by Scott Sigler
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, see
n 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.
The stadium walk had ended with an elevator ride to a luxury box, where Quentin and the others sat in a large seat and looked down at the white field far below. Dark blue lines and numbers looked almost black under the domed stadium’s bright lights. As the teams battled, Quentin focused on the player he’d decided he just had to have — Sklorno wide receiver Cheboygan.
“Barnes,” Hokor said, “I’m still not sold on Cheboygan. She’s good, but she’d be our fourth receiver at best and she’s not that fast. What about Cofferville or Minas Gerais? Both of those receivers have timed their 30-yard dash in the upper tenth percentile of all Tier Three players.”
Quentin shook his head. “I’ve already got speed, Coach. Hawick and Milford are blazers. I want ball-control, I want receivers who can catch anything I throw at them, and who can live through the season.” The female Sklorno bodies had evolved for speed, speed and more speed. Muscular thighs rose back and up, narrow forelegs pointed forward and down to connect with long, flexible feet — these grasshopper-like limbs made the species the fastest sentients in the galaxy. The legs supported a narrow, vertical trunk of a body that bent back in a slight curve, ending in the Sklorno’s strange head. At the front of the small head, near the neck, two long raspers that could curl up hidden behind a chin plate or dangle down to the ground, revealing thousands of tiny rasper teeth. Above the chin plate, a dense crop of coarse, black hairs around four long eye stalks. The eye stalks moved separately, letting a Sklorno see everything around her. Below the chin plate, on the body, were the long, muscular tentacles that reached out like boneless snakes to snag footballs out of the air.
The physiology alone was strange enough to begin with even without the Sklorno’s coloration — which was no coloration at all. Clear skin showed fluttering, translucent muscles, transparent blood coursing through them, all wrapped around black bones that looked blurred and out of focus from the tissue surrounding them.
Cheboygan’s clear skin was mostly hidden, of course, by her light green and yellow Manglers uniform and helmet. She was bigger than most Sklorno receivers, her stats said she was stronger, and there were more factors that made Quentin want her on the Krakens’ roster.
“Coach, her speed isn’t top-shelf, but she’s still plenty damn fast,” Quentin said. “Did you check out her mass-to-speed score and her density rating?”
John looked up from his double serving of chili fries. The words density rating seemed to leave a bad taste in his mouth.
“Huh? Q, what kind of stat is that? You mean her strength?”
“Not her strength, John. Mass, her density. How, uh, tightly compacted she is.”
“You mean if she’s fat?”
Quentin shook his head. “No, not that. The more mass she has, the bigger hits she can take. Combine her mass with her speed, or her velocity, and you get her force. That means if I throw to her over the middle while she’s moving, she has more force than a linebacker like you.”
“Screw that,” John said. “I’m made of mega-force. Supermega force, even. I’ll knock her right the hell out.”
“Yes, John, of course you will. But not all linebackers are stone-bred monstrosities like you.”
“And cultured.” John pointed with a chili-covered fry for emphasis. “That part comes from Ma.”
Quentin nodded. “And cultured. Anyway, the more force the receiver has, I think the better suited she is to catching passes over the middle. Defenses don’t have to worry about Milford or Hawick running those routes because they don’t have enough mass to take those hits without getting hurt. Right now, I can only throw short over the middle to our tight ends or our running backs. I want more options. Force equals mass times acceleration, so I want lots of force.”
John popped the greasy fry into his mouth. He chewed with his mouth open and kept talking. “Mass? Acceleration? Sounds to me like you’ve been hanging out with that nerd Kimberlin again. He trying to make you all smart and stuff?”
“He’s tutoring me,” Quentin said. “So what?”
John rolled his eyes. YOU CAN’T TEACH AN OLD DOG SPILLED MILK scrolled across his forehead. “You’re a football player, Q. How about you worry about football? I mean, do you even have an agent yet?”
Quentin shook his head. “No, but I’m supposed to meet with Yitzhak’s agent when I get back to Ionath. Guy’s name is Danny Lundy.”
John’s right hand turned into an emphatic fist. “Lundy is my agent, Q! He’s the man. He’ll tear the tongue out of anyone who gets in your way.”
“Good to know.”
“Anyway, Q, you should just focus on football. You don’t need all this physics crap. Just trust your eyes. Stop trying to be something you’re not.”
Quentin looked back down to the field. Something he was not? What did that mean? Was he supposed to stay ignorant just because he played football? No, no way. Kimberlin had promised that knowledge would add to Quentin’s ability to lead the Krakens to a championship, not distract from it. Studying was hard work. Kimberlin demanded perfect scores, but at least some of the knowledge seemed promising. Physics, in particular. In the past six weeks of tutoring, Quentin had learned about things like mass, force, velocity and conservation of momentum. H
e knew the actual reason why little players bounced off of big players. He knew why tacklers needed a low center of gravity and why he was putting his receivers’ lives at risk if he threw too high — something called torque. He understood how air density impacted the flight of a pass.
The knowledge was amazing. Kimberlin also wanted to teach useless stuff like history, but some of the species biology might prove helpful. Quentin was willing to learn anything if that knowledge would give him the edge he needed to claim the GFL title. If John didn’t need such knowledge, that was John’s business, but Quentin refused to feel bad about expanding his brain.
Down on the field, the light green and yellow Manglers broke the huddle and lined up. The Archangels — white jerseys and turquoise helmets showing the dirt, blood and damage of a nearly complete game — dug in, trying to protect their slim 13-10 lead. Every player on that field knew that scouts from hundreds of upper tier teams were watching, and they played accordingly.
Hokor quickly activated a palm-up display on his pedipalp, then clicked through the interface until a slowly spinning display of Cheboygan appeared.
“Eight feet tall, three hundred sixty pounds,” Hokor said. “Unusually large for a Sklorno. She’s slow, though.”
“Slow for a Sklorno,” Quentin said. “That means she’s still faster than Starcher or Ju Tweedy. All that size, moving at high speed? Coach, that’s money.”
Hokor looked at the stats some more, then down to the field. “I am not sure, Barnes. Speed kills.”
The Manglers quarterback took the snap and dropped back. Lights played off of a light green jersey with yellow letters and numbers, the light green helmet with a yellow saw logo on the side. Cheboygan, wearing the Sklorno version of the same uniform, ran downfield ten yards, then angled for the deep middle on a post pattern. She drew double coverage, opening up the shallow middle on a crossing route. Quentin watched the ball sail through the air, hitting receiver Manzhouli fifteen yards downfield and almost directly over center. She bobbled it, reached up for it, then flew backward as a white-and-turquoise-clad Archangel defensive back put a shoulder pad in her chest.