Death Match (2003)

by Tom - Net Force Explorers 18 Clancy

  The goals now precessed one hex along, and everything changed, the previous scrum dissolving into a new one, oriented in a slightly different direction, as the teams reacted to the shift. As usual there were a few seconds during which none of the teams reacted as a whole, but only fragmentarily, shouting orders and suggestions at each other that were nearly lost in the clamor of the crowd. Darien for Chicago nabbed possession of the ball as it was being passed between two Spartak forwards, worked herself out of the tangle of bodies and passed to her fellow forward, Daystrom, who caught the ball in the crook of an elbow and spun in place, in roll axis, looking for the teammate to take the next pass. Most of the other Chicago players were still tangled up on the far side of the scrum, and Daystrom shouted himself hoarse at them to detach themselves and put some air between themselves and the "traffic jam" in the middle of the volume. One or two of them heard and pushed free, but the rest were trying to block either Spartak or South Florida players, and took a moment to respond to Daystrom. Daystrom glimpsed a face that looked ready, Ferguson's, and flung the ball at him--

  A leg thrust out of the scrum and kneed around the ball, capturing it. A moment later the body belonging to the ball worked its way out of the scrum and folded itself up double to spin. It was Spartak's Yashenko. A great howl of delight went up from the Moscow fans and the scrum abruptly disintegrated, players scattering in all directions, looking to see where the ball was, locating it, targeting Yashenko and pushing off the volume walls or each other to get at him, to block or tackle.

  The movement in the volume became frantic. Yashenko kept spinning, and one of his teammates, Talievna, was the first to reach him of the multiple "launches" that were heading his way. Within a meter of him she curled up to offer him inertial mass, and Yashenko pushed off against her and was halfway across the spat volume by the time the people who had been coming at him to tackle or block had arrived at his former position.

  In an instant it became apparent that he was lining up for an attack on the Chicago goal, at right angles to the Spartak goal directly ahead of him. But there were too many of the Chi players on the wrong side of the volume to defend properly, now, and even the Chi goalie Bonner had been caught away from his post and was now trying to get at the wall for a push in the right direction. The crowd went up in a great howl of excitement as people reacted to the fragmentation among the teams and the prospect of the score, as Yashenko got ready to pass. But there was one place where confusion did not reign quite supreme. Among the bodies now swarming toward the Chicago goal, George Brickner curled himself down into cannonball--possibly inevitable in the confusion, but at least one player was ready for it--then Brickner pushed sideways off Chicago's Daystrom and thus opened up a space between them with the equal-and-opposite reaction. There were shouts of confusion, some from his team-mates, but he had seen what they hadn't, and Melendez had seen his glance. As Yashenko headered the ball at Galitsin for the goal, Melendez braced himself off Galitsin and pushed--and the ball flew with terrible speed past Galitsin, who reached for it but couldn't stop it, and smacked squarely into the goal outlined in red, white, and blue before it could precess.

  There was a roar of rage and disappointment from the Spartak fans as the computer held the ball in place and did a retrace of recent motions to see who picked up the point. But the referee had seen that perfectly well. "Own goal, Moscow," the referee said over the roar, "credit to South Florida--!"

  Another roar, but this time of joy, from the South Florida fans. The rest of the audience was waiting in breathless hope or anguish for the computer to finish the traceback and agree or disagree with the ref, but the digits on the scoreboard hexes embedded in the transparent walls of the spat volume burned briefly bright...and then changed from 2-1-1 to 2-2-1.

  Play resumed, and if it had been fast before, it was furious now. Twenty-one men and women, angry or wildly excited or both, jostled for control of the ball as it was fired back into the volume. It vanished into a flying scrum of bodies wearing yellow and red about half and half, while the ones in red, white, and blue changed tactics, as was possibly understandable, and simply tried to keep either of the others from scoring. This was one of those situations in which spatball started to more closely resemble a particularly spiteful playground game of keep-away than anything else. Somehow, though, Chicago managed to get hold of the ball again, and another hand-around began as Hanrahan emerged from the scrum with the ball gripped desperately behind one bent knee. He did a 180-degree somersault in the pitch axis and flung the ball away again, revealing (to Moscow if no one else) that the pass he had been setting up was a feint, and that three of his teammates were lining up in great-circle on South Florida's goal. But it was too late. The crowd was already counting down, and there was no injury time, and even as Jarvik took the pass from Hanrahan and fired it at Torrance, who in turn fired it at the goal, the South Florida goalie was there, out of nowhere, wrapping herself around the ball like an oyster around somebody's escaped pearl.

  "Houdini!" the South Florida fans screamed at the goalie in tribute, but Zermann paid no attention to them--opening herself up again, glancing around her for no more than a second, and fisting the ball away sideways like a bolt of orange lightning at Brickner, who caught it in his elbow and tightened in for spin--

  And the horn went. Catie jumped up and flung her arms around Zermann's brother Kerry, who had been sitting beside her rigid as a statue for the last fifteen minutes, but now was jumping up and down and screaming "Slugs! Slugs!" like everyone else within the twenty-meter diameter that circumscribed the Slugs friends-and-family area. From behind her, Hal caromed into Catie, and she dropped Kerry Zermann and pounded her brother's head in sisterly delight. All around them the crowd of sixty thousand was in bedlam, and in the spat volume team members of all kinds were hugging each another and jerseys were being pulled off and sent sailing across the volume to other players, who slipped them on and came across to shake hands, some cheerfully, some with scowls. The announcer was shouting into the main sound link, "--and South Florida and Chicago tie, two-two, with Moscow Spartak falling by the wayside with an own goal and only one score during the whole of an incredible game, one that'll go down in the record books for sheer unpredictability and brilliant play--the umpire congratulating both sides now as the Slugs and the Fire progress to the quarter-final stage, both teams going into the positional lottery along with New York, Los Angeles, the Grasshoppers of Xamax Zurich, Manchester United High, Rio de Janeiro, and Sydney Gold Stripe. A game that will go down in spat history for possibly the latest..."

  Catie found herself wondering later, The latest what?--for when things quieted down again enough for her to notice things, she was in the "locker room" with the Slugs, their entourage, and about fifty other people, mostly from the sports networks. The locker room wasn't any such thing, of course, any more than it had to be in any other virtual sport. The players' actual bodies were mostly in their own homes, and if they needed showers, or someplace to change their clothes, such things were only steps away from their own implant chairs. But the need for a place to celebrate after a won game, and to deal with the press, still existed, and so here they all were, the Slugs laughing, shouting, jubilant even after only achieving a draw. At first Catie tried to keep herself calm in the midst of all this, but it was just silly. So much excitement, so tightly concentrated, simply overwhelmed your senses--the reporters running around sticking virtual mikes (representative of link-out programs to their own broadcasters' servers) into people's faces, the champagne being squirted around with total abandon--for when the session finally broke up, no one would actually be sticky, and no money for the bubbly stuff would actually have been wasted--the hoots and shouts of victory, the jokes and jibes, and the big stuffed banana slug being paraded around the locker room, with some team members and hangers-on bowing to it ceremoniously, and others following it around in an impromptu conga line--Catie couldn't help but laugh, especially when George's co-captain, Mark, left one interv
iew with the CNNSI reporter and came up to her with what looked like a very big peanut butter jar wrapped in prismatic gift paper. He was holding the lid on, and he said to Catie, in a mysterious voice, "Want a look?"

  "Sure," Catie said.

  He opened the lid. She peered in. Then she raised her eyebrows and said, "I thought they were bigger."

  "Aww," Mark said, sounding disappointed. Plainly he had been expecting a more emphatic response. "And you looked like such a sweet, innocent little thing, too."

  Catie grinned. "Guilty on one count, maybe. But when you've had as many weird things put down your back by your little brother as I have over the last seventeen years, one slug more or less doesn't matter much. Besides, I think that one's asleep."

  "Asleep? How can you tell?" Mark stared into the jar. "Listen, seriously, how can you--?" But at that point one of the reporters from AB/NBC came up to Mark with a "mike" and started asking him questions about Chicago's "front five," and Catie slipped away, grinning. That response had paralyzed her brother, too, a few years ago, and had won her at least an hour of peace somewhere along the line.

  Very slowly the locker room began to clear out, and as it did, George Brickner drifted over toward Catie, glancing around him with an expression that overtly looked like satisfaction. But there was still something else going on too, that uncertain quality in his gaze that Catie had noticed before and had not been able to put a name to. Seeing it again now, it began to bother her more than ever. If there was a form of art she preferred above all others, it was portraiture, and after a lot of studying of faces, over time, she was beginning to get a sense of whether the face in question was (for lack of a better phrase) comfortable with itself. George's face was not, and Catie kept wondering why.

  "Well," he said, watching one last reporter getting into Melendez's face again, "at least that's over. Now we start getting ready to go into the lottery."

  Catie raised her eyebrows at that. "You're going to have to coach me here a little, George...I'm still new to this game. Though I think I heard some of the reporters going on about this earlier."

  "Oh. Well, at the quarterfinal level, the teams that have 'survived' that long go into a lottery to determine who plays who in what order. Originally, it was a way of avoiding accusations that one team or another was using undue influence to have first crack at the spat volume on the Space Station." He waved away one of his teammates who was coming at him and Catie with one more champagne bottle. "Pete, why don't you drink some of the stuff? Nice vintage, no calories!"

  The answer was a rude noise, after which Dalton departed to squirt someone else. "...Anyway, later they kept the same routine to make sure that time slots in the dedicated 'sealed' server were distributed fairly, since the security protocols in the single server only allow one game to be played at a time. A spat tournament isn't something you can stage over multiple venues, like a real-world sport. At least it couldn't be done so far. That may change now. With money pouring into the sport the way it has been, they'll be able to afford to set up and maintain at least one more dedicated server, maybe two. One of the good things that'll come of all this sponsorship, I hope, eventually."

  George sighed then. "At least the hardware upgrades will be good if the software is improved...the stuff we have is already getting kind of clunky. In particular, there are problems handling the larger 'crowds.' That's an increasingly thorny issue, and it's going to get worse as the virtual 'gate' gets bigger and more and more people are attracted to the sport."

  "Don't tell me that you're longing for the good old days when spat was smaller, and only a few aficionados would turn up...." This was something that Catie had heard from at least one of the commentators over the past couple of weeks.

  George laughed at her. "Are you kidding? This time, right now, is going to be looked back on in twenty years as spat's golden age. I like it the way it is." Then his face clouded. "I'd like it better still, though, if we'd won today. We should have."

  "But you didn't."

  George looked at her sharply. "You don't understand me," George said. "I wasn't saying, 'I wish we'd won.' I was saying, 'We should have won.'" He looked at Catie to see if she was getting what he was saying, and he lowered his voice. "Especially in the second half. The force we applied to the ball, the way we were handling it, should have produced a certain given result then...and it didn't. Something was wrong in there. I felt it again in the third half...which was why I was insisting on so much contact, and only shooting at goal from up close."

  Catie understood him, and what he was saying unnerved her. "You're saying that the feel of the virtual spat space, the way it was behaving, had been interfered with somehow."

  He nodded.

  Catie shook her head. "I know there are games where that happens on purpose. The way a golf greenskeeper can alter the 'lie' of the greens to make a hole harder to play...or the groomers at a bowling alley can varnish or wax the alleys to make the ball behave one way or another. It even happens in baseball...the guys who mow the lawn do the infield to favor their team's hitting tendencies."

  "That's legal, within limits, and for those games. But in spat the server is maintained by a central authority, not by the individual teams, and the spat volume's behavior is supposed to be neutral."

  "So to change the way the scoring surface was acting...it would mean that someone had to tamper with the server," Catie said, also keeping her voice low. "But that's supposed to be impossible. The servers are sealed, aren't they?"

  "They're supposed to be," said George. "But exactly what that means in operational terms, I haven't the slightest idea. Do you?"

  Catie didn't, but she resolved to find out, and she knew someone who could make the issue as clear to her as it needed to be. "No," she said. "Not at the moment."

  George nodded. Catie looked at him and got the clear sense that he knew more about what she was up to than he was letting on, but he was being cagey about it. Maybe he was wise...for there was always the possibility, in any virtual encounter, that one was being listened to. Even encryption was not always everything it was cracked up to be. For some of the more routine forms of encryption, the "soft" ones, various law enforcement organizations held back-door keys...and not even law enforcement, Catie knew, was immune to occasionally being compromised. When you came right down to it, even law enforcement officers were just people, and people, however regrettably, had weaknesses that could occasionally be exploited by those with the inclination to do so.

  "Tell me how it felt to you," Catie said after a moment.

  "Like the ball was bouncing wrong," George said. "As if the virtual 'rotation speed' of the spat space had been altered without warning. Not a whole lot. But when you work in microgravity for long enough, you get to know the feel. We've had astronauts in to check it for 'reality,' and they've always said it was right on."

  Catie nodded again. "Meanwhile," she said, "did you get my move?"

  "Just pregame." George gave her an amused look. "Conservative."

  "If you can tell that much about me from just one move," Catie said, "you're pretty good."

  "That's what they tell me," George said, and gave her a superior look, which he couldn't hold--a moment later he was laughing.

  "When's the lottery?" Catie said.

  "Tuesday evening," George said. "Usually it's not a big deal...but I hear it's going prime time this year." He was still smiling, but once again that expression of guarded concern was in his eyes.

  Catie looked across the room at Hal, who had recovered quite nicely from his late arrival at the game, and was now gazing down into Mark's jar with interest. A second later he took it from Mark and headed in Catie's direction. Time to put on her game face.... "When you send your next move along," she said, "I'll get in touch, and we can have a little chat."

  George nodded. "I'll look forward to that."

  "Cates," Hal was saying, "how can you tell it's asleep?"

  Catie smiled.

  Elsewhere, in a virtual
bar far away, it was no longer afternoon, but night; and two shadowy forms sat on either side of a marble table, under the blue-tinged mood lighting, and eyed one another coolly.

  "Lucky for you they drew," Darjan said.

  Heming kept himself still, and didn't gulp...though he felt like it. Chicago's draw had been entirely too tight a thing. "I can't understand why they didn't win," he said.

  Darjan gave him a dry look. "Maybe our principals' enthusiasm is misplaced," he said. "The team was given the equivalent of nearly half an hour's worth of free goals. They weren't able to make any decent use of the time. Whatever that may suggest to us, it's suggesting other things to the people who're most interested in what they do next. We're going to have to look at more robust forms of intervention."

  "Still, they got into the play-off pool anyway," said Heming after a moment. "The draw is Tuesday. The odds of them being matched off against South Florida again are minuscule."

  "Forty-four to one is not minuscule," Darjan said quietly. "Two point six billion to one, like a respectable lottery, the same chance you have to be hit by a meteorite, now that's minuscule. Forty-four to one is too damn good. And no matter who South Florida plays, their odds are still too damn good. This has got to be sorted out, Heming. Fast. What are you doing about it?"

  Heming didn't quite squirm, though he wanted to. "Some people are going to go have a look at the South Florida team members' Net machines," he said. "'Routine maintenance.'"

  Darjan sat quiet for a moment. "That sounds like a thought," he said finally. "As long as you're not planning anything so infantile as having the machines fail in the middle of a game."