THE ALL-PRO (71 page)

He faced the space-side wall as the X, Y and Z hololines flared to life. Outside the viewport, he saw the quad-battery’s armor slide away and the barrels rise up — four lethal, parallel lines.

This time, they weren’t loaded with blanks.

Captain Kate’s calm voice echoed through the small room. “Barnes, I read your gun is active. Everything out there is a bogey.”

“What’s a bogey?”

“Just shoot anything that moves, rookie,” she said. “I have to concentrate on damage control, so you’re on your own. No pressure, Barnes, but if you don’t shoot down these fighters, we all die. Patching you into gunner channel. Captain Kate, out.”

The speakerfilm crackled with static.

Then, the voice of Virak the Mean. “Quentin, is your weapon online?”

Quentin raised his hands up and out, chest-level, palms down. Through the slot, he saw the barrels move in time with his hands. The air around him flashed, rapid-fire bursts of bright static and then he saw arrows of fast-moving red light. They swam in all directions, crossing in front of him from the left, the right, from below and above.

“Virak! What are these red things?”

“Bogeys.”

“Will someone
please
tell me what the hell a
bogey
is?”

“Enemy fighters,” Virak said, his voice just as calm as Captain Kate’s. How could these sentients stay cool when fighters were
shooting
at the
Touchback
?

“Start firing, Quentin,” Virak said. “Quickly.”

Quentin tried to focus on the red arrows of light zooming in and out of his vision. One seemed to fly right at his face. He ducked, felt the vibration of his quad-cannon firing.

He looked at his hands. He’d balled them up into fists.

Can’t do that, that fires the guns.

He stood straight, took in a breath, leveled his hands flat once again.

“They are making a strafing run,” Choto called out. “Length of ship, engaging now.”

Tiny vibrations echoed under Quentin’s feet, the firing of guns somewhere else on the
Touchback
.

“They’re passing aft,” Virak said. “Quentin, prepare to fire.”

Quentin turned his hands palms-up and curled his fingers in. The X-axis hash marks raced apart as his system focused in on a closer region of space. He put his hands flat, then twisted a little to the right, a little to the left, watching the barrels match the move.

Then two red arrows shot past as if they had flown right over his head, a streak of light trailing behind each to indicate their speed and direction.

Quentin’s hands made fists, left-right, left-right. The room vibrated. Out through the viewport, he saw the barrels erupt with barely discernible cones of fire that instantly vanished behind clouds of smoke billowing out the rear. Quentin had to stop looking out the slot — he needed to make this hologram his reality.

Two more red arrows flashed from right to left, in and out of his vision in less than a second. Before Quentin could extend his X-axis for a longer-range shot, the arrows banked to his right and were out of his display.

“I missed!” Quentin said. “They’re coming back around to my right.”

“Port side, low,” Virak said. “Choto, they’re coming underneath.”

“Target acquired,” Choto said. Quentin again felt a distant, lighter vibration. His mind registered that level of shaking as the firing of Choto’s gun.

“Bogey destroyed,” Choto called out. “Three bogeys remain.”

Quentin realized he was shaking. This was life and death. And yet, wasn’t his life at risk on every snap of every game? Why was this any different? He breathed deeply through his nose as he held his hands up palm-out. The X-axis compressed, expanding his scale of vision.

From his upper right, he saw two red arrows.

“Target acquired,” Quentin said, mimicking what he’d heard from Choto. He leveled his hands, locking the axis display. The dots looked tiny. Quentin pointed his hands at them, then made left-right-left-right fists.

The dots banked down and to the right. He’d fired behind.

“Lead your target,” Virak said. “Note the distance in the display, Quentin.”

Part of his mind heard Virak’s words and part ignored them because he’d already figured that out. He curled his fingers up and in, making the hash marks spread apart as his targeting area closed in tighter. At the same time, he twisted to the right, recentering on the two dots.

Stay calm
, he told himself.
Stay in the pocket, do your job.

Once he had centered his display on the arrows, they seemed to change angles — they shot straight for him.

“Strafing run,” Virak said. “Quentin, they’re coming right for you.”

Stay in the pocket.

Quentin held both hands level, palms-down.

The arrows banked away from each other, then turned in, light-trails criss-crossing over their own paths.

BLINK

For just a moment, everything slowed. Quentin understood the fighters’ tactic — they crossed in front of each other to throw off any leading. It was just like throwing a pass; he had to see the speed of the ball coming in, the angle, aim just in front of where the receiver would be.

Left-right-left-right-left-right.

One of the arrows flashed brightly, then blinked out.

“I got him!” Quentin said. “I got him!”

“Great, Quentin,” Virak said. “Do not grow overconfident.”

The second arrow flashed at Quentin’s face, but this time he didn’t flinch.

He should have.

A noise like the coming of High One himself raged in the gun cabin. Instinct threw his body to the deck. Sparks flew, things slammed into him, the room seemed to explode a dozen times all at once.

He became aware of a klaxon alarm blaring, hurting his head, making him wish that he’d go deaf. Then the voice of Captain Kate, fractured and highly amplified, even louder than the klaxon.

“Quentin! Get out of there!

And one more noise — a squeal of wind.

He rolled to his back and looked to the viewport. Bullets had ripped holes in the crysteel, torn the metal, bent the armor inward like a mag-can punctured by a screwdriver. Bits of wreckage flew to the holes as if the holes were supermagnets. Some of the debris clanged to a stop, too big to go through, while some of the smaller pieces shot out into the void at a million miles an hour.

Quentin’s body slid toward the viewport. He put his hands and feet flat on the still-wet black platform, bracing himself as best he could, but his eyes never left the center of the viewport.

One fist-sized bullet had lodged in the clear material. A big bullet surrounded by cracks.

Cracks that were
growing
.

“Uh-oh,” he said, then flipped to his hands and knees and started scrambling for the door.

He made it only a foot before he heard the crunching
crack
of the window giving way. He started to slide backward, yanked by the hand of a wind-god. Quentin threw his body forward as if he were Hawick diving for a pass. His fingers locked on the edge of the firing platform.

Hurricane wind lifted his feet up behind him, his body a straight line pointing right at the six-inch-wide hole. He couldn’t breathe. If he let go, he’d slam into that hole. He was far too big to fit through — the pressure would pull on any soft part of his body exposed to the Void. His innards would
squish
out into space.

The klaxon.

The hissing.

Captain Kate yelling.

The gun cabin door clanged open. Quentin looked up, eyes watering from the air racing past his face and saw Mum-O, Crazy George Starcher right behind him, decompression wind making their clothes flap madly about their bodies.

Starcher put a foot on either side of the door and grabbed Mum-O’s rear legs. Mum-O
compressed
, the accordion-like thing the Ki did just before they expanded and knocked the crap out of an opposing quarterback.

This is an odd time for a cheap shot. I hope Coach makes him run laps.

Mum-O expanded, shooting into the wreckage-strewn room. Multi-jointed arms reached out. Quentin had a blurry vision of the horror holos back home on Micovi, the ones that painted the Ki as murderous demons, then strong arms wrapped around his chest and shoulders and he was
flying
, but the
right
way toward the door and not into space.

Quentin felt the arms squeeze tighter. He hit hard against the corridor, heard a
slam
of a door closing, then the spin of an airlock wheel.

The wind vanished.

He felt the deck under his butt. He blinked, opened his eyes.

Crazy George Starcher. Right behind George, the five-eyed face of Mum-O.

George grabbed Quentin’s shoulders and gave a little shake. “Quentin! Are you okay?”

Quentin’s head bobbled.

George shook him again, harder. “Quentin!”

Quentin batted George’s hands away. “Starcher, knock it off! I’m okay!”

“You’re bleeding.”

“What’s new?” A deep gash ran the length of Quentin’s thigh. His blood oozed out, ran onto the deck. “Uh ... can you guys help me get to Doc Patah?”

Mum-O pushed George aside. The twelve-foot-long Ki picked Quentin up and placed the Human on his back. Quentin felt a lurch, then wrapped his arms around Mum-O’s chest and held on for dear life. The Ki tucked multi-jointed arms and legs to the side and slithered down the corridor like a giant snake.

• • •

“QUENTIN, SIT STILL,”
Doc Patah said. “Your injury is minor and I don’t have time for this.”

Quentin braced himself as Doc Patah applied two metal clamps to the five-inch gash in his left thigh. The Harrah put the pair of devices in place, then activated them both. The clamps pinched, pressing together the edges of Quentin’s torn skin. Blood surged up as the clamps locked down, then the flow stopped. Doc reached a mouth-flap into his backpack, brought out a tube and squirted the contents on the cut.

“Nanocytes,” he said. “The gel allows them to flow in around the clamps. The cut isn’t deep enough to merit anything else. We just need to stop the bleeding.”

With that, Doc flapped away, shooting across the room to a table that held Shun-On-Won, the backup offensive right guard. Black blood covered Shun-On’s chest, with more flowing out every second. Doc’s tentacles slid right inside the wound, wiggled for a moment. The trickle of black blood slowed, then stopped. Shun-On wasn’t dead, but from the looks of things he wasn’t that far away from it.

Quentin glanced around the infirmary. Hokor was there, unconscious on the table, wires connecting him to beeping machines. Why had Coach left the dining deck? Tried to help, like Quentin had? Doc Patah paid no attention to him, so Quentin assumed Hokor was fine.

A Human woman sat on a table, her left hand wrapped in a bloody blue bandage. Red blood stained her orange uniform. Quentin remembered her from his tour with Captain Kate. Sayeeda was her name, maybe. Something like that. Her eyes were squeezed tight, but she sat very still, bravely dealing with the pain while she waited her turn.

With a flash of guilt, Quentin suddenly realized why Doc Patah had stopped treating Shun-On long enough to check Quentin’s thigh injury — prioritization. Shun-On was a backup lineman. He wasn’t as important as the franchise quarterback. What if Shun-On
died
because Doc Patah stopped long enough to make sure Quentin’s injury wasn’t as severe? And Sayeeda, no matter what her injury, would have to wait until all of the football players had been treated.

Doc Patah’s order of treatment was simultaneously abhorrent and perfectly logical. Even while under attack, while dying, the Ionath Krakens were about winning football games.

At least Sayeeda was alive. On another table, Quentin saw a Quyth Worker-sized body covered by a sheet. He hoped it wasn’t Pilkie. And in the corner of the room, George Starcher sat on the floor, his head in his hands. Next to him was the trash can that held the remnants of Killik the Unworthy.

The klaxon alarms ceased.

“The last fighter has disengaged,” said Captain Kate over the sound system. “We out-ran their support ship. However, we have suffered some engine damage, which we need to repair immediately. We can’t go back the way we came, or we’ll run into the same support vessel. We will have to tack back at angles to the Sklorno border. We’ll move at full burn while we repair engines, but our tactical speed is down to about eighty percent of max. The punch-drive will not be recharged for another six hours. Hold for orders.”

When she stopped talking, the ship sounded eerily quiet.

Mum-O-Killowe stood next to Shun-On’s table, staring at his wounded Ki teammate, watching Doc Patah scramble to save a life.

Some of Captain Kate’s words finally registered.

“Wait a minute,” Quentin said. “We’re tacking
back
to Sklorno space? If we’re not in Sklorno space, where in the Void are we?”

George looked up. “The only other thing in this sector is Prawatt territory. So I guess we’re there.”

“You mean we’re in Prawatt Jihad space?”

George thought, then nodded, then put his head back in his hands.

The speakerfilm crackled. Captain Kate was back.

“Barnes, Starcher, Mum-O-Killowe, Kimberlin, report to the bridge,” she said. “All other footballers, get your damage-control assignments from Messal.”

Quentin stood, tested out his leg. He knew he shouldn’t be moving on it, but he’d played hurt enough times to know that didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to second-guess Captain Kate. She was probably the only reason they were all alive. Until this was over, he would run the plays that she called.

“Mum-O,” Quentin said. “Come on, we need to go to the bridge. George, get up. Let’s go.”

Mum-O scuttled over. George stood and picked up the trash can.

“Uh, George?” Quentin said. “I think you need to leave Killik here.”

George stared for a moment, then looked down, as if it surprised him to see he’d picked up the can at all. He lowered it gently, the bottom clinking slightly as it came to rest on the floor. Killik’s foot was still sticking out of it.