonaro. She’s about ten years older than you. She would have been about fifteen the time your brother died.”

A sister? That couldn’t be true. But what if it was? The sluggish feeling brought on by the knowledge of his mother expanded, spread, a creeping sensation that more bad news was about to hit home.

“And my ... my
sister’s
record?” Quentin said. “Did you find a death record on her?”

Frederico shook his head. “Don’t get too excited, okay? Just because I didn’t find a death record doesn’t mean—”

“Doesn’t mean that she’s alive, I know. I get it, Frederico, you can stop repeating that, okay?”

Frederico nodded. “Right, sorry. It’s just ... well, you wouldn’t be much of a poker player, Quentin. I can see the hope in your face.”

“We’re not playing poker.” Quentin could hide expressions when he needed to, when he wanted to. Enough to even fool Gredok the Splithead, a sentient who could read your body temperature, your pulse. The game of manipulation ran rampant through all things GFL. Quentin had committed himself to learning that game, mastering it.

“It’s the eyes,” Frederico said. “A dead giveaway every time.”

“You’re not going to start talking about how pretty my eyes are again, are you?”

Frederico smiled, shook his head. “No, not at all. To tell you the truth, when we first met I did that just to get a rise out of you. You’re okay-looking by the numbers, but you’re really not my type.”

“I wish I could say I was offended by that.”

The roar of the crowd made them both look at the door.

Frederico nodded. “You need to get back to your date. If you want, I’ll keep looking for more info.”

“I do,” Quentin said. “Just find whatever you can. Even ... even death records give me some idea, you know?”

Frederico nodded, then turned his attention back to the nannite machine. He was probably going to actually repair it. That struck Quentin as an odd touch for a meeting that took this much effort to set up, but Frederico seemed to be all about the details.

Quentin turned and walked out of the bathroom. The two guards were waiting for him.

“Everything okay, Mister Barnes?”

“Yeah, fine. Had some New Rodina food this morning, it caught up with me is all. Let’s head back down.”

The guard nodded. “Yes sir, Mister Barnes. We missed the second round. The wheel picked
Four Laps
and the Stompers took it. They just spun the wheel for round three — it’s
Capture the Flag
, my favorite. You’ll love it, Mister Barnes. This one is
really
bloody.”

Quentin let the guards walk him back down the steps. Compared to the first round of Dinolition, he could only imagine what
really
bloody could mean.

• • •

NOTHING IN THE GALAXY
could possibly be as exciting as playing football. Just
watching
it, however, proved a surprisingly close second. Quentin had no emotional involvement in the T3 Tourney championship game between the Mathara Manglers and the Achnad Archangels. He wasn’t rooting for anyone, didn’t know a player on either team, and yet his heart pounded as time ticked away. Fourth quarter, Achnad up 13-10. He was on the edge of his seat.

Affectionately known as the “Two Weeks of Hell,” the single-elimination tournament featured thirty-two teams playing games every three days until a sole champion remained. In that two weeks, thirty games had been played across the League of Planets’ five worlds and two net colonies. The championship game, of course, took place in the crown jewel of the system’s football stadiums, the Shipyard — home field of the three-time GFL champion Hittoni Hullwalkers. Quentin would be back in this very stadium in Week Four of the Tier One season, some six months away.

Like every football-crazed kid, he’d dreamed of playing in the Shipyard, just like he’d dreamed of playing in To Pirates Stadium and the galaxy’s other gridiron meccas. This year, however, one dream, one stadium, rose above all others:

The Tomb of the Virilli.

Home field of the Yall Criminals.

Not because Ionath played at Yall in Week Two in the showcase that was Monday Night Football, but because this year the stadium hosted the sport’s ultimate game — Galaxy Bowl XXVI, where the GFL champion would be crowned.

Where Quentin and his teammates would join the ranks of legends.

But that conquest was many months away and would not happen without adding some fresh blood to the Krakens roster. That meant scouting the Tier Three Tourney, looking for players that Gredok might sign.

What little he’d seen of Hittoni stunned him, everything from the towering buildings to the three decks of grav-roads to the citizens. So many different Human variants. Some were modified so heavily they would have never been allowed on a football field — skin colors, grafts, implants, cybernetics, countless thousands who seemed to treat the Human body as a canvas or a lump of clay to be beautified according to a myriad of personal tastes. That was the League of Planets for you, the technological capital of civilization. When it came to building ships or building bodies, the League stood above all others.

Hittoni wasn’t as densely populated as the insanity he’d seen on the Sklorno world of Alimum. Quentin had been there during the Tier One season for the Krakens’ game against the Armada, seen a planet with eighty billion sentients, a city with five billion sentients packed in tight.

Hittoni, by comparison, had just over a billion in the massive area considered the “city proper.” But while Alimum was far more congested, Quentin hadn’t left the private, guarded areas of the football stadium. Hittoni was a Human planet — mostly blue-skinned Humans, true, but Humans nonetheless — and as such, Quentin had enjoyed a rare semi-anonymous walk around the stadium as if he were just another sports fan.

The stadium itself was a museum documenting the history of space travel. The League of Planets had collected many ancient pre-punch drive vessels. These floated free on grav-pads lining the stadium concourse. Quentin, Hokor and John Tweedy had walked a slow lap around the Shipyard, looking at priceless relics with names like
Pioneer, Challenger, Ikaros, Sputnik, Voyager, Helios, Shenzou, Aurora, Jaxa
and more. Quentin found it fascinating that the birth of football and the birth of Human spaceflight had occurred within just a few decades of each other.

Coincidence? He didn’t think so.

He’d been recognized several times on the walk around the concourse. It was a football stadium, after all. Once his League-appointed bodyguards allowed the fans to approach, Quentin signed every messageboard thrust his way. Many fans asked Hokor as well, but the coach didn’t like to talk to anyone and had the guards keep everyone away. Hokor, it seemed, harbored more fear from the victory parade bombing than Quentin did.

The bombing wasn’t far from the minds of the Creterakians, that was for sure. The small, winged creatures flew overhead in multiple flocks of five, ten, even twenty. There were far more than Quentin had ever seen before, even back on Micovi during his PNFL days. The creatures ruled here, in the League of Planets, just like they did in most of the galaxy. Bodies roughly the size and shape of a football with a flat, two-foot-long tail that paralleled the ground. Two pair of foot-long arms, stacked on top of each other: the bottom arms held the ever-present entropic rifles, the top arms flapped madly, flying via the veined membrane that ran from the tiny hands all the way back to the tip of the tail. And then those disgusting heads: three pair of eyes — one pair that sat on either side of the head, looking out to the left and right; one pair up front, letting them see all before them; and one pair looking
down,
giving them a perfect view of the ground beneath. Their skin held various shades of red, usually with splotches of pink or purple.

You could always tell the military Creterakians apart from the civilians. Military wore the black or silver uniforms of the Empire; some wore the white uniforms of GFL Security. Civilians, on the other hand, wore garish outfits with clashing colors, insane patterns and — usually — flashing lights of some kind. Shizzle, the Krakens’ Creterakian translator, was famous for his abhorrent taste in clothes.