THE ALL-PRO (70 page)

QUENTIN KEPT HIS EYES CLOSED
. His hands gripped the puke bucket. He waited for the inevitable. Last week, John had decorated the golden bucket with a Themala Dreadnaughts sticker even though the
Touchback
had stayed in orbit above Fortress and hadn’t entered punch space. On Monday, after the Dreadnaughts had upset the Wolfpack in the second round of the playoffs, John had added stickers for
both
teams in the championship game — Themala’s red, yellow and brown “TD” as well as the silver, gold and bronze logo of the Jupiter Jacks.

As a team, the Krakens traveled to Planet Yall, to the city of Virilliville, home of Galaxy Bowl XXVI.

“Hey, Q,” John said. “How’s that tummy?”

Quentin kept his eyes shut. He shook his head. The
shimmer
was coming any moment now. He tried to concentrate, to see if this time he might avoid the motion sickness. “John, just shut up.”

John breathed deeply through his nose. “Hey, do you smell that? Smells like ... like a Ki splatterfart hitting a wet, dirty ashtray.”

Quentin’s stomach roiled. “John, knock it off.”

“Oh!
Now
I know what it smells like,” John said. “Like rotten shushuliks in a hot, musty dumpster. Man, imagine how those would
taste
, Q.”

Quentin was already throwing up when the shimmer hit.

He coughed, wiped his mouth, opened his eyes.

YOU PUKE LIKE A LITTLE GIRL
scrolled across John’s smiling face.

“John, you’re an idiot.”

The big linebacker smiled with satisfaction. “He who laughs last gets the spoils, Q. Remember I said that.”

“Oh, I will.”

Quentin lifted the plastic bag, tied it off and set it back in the bucket. He looked to the observation deck’s crysteel windows.

Like the last trip to Yall, excited Sklorno packed the left and right windows. They jumped, chirped, pushed and pulled at each other. They left the center window unobstructed, however — a kind gesture for their resident “Godling.”

Out there, the planet Yall. Burnished blue, choked by the tight fist of endlessly sprawling civilization. They’d come to this same place just fourteen weeks earlier. The Krakens had come
so close!
So close to being here as a contender, not just going through the paces to prepare for next season.

“Uh, Q? Do you see that light?”

Quentin saw it. A bright light, moving fast at first, then not at all. It flickered, glowed brighter than the other lights surrounding the planet. The
Touchback
had an arrival window of space, in which other ships were not allowed to enter. That flickering light was a ship — it seemed to have ignored that safety window.

Quentin didn’t know much about space travel, but he knew the basics — if something moved like that, it was artificial and if it seemed to stop moving, it was probably coming straight at you.

“Yeah, John, I see it. What do you think it is?”

“It’s trouble.”

“Trouble? What do you mean?”

John didn’t have time to answer before a klaxon alarm screeched through the observation deck.

“Attention!” Captain Kate’s voice came from the ship’s sound system. “All Krakens players and staff report to the dining deck immediately. All ship crew report to battle stations.”

The Sklorno players sprinted out of the observation deck.

Quentin looked at John. “Battle stations? What in the Void is she talking about?”

John grabbed Quentin’s arm and started leading him out of the observation deck. “Come on, Q. We got to get to the dining deck. It’s the deepest part of the ship. We’ll be safest there.”

Quentin looked back out the window. He saw four bright lights branch off the oncoming ship — branch off, then close in on the
Touchback
. He had to look away and start running to keep up with John’s pulling.

• • •

QUENTIN AND THE OTHERS
sprinted down the corridor. They rushed into the dining deck to find it already half full. The faster Sklorno players were already there, of course, as were many Ki. Messal the Efficient stood by the door, palm-up display glowing in the air above his pedipalp hand — looked like a team roster. As each player ran in, he tapped icons.

Other than Tara, Quentin saw no Quyth Warriors. He sat off by himself looking like his old, dejected self. The flood of players slowed. Coach Hokor, Mum-O and Michael Kimberlin entered. They must have been the last because Messal tapped a wall panel. A heavy blast door slid into place, sealing the room. Quentin had never even known a door was there — the dining deck had always been open.

“Messal,” Quentin said. “What about Virak and Choto?”

“They are trained soldiers,” Messal said. “They are manning the guns, as are Shayat the Thick and Killik the Unworthy.”

Captain Cheevers had told him Quyth players would man the guns, but Quentin hadn’t really believed it. “Don’t we have other staff who can do that?”

“A few,” Messal said. “But would
you
like to tell Virak that he should sit here and be idle while we are attacked?”

Quentin shook his head. No, he wouldn’t want to suggest that to Virak the Mean. “Well, what about Tara, then?”

Messal looked away. “Please, Elder Barnes, with all due respect, I don’t have time for such obviously ridiculous questions.”

Quentin felt a strange vibration beneath his feet, bursts of some rapid-fire pulsing.

“That would be the guns,” Messal said, amazingly calm in the face of this strange danger. “Excuse me, Elder Barnes, I have to report to the Captain.”

Messal walked toward a wall panel. A bigger vibration rattled the ship. Quentin instinctively knew that wasn’t a gun firing — the
Touchback
had been hit.

“Damage,” Kate’s voice echoed from the sound system. She also sounded spookily calm. “Hits to the upper decks. The practice field dome has been penetrated. I’ll feed damage schematics into the main ship feed. Everyone, be aware of off-limit areas.

They will change as the fight continues.” The ship shuddered again, harder this time. Quentin stumbled and braced himself on a table. He lifted his palm to chest level, calling up his own display. A glowing icon showed the ship feed. He poked the icon. A holographic ship schematic flared to life. Most of the ship was in green, but he saw the practice field in blinking yellow and several corridors in solid red. Six blue icons were labeled GUN CABIN, numbers one through six.

He felt the vibrations beneath his feet, realized that one of the blue icons flashed in time to mark which gun was firing. He saw that GUN CABIN 6 was closest to the dining deck. That was the same cabin that Captain Kate had showed him during the tour.

Another violent vibration, the bad kind. Seconds later, more areas of the ship glowed red — rooms and corridors marked offlimits, probably exposed to the vacuum of space.

Quentin looked around the dining deck. Forty-some sentients doing the same thing he was doing, looking at ship schematics, waiting helplessly.

The
Touchback
trembled again, even worse than before.

GUN CABIN 6 blinked from blue to red. Who had been in there? Virak? The icon switched from red to yellow. Quentin scanned the schematic. So many corridors in red — there was almost no way to reach Gun Cabin 6.

No, there was one way — a straight line from the dining deck.

“Attention!” Captain Kate’s voice. “We need clean-up in Gun Cabin 6. Messal, organize non-essential crew to get in there and fix it up. The gun reads operative on my board. We’ll work on repairs to corridors 12-A and 10-B so we can get someone else on it.”

How long would that take? Would the
Touchback
even be around by then? Quentin looked at the schematic, used his thumb and forefinger to zoom in on the GUN CABIN 6 icon. At this level of detail, he saw a name in red — Killik the Unworthy. Was Killik injured? Dead?

Quentin was no stranger to violence, to the threat of death. He’d been in dangerous situations before — what he had never done, however, was sit back and wait for things to happen. He had to do something.

He ran to the dining deck’s closed blast door.

“Elder Barnes! Where are you going?”

“I know how to fire that gun, Messal. I’m going to get it back in the fight.”

Messal blocked the door with his little body. “No! You must stay in the dining deck!”

A pair of big hands reached down and picked up Messal, moving him to the side. Crazy George Starcher.

“I’ll go with you,” George said.

George was a veteran. Had he been in combat before?

“You were in the Navy, right?” Quentin said. “You should shoot, not me.”

George shook his head. “Oh, no, I never fired a cannon. I was a mechanic. I can see the innermost connections of the machines, the dark lines of spirit and space and interdimensional soul that weaves forth the fabric, that—”

A barking roar from Mum-O-Killowe cut George off. Mum-O, apparently, liked listening to George’s odd rants no more than Quentin did. Mum-O’s multi-jointed arms reached for the door. His hands tapped the wall panel to open it.

“Bregat,” the Ki said, then scuttled through the door and into the corridor.

The
Touchback
shook again. No time for second thoughts. Quentin ran through the door, Mum-O and George Starcher right behind him. The blast door slid down and clanged shut.

• • •

PALM UP IN FRONT OF HIM
, Quentin sprinted down the corridor, trying to simultaneously watch the both schematic and his footing. On the map, this corridor blinked yellow. What did that mean? Was it about to go red? He remembered the emergency training that told him to never take the elevators if there was a fire. He imagined running space battles followed the same logic. He ran for the stairs that would go down one flight to Deck Eight. From there, about forty feet to reach Gun Cabin 6.

Captain Kate’s voice echoed through the corridors. “Evacuate the practice field area.” Her voice still sounded eerily calm. “Sealing the field in ten seconds.”

George Starcher and Mum-O-Killowe just steps behind, Quentin hit Deck Eight and ran down the corridor. He heard Captain Kate counting down from ten. She made it to
five
before another blast made the
Touchback
lurch under his feet, throwing him face-first into a bulkhead. His head spun. He fought to stay conscious. The artificial gravity sputtered for a moment. Quentin felt himself floating, the wall brushing against his right shoulder. Without warning, the gravity kicked back on and he dropped hard to the deck. Blood wetted his lips. His nose felt broken.

George lifted him to his feet. “Quentin! Are you okay?”

Quentin put a hand on the wall for balance against the moving ship. No, the ship was once again rock-still — his legs were wobbly. He felt something in his mouth. Quentin spit into his hand.

A bloody tooth.

His tongue told him what he already knew — front right.

“Why always
that
one?”

He put the tooth in his pocket. George helped him stumble down the corridor toward the gun cabin’s closed door. Quentin tried the handle — locked.

“Let me,” George said. He knelt by the key pad, then grabbed it and ripped it off the wall. He reached inside and started fiddling with the wires.

A heavy
clang
came from inside the wall as the door’s internal locks slid back into their recesses. His balance mostly back to normal, Quentin stepped inside. Smoke filled the room, as did splatters of red blood and chunks of green flesh, bits of shattered orange chitin and a nasty scattering of body parts.

George grabbed a trash can and rushed to the platform. He knelt and started using his hands to scoop up bloody green blobs.

“High One,” Quentin said. “Is that ... Killik?”

“Get a mop,” George said. He pointed to the corner of the room. Quentin walked there, watching his step amongst scattered bits of wreckage. He found the mop in a case on the wall. He pulled it out and worked his way back to the platform. To his right, Mum-O’s four hands scrambled across the long, horizontal, crysteel viewport. Cracks lined the material, cracks that glistened with some kind of clear liquid.

Big globs of white foam dotted the space-side wall. Bullets had punched through, the holes instantly filling with vent-foam that expanded and hardened, stopping the escape of air.

“Quentin,
mop!
” George said. “We can’t have you slipping on Killik’s guts.”

Quentin bent to the task, trying to keep his lunch in place. The wet mop pushed black goo, attached bits of exoskeleton and burned bits of cloth off of the platform and onto the floor below. George finished picking up the big pieces. His hands gleamed with slime. Gore covered his shirt and pants. A Quyth foot stuck out of the trash can, the severed leg streaked with red wetness leaking out through spiderwebbed chitin.

With Killik’s remains gone, Quentin finished sweeping the platform clear.

“Mum-O,” George said. “Do you hear any squealing or squeaking noises? Feel any breeze?”

Mum-O barked out a word that sounded a lot like a Human
no
, then turned and scuttled over wreckage, heading for the door. As he did, he drew his upper-left hand just under his hexagonal mouth, from right to left. Quentin recognized the very Human-like gesture — the sign of a throat being slit.

George nodded. “Quentin, the room is okay for now, but the decompression measures are exhausted. If this room takes any more hits, any at all, get out
fast
. We’ll wait outside as long as we can, but if the corridor goes red, we have to get clear.”

This was really happening. They were in an actual space battle, bullets punching through the hull, sentients dying. George followed Mum-O out. The door to Gun Cabin 6 clanged shut.

Quentin was alone.

He hit 726 on the keypad, then stepped onto the platform.