Wolf and Raven

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Somewhere in the dark passageway back into the stadium I heard a thwok, then the razorgirl came tumbling back into the small enclosure. A half-second later Jimmy entered the enclosure, a bat in his hands. “Wolf? Thumper?”

  I tried to answer him, but the Old One growled.

  Jimmy turned toward the shadows, raising the bat.

  The Old One took that as a threat and tried to make me lunge at him.

  I gritted my teeth, locking my jaw shut, and refused. “Go. Away. Jimmy.” My voice came in a harsh croak, with lots of growl worked in and around it. “Go.”

  He, too, is unnatural, Longtooth. He is as bad as this place.

  But he is my friend. I shaped my will into a stick and poked it at the Old One. You tried to play at man’s games, and you lost.

  It will not always be so, Longtooth.

  One game at a time.

  Jimmy lowered his head slightly, trying to pierce the darkness that shrouded me. “Wolf, is that you? Are you okay?”

  “It’s me, Jimmy. I need you to go away.” I had to force the words out through my throat. “Call security. Thumper is hurt bad. Dead, I think. These two did it. Go. Now. Please.”

  “Are you hurt?” Jimmy took a half-step toward me. “You look . . . different.”

  His eyes have been done, he can probably see me. I didn’t know if his optical mods included low-light vision, but the shadows would only hide me if he stayed back. “I’m going to be fine. Please, just go. I’ll catch up and explain. Get Thumper help.”

  He nodded. “ ’Kay, if that’s what you want.”

  “Thanks.”

  Jimmy turned and ran away down the passage, and the Old One relinquished his grip on me. I felt all the agonies of my body returning to normal, but I refused to cry out. Torturing me that way was beneath him, but the Old One had been thwarted so he didn’t care. Grumbling like some guttercur, he retreated inside me and lurked like a hangover.

  I shivered, then stood unsteadily. I might have been deep in the bowels of a building that mocked nature, covered in the blood of people who had denied their own nature, but at least I was myself again.

  And, for the moment, that was a win.

  III

  As wins went, though, it was rather costly. Thumper’s death nearly gut-shot the team. His enthusiasm had kept everyone loose, his gentle words had dispelled the negativism that could prolong a slump, and his sense of humor reminded everyone that since baseball was really a game, they should have fun out there. To have him killed stunned everyone, and at such a crucial point in the year, that could easily have spelled doom for the team.

  Oddly enough, Ken Wilson helped turn that sentiment around. Against doctor’s orders he left the hospital and came to the team meeting after Thumper’s death. He looked around at those gathered and delivered a succinct and powerful eulogy. “Each of us,” he said, “knows who we are inside. I’m not Babe Ruth, you’re not Matt Williams or Pee Wee Reese. When we step away from the game, when we retire our statsofts, we will be someone outside the game. Thumper devoted his whole life to baseball and became a person who literally lived for it. And now he’s died for it. He died making sure everything would be perfect for us, for our game against the Jaguars tomorrow. Our duty, our debt to him demands that we make that game as perfect as he made this place for that game. You know, you all know, he’s still here, watching us. Well, I’m not gonna let him down.”

  As Ken spoke I felt an upswelling of emotion and could see the same shining from the eyes of the other players. I knew they bought into it wholly and completely, but that’s because they didn’t have a full understanding of how Thumper had died. Palmer Clark had taken immediate charge of the investigation and had clamped a lid on things very quickly. All the media learned was that Thumper had been engaged in some routine maintenance duties when he’d had an accident, struck his head, and died.

  The truth was not nearly so neat. There was no denying that the two gillettes had killed him, but there was nothing to connect them with the team’s sub-par statistical performance. I was not a party to any interrogations, but from what Clark told me, the two of them were being fairly tight-lipped. They had a history of catting—burgling—various and sundry corporate apartments or places where VIPs installed their extramarital lovers. They hit spots where they figured folks would not want much attention paid and would have valuable items hidden. Clark figured they had been hiding out preparatory to breaking into the Dome’s luxury boxes, Thumper surprised them, and died in the ensuing struggle.

  I couldn’t dispute that idea, and cautioned myself against trying to make a pattern where none existed. It seemed to me, though, that if Thumper had found them hiding, they could have made up some excuse and gotten out of there. Moreover, they were wired and skilled enough to have taken Thumper down without killing him. The only reason they had for killing him was if he’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to see. Though he might have been killed accidently, they should have vacated the area the moment he went down, not hung around.

  Still, the security force and I looked around and couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary. I didn’t like it, but the accidental death theory seemed to be the easiest one to explain all that was happening. Normally that’s enough for me, but I was pretty sure there were some dots that weren’t getting connected and that if I could find them, I’d be able to figure out what was really going on.

  My general feeling of uneasiness had been heightened by a bit of distance between Jimmy and me. He definitely was putting his game face on during practice, concentrating a great deal. He told me that he’d just wanted to help that night, and had come looking for me when I’d not been in the locker room after his media conference. He’d headed for the scoreboard area because that’s where he thought Thumper would be. He literally ran into the woman as she fled, swatted her back into the battlefield, and then wanted to help me.

  As he told me this I could hear the hurt in his voice that I had asked him to leave. I really wanted to tell him why I’d asked him to go, but letting someone know you’ve gone feral and are likely to tear his throat out is really not the way to seal a friendship. I explained to him that with bodies and the like, I was trying to protect him from scandal or anything that would hurt the team. That was my job there, after all.

  He seemed to accept that explanation, which isn’t to say he believed it. After that we drifted apart—able to share jokes and all, but it wasn’t the same as before.

  Given all the other pressures on him, I didn’t see any reason to make an issue out of it. And explaining things would have required me telling him my secret. While I knew I could trust him with it, learning it was something that had already killed too many of Raven’s aides in the past. With Thumper’s death to show that folks were playing for keeps on this one, putting that burden on Jimmy wasn’t something I was going to do.

  I spent most of my time with the pitchers. I played a lot of catch and received advanced instruction in the proper methods of spitting. Chewing tobacco and compost have a lot in common, and you only swallow tobacco juice once, which is ample inducement to learn how to spit it as far away from you as you possibly can. Very quickly I switched to chewing gum and got to spitting with a degree of accuracy that I figured would impress even Kid Stealth[27].

  * * *

  In this kind of story about baseball, I’m supposed to note that the day of the big game dawned bright and sunny, full of promise and hope, but you wouldn’t believe that. This is Seattle, after all, where they print pictures of the sun on soyamilk cartons just to remind folks what it looks like. And our game was in the Dome, at night, which means the most cogent comment on atmospherics is that the roof wasn’t leaking in any inconvenient places.

  The same could not be said of the team. We were leaking and leaking badly; but we were leaking numbers. San Diego did have an elf with Tom Seaver riding him. He was using the 1971 stats, during which Seaver had a 1.76 ERA and 289 strike-outs. He kept blowing the ball by our guys, or mes
sing them up with off-speed pitches. Those few guys who did make contact all grounded out. Going into the later innings, we were all aware that Seaver had pitched four shut-outs in ’71, but had only thrown three so far this year.

  The mood in the dugout began to sour, despite guys turning their caps inside out and wearing them backward—anything to start a rally! I felt frustrated in the extreme because there was nothing I could do in the dugout or on the field to help the team. The Old One snarled at me to convince Bobby to put me in.

  I have seen enough of this game, Longtooth. I can make you fast to catch the rabbit-ball, and I can let you club it to death as well.

  The image of my trying to take a bite out of a pitch coming in high and tight made me wince. Sorry, Old One, not your game. There was no way I could explain to him that if any of the etheric sensors here caught magic being employed by me we’d forfeit the game. Being on the roster had given me the access I needed to get my job done, but it also placed a limitation on me.

  I dropped down on the end of the bench as we went out into the field at the top of the eighth. I started running over things in my mind, looking at them anew, trying to see if there was anything I’d missed. We all knew tampering was going on somehow, but the software was being verified by the league before each game, so it was clean. And it wasn’t like the players were picking up a virus on the field . . .

  Or was it? What I knew about computers and the way they functioned could be put on a chip and still leave terabytes open, but I did know some of those great, ancient, hoary, old statements that had gone from being glib to trite. The eldest among them: Garbage in, garbage out. Based on what Jimmy had told me when he convinced me to hit, I knew players actually did get data fed into them during the game. It allowed them to track the ball when pitched. Pumping other data into hitters would be a simple way to knock their performance off the statistical curve.

  But what’s the input device? I glanced from the hitter out to centerfield. The scoreboard, with that single, burned-out bulb!

  It hit me like a hammer. Ken Wilson should have gone down at the plate, but he got up to bat with his eyes closed. It was only when he was taking bows that he saw the scoreboard and the signals put him down. And Thumper had been out there changing a burned-out bulb, which wasn’t burned out at all, but set up to flash instructions in the ultraviolet light range. Even if folks in the stands or other players noticed it, if it wasn’t flashing a code that did something to their statsoft, they’d be unaffected and would have no reason to remember it.

  I blew a bubble with my gum and jumped a bit as it popped. The two catters hadn’t been waiting for a chance to rob luxury suites, they’d been making sure the proper bulb was in the proper socket on the scoreboard. Thumper surprised them and they killed him. Which means that bulb is what’s keeping us down.

  I got up and started running into the clubhouse. This is not easy to do in spikes. I crunch-clacked my way down corridors, then skidded around corners and scrambled like a cartoon character to get up speed for my next dash. I heard the muffled roar of the crowd as we got San Diego out and started to come to bat. Now or never.

  I bounced off the corridor wall leading to the scoreboard area and dashed into it. I saw Palmer Clark waiting by the entrance and realized he’d heard me coming, which gave him time to set up for my arrival. His right hand fell fast and the muzzle of his gun hit me solidly on the neck. I went down hard and would have been unconscious but for my aborted attempt to stop running when I saw him. My cleats had slipped out from under me, already dropping me to the ground, so the blow didn’t hit as hard as it could have. Still, I bounced once and rolled up into a ball against the wall where I’d lurked in the shadows two nights earlier.

  From my position there I could see several things, the first and foremost being the Ares Predator in Clark’s right hand. The muzzle looked like the south end of the Alaska oil pipeline and I really had no desire to be catching what it would be pitching. Up beyond him, just past the edge of the Megatron, I saw one of the smaller video display units set high above the seats on the third base side. It showed Jimmy warming up and stepping toward the plate.

  Clark smiled. “Just as well you’re here. I’d planned on framing you in the tampering scandal once I heard you were working with the team. You engineer this point-shaving deal, you get caught and get dead.”

  “That’s what I get for slotting Shoeless Joe Jackson, right?”

  “You should be so lucky.” As Jimmy stepped into the batter’s box, Clark pointed a rectangular remote control sort of device at the scoreboard. I saw no receiver for it, but from where he stood he angled things down past the fireworks tubes, so I assumed it was hidden from my view. “There, that should do it.”

  On the screen I saw Seaver rear back and throw. Jimmy took a wicked cut at the ball, but missed it cleanly. He twisted around and hit the ground. He stayed down for a second, then shook his head and stood again. The umpire called for time while Jimmy backed off and brushed dirt from his clothes.

  I smiled at Clark. “He’s tougher than Ken.”

  Clark shrugged. “What happened to Ken was not very subtle, but was necessary as a show of what can be done. This evening, the effects have been more gentle.” Use me, Longtooth. We will get the gun away from him and stop him.

  I shook my head and rubbed at the back of my neck. I still hurt from the clubbing and wasn’t certain I could concentrate enough to summon the Old One’s help. Moreover, I still knew that if I did so, the game would be lost, I’d be dead, and Clark would be free to continue doing what he was doing.

  A second pitch came in and Jimmy started to swing for it, then held up. The ball grooved straight down the middle and the umpire yelled, “Strike.”

  Clark smiled. “One more pitch and your boy strikes out. The anguished cries of thousands will be enough to drown out the shot that kills you.”

  “Think so?”

  Clark composed his face into a mask of serene civility. “Count on it.”

  The wind-up.

  The pitch.

  I gave Clark a spitter.

  The little pellet of gum came in like a hanging curve. He stumbled back from it and batted it away with his left hand. Disgust curled his upper lip and he was about to snap something at me, when he heard a sound that stopped him.

  The crack of a bat on a ball.

  Funny thing about being that far out in centerfield. On the screen I saw Jimmy swing and connect, but it was a second or so before I heard the sound of the hit. Clark half turned to look at the screen I was watching, and completed his turn about the time the ball cleared the fence.

  I don’t think anyone noticed that only five of the six mortar tubes sent fireworks exploding over the scoreboard. The one that hit Clark entered his back, lifting him up off the ground about a meter or so, and spinning him around. As he came back to where I could see his face, I caught a hint of horror and agony in his eyes, then he vomited green fire. His body somersaulted once, then hit the ground and flopped a lot until greasy gray smoke rose from his back and mouth.

  Longtooth.

  I rested my head back against the wall and closed my eyes to let that image fade to black. “Yes?”

  I see why you like this game.

  * * *

  I saw Jimmy about a day later. I was leaning against his ride and smiled as he came walking over. “Never got a chance to tell you, that was a great dinger yesterday.”

  “Thanks.” He glanced at the ground, then put his satchel down and folded his arms across his chest. “They told us some of what was going on. They said Clark had extra code inserted into the statsofts that wasn’t picked up in the verification process. Said that allowed him to code orders for us and load them in through the scoreboard.”

  “Right.” I shook my head. “Should have guessed what was going on all the way along. The only folks outside the league who benefited from the statsoft situation are gamblers. They can run the stats and figure out how a game should end up, then adjust
odds accordingly. Doing what he was doing, Clark showed he could skew those probabilities big time.”

  “Think he was betting on the games?”

  “Possible. Apparently he still slotted one of the Pete Rose years he used to play.” I shrugged. “No gambler will admit to taking his bets, but I think he was after something bigger. I think he saw Rose as being victimized by gamblers and wanted to avenge him. By showing he could skew the results, he was in a position to blackmail gambling concerns and get payoffs from them to do nothing.”

  Jimmy nodded, but the stiffness in his posture didn’t ease. “Funny how letting someone else ride you can get you mixed up.”

  “Generally why there’s only one personality allowed per body.” I smiled, but Jimmy didn’t return it.

  “They said you got to Clark before he could zap me with his thing. Analysis of the code he broadcast said I would have struck out, not hit a homer.”

  “Really? They didn’t tell me that.”

  “Is what you told them the truth?”

  I shrugged. “Truth is open to a lot of interpretations. The only truth I care about was the round-tripper you notched in the eighth. It gave us the win, puts us in the pennant hunt.”

  “But you know.”

  “Your secret? Yeah, I know.” I nodded slowly. “When you didn’t strike out, I saw the surprise on Clark’s face—for all of a second—and I realized we’re a lot alike. What you see now is the real me, but what you saw the night Thumper died, that’s part of me, too. A secret part of me. Not even Val knows about it, nor Lynn. It’s me when I’m being natural.”

  I smiled up at him. “You’re a natural, too. You’re not what people expect. You may load the software so it can be verified, and you’ve had that much work done on you, but you’re not using wired reflexes to hit or field. You’re just you.”

  Jimmy’s face hardened. “Ever since I was a kid I was in love with baseball. It’s a game for kids and folks who can still take joy in the things that kids take joy in.”

  “Instead of those who slot Kidjoy 1.3?”