Death Match nfe-18

by Tom Clancy

  “Thanks loads. CNNSI, please. Sports headlines, rolling. Latest.”

  A moment later the effusive young guy with the wild hairstyle who was doing afternoon and evening news on CNNSI lately was standing behind a desk in front of Catie. “—In an unusual move apparently made for operational reasons, the International Spatball Federation has changed its scheduling for this year’s spatball play-offs.” Behind the anchor, the “background” showed an impressive-looking lineup of implant chairs and very high-end Net boxes and terminals. “The management of Manchester United High announced today that software trouble at their newly installed, multimillion-pound Professional Play Center at Anfield has made it impossible for them to meet the originally scheduled play date of this Thursday. Since the ISF was informed within the mandated twelve-hour emergency notification limit, the team will not forfeit its match with the Chicago Fire. That match has been rescheduled to Saturday, and the Saturday match between the South Florida Spat Association and Xamax Zurich has been moved to Thursday evening by agreement with those two teams.”

  “Oh, no,” Catie said softly. They’ll never be ready in time.

  Worse. The server will never be debugged in time!

  The game is going to have to go ahead…and the people who wanted to ruin the Banana Slugs’ chances to win are going to do just that—

  She came back to herself to hear the sportscaster saying, “—this is the third major software failure in two months to assail the new installation at Anfield, which has been dogged from inception to installation by cost overruns and then by hardware glitches, as well as by problems with the new MaximumVolume software and operating system which was developed for Manchester. The first two failures of the system, late in the ‘scheduled’ season, caused one forfeit and one loss due to the failure of center forward Alan Bellingham’s custom player suite during the third half of United’s crucial preplay-off game with Tokyo Juuban and Ottawa. Manchester United shareholders have once again called for an independent inquiry into the team’s dealings with sports-simming software giant Camond, the president of the shareholders’ association once again asserting that—”

  Catie sat there in unbelieving dismay, her dinner forgotten. “Space…”

  “I was only following orders.”

  “Yeah, right. Is George Brickner available?”

  “Trying his space for you now.”

  There was a brief pause. “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Catie.”

  “Oh.” Another pause. “Just a minute.”

  It was more like a couple of minutes. She waited. When he walked into her space, George took one look at the shocked expression on her face, and paused, and then he just nodded. “You heard.”

  “Yeah.”

  He sat down in the chair which had been left there for James Winters. She plopped down in the Comfy Chair, but for once it brought her little comfort. “You talked to James Winters….”

  “Among various other people,” George said, rubbing his face, “yes.” He looked very tired.

  Catie knew how he felt, all of a sudden. “George, why did you do it?”

  “Agree to change the schedule, you mean? Because the ISF asked us to. And we didn’t have a good reason to say no.”

  “But you did! If you—”

  “Catie,” George said, “if we refused to allow the change in schedule — and it was a perfectly reasonable request on the ISF’s part — you know what would happen. People would have started asking questions. Why were we so reluctant? What was going on? And soon enough, someone would have found out. Or else one of the people involved with what was done to the ISF spat-volume server would have started to suspect something…and they would all have folded their little operation up and gone into hiding. After all this trouble, nothing would be solved.”

  It was her own argument, twisted into a horrible shape that she had never imagined, and it stunned Catie into silence. George was quiet for a few moments, too.

  “You think I don’t know what you’re thinking?” George said. “Believe me, I feel the same way. It would have been great to get in there and have a chance at winning this tournament, to do a thing that would make spat-ball history. Even a chance of making it to the semifinals — that would have been something to tell our grandchildren about. But if we don’t stop what’s happening to spat, stop it right now, there’ll be no sport to tell our grandchildren about…. Not one worth playing, anyway.” He swallowed. “Sports is about making sacrifices, sometimes. This is one of those times. The team agrees with me.”

  “Do they know…?”

  He looked at her. “They know enough,” George said. “The Net Force people have been in to check their machines. They’ve been sabotaged, Catie. We can’t touch that, either. We can’t change anything. If we do, the people behind the sabotage will know, and they’ll go to ground somewhere. And who knows, maybe we’ll win…but the sport will lose. And all the people like us who play it for joy, they’ll lose, too.”

  Catie looked at George with an ache in her middle that she couldn’t have described in any words. “It’s bad enough that you’re so good-looking,” Catie said after a while, maybe more bitterly than she intended, “but do you have to be a hero, too? It’s just not fair.”

  “Things aren’t usually,” George said. “But there’s no harm in trying to make them fair for the next guy along.”

  Catie could think of no reply to that.

  “It’s not going to be so bad,” George said.

  “Yes, it is,” said Catie.

  George’s face twisted into a pained shape Catie didn’t particularly like to see on it. “All right,” he said, “yes! It is! But we can’t let that stop us. We’re going to give them a fight like they’ve never seen before. We’re going to show the people who put the fix in that the only way to stop us is to fix the game in ways that have never been seen before…and even if we lose, we’re going to play like no one’s ever seen a spat team play before. We’re going to play so well that everyone who sees the game we’re about to lose will shake their heads and wonder what the heck went wrong. Then when they see Chicago play at the weekend, those same people are going to shake their heads and say, ‘They should never have made it this far. Someone must have been cheating the system somehow.’ And that’s the best way for us to respond, the only way that also helps Net Force do what it needs to do about this situation. I don’t like it much. It’s not at all the ending for this season that I dreamed of. The team doesn’t like it much, either. It doesn’t match their dreams. But we’re not going to go quietly. I promise you that!”

  They both sat quiet for a few moments, looking in different directions. Then George looked over at the chess-board. “I see you’ve got me in a knight fork,” he said.

  “I’ve had you there for three moves,” Catie said.

  “You gonna do anything about it?”

  “I’ve started doing something about it,” Catie said. “Your bishop.”

  “I’m not worried about that,” George said, and gave her a superior look. “Not after the way you threw that last knight away. Anyway, I’m going to take your queen in three moves.”

  “No, you’re not,” Catie said.

  “Yes, I am,” George said.

  “You can’t. There’s no way—” Catie got up and stalked over to the chessboard, glad of an excuse not to have to look at George. She was upset; upset at the unfairness of life, which was about to cheat this guy and his friends of a victory that they deserved. And she hated to have people see her when she was upset.

  “There,” she said, and picked up one of her bishops and moved it. The window hanging in the air with the notation of the game changed itself to reflect the move.

  George got up and wandered over to the chessboard, looking over Catie’s shoulder at the board’s center area. “Getting messy in there,” he said.

  “Not nearly as messy as some places,” Catie said, heart-sore. In her mind all she could see was that great piled-up tangle of co
de in the ISF server, intricate, complex, and rotten at its core.

  George was silent for a moment. “Catie,” he said. “You did the best you could. It’s out of our hands now — your hands and mine. All we can do now is play the game through to the end, and try to do it with some dignity. And in the meantime…I appreciate that you were trying to help. I really do.”

  Catie nodded. “Do you have a move?” she said.

  He looked at the board one more time. “Not tonight,” he said. “I’ll have a couple for you tomorrow, before we go off to practice. And then one more later.”

  “All right,” she said.

  George went back to his doorway, went through it, vanished. Catie didn’t turn to watch him go, just looked at the bishop she had moved, and found herself suddenly wishing that the game she had so much been looking forward to would never happen at all.

  The last contact between them before the game, on Wednesday night, was made over a voice-only line. They would not now speak again until after the game on Thursday.

  “…The neighbors said she left early to pick up her daughter at school,” Darjan said, “and she didn’t come back. She went off to hide somewhere, apparently. She hasn’t come back yet.”

  “You going to let her get away with that?”

  Darjan laughed. “It’s not vital. There are four other people being worked on in other cities. We’ve got other fish to fry, anyway. When they changed the schedule, everybody had to scurry to make sure that the mirror was working right. There’ll be some people pleased, anyway. The Slugs’ll be out of the running that much faster. How about your end of things? All the South Florida players’ servers taken care of?”

  “All handled now.”

  “Fine. Let’s go over all the other arrangements one last time.”

  Heming laughed. “Always the perfectionist, huh, Armin?”

  “Always,” Darjan said. “Just call me fond of keeping my skin in one piece.”

  “They don’t pay you enough for the amount you worry,” Heming said.

  “No,” said Darjan, “they don’t. Let’s start at the top….”

  8

  Despite Catie’s preferences, Thursday eventually came. The game was scheduled for nine P.M. Eastern time, and Catie went to her mom and dad to make sure that both the Net machines in the house were going to be available for her and Hal. But her mother and father already knew about the scheduling, and seemed surprised that she was bothering to ask.

  “With all the coverage there’s been about this in the last couple of days, honey,” her mother said, “you know we wouldn’t deprive you!” She was unloading another pile of books onto the kitchen table, this batch, from the looks of it, was heavy on the classics again, but mostly sixteenth-and seventeenth-century French literature.

  Catie sighed, picking up a copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel and paging through it. She hadn’t been looking at the spatball coverage. It made her heart ache to think of what was going to happen to South Florida tonight. Mostly she had been catching up on schoolwork and making the occasional chess move to match the two that George had made since she spoke to him last. But those were the only times she’d been online since then.

  Her dad wandered through the kitchen then, holding a package. “Hon, what happened to my knife?”

  “Your knife?”

  “The one in the studio.”

  Her mother went over to the dishwasher and pulled out a tired-looking plastic-handled steak knife, and handed it to her father. “I thought I would give it a scrub while its shape could still be made out somewhat under the paint,” she said.

  “The dishwasher got it this clean?” her dad said, starting to work with the knife on the package he was carrying. “Amazing!”

  “No, a hammer and chisel and elbow grease got the first inch of paint off it,” her mother said. “Hard work, not a miracle, paid off there. Catie, honey, did I tell you we talked to James Winters again?”

  “Again?” Catie put the book down. “What did he want?”

  “Just to thank us for letting you help,” her father said. “He thinks highly of you.”

  Catie raised her eyebrows. “It’s nice to know,” she said.

  Her father put the knife down on the table and started peeling open the package. “‘Nice to know’? Have you had a change of career goals all of a sudden?”

  “Uh, no…I’m just tired.” She checked her watch.

  “How long is that game, honey?” her mother said.

  “About two hours or so, unless they go into overtime.”

  “All right. As long as I can have one of the machines sometime before bed…”

  “No problem.”

  Nine o’clock came soon enough, and Catie took the machine in the family room. Hal took the one down the hall. In the Great Hall she paused to look over the chess-board for any new moves. There were none. “Space…”

  “You know, you’re more beautiful every day.”

  Catie looked up into the air with a cockeyed expression. “I think I liked it better when you were insulting me.”

  “You’ll probably be sorry you said that in a few years. Was there something you wanted?”

  “Friends-and-family space in the ISF spatball volume, please…”

  A doorway appeared in the middle of the Great Hall. “Any messages waiting?” Catie said before she went through.

  “Nothing, boss.”

  “Okay. Flag me as busy for the next two hours.”

  She slipped into the microgravity of the friends-and-family space and greeted some of the other team members’ relatives whom she knew slightly, then settled down among them. Hal popped in a few minutes later, bubbling over with excitement. “I can’t believe it’s finally happening,” he said. “I can’t believe it….”

  “I can,” Catie said softly.

  He turned to look at her. “Cates,” he said, “have you and George had a fight or something?”

  “It’s not me-and-George,” Catie said, “and no, we haven’t had a fight.” Probably it would be simpler if we had….

  “You sure?”

  Catie gave Hal a don’t-push-your-luck look…then felt guilty and softened her expression. “Yeah, I’m sure. Why?”

  “It’s just that if he said something that bothered you,” Hal said, “I was going to adjust his attitude.”

  Catie had to laugh at that. “It’s nothing like that,” she said. “But look…thanks anyway.”

  “Uh-oh,” Hal said. “Here we go…!”

  The cheering was beginning as the players from both sides, Xamax in their green and white, South Florida in their yellow and black, were floating into the volume now, taking positions around the walls as the environment announcer read out their names and numbers to the usual wild cheers. The captains came last, as always. When George’s name was announced, the usual cry of “Parrot! Parrot!” went up from the South Florida fans all around. George looked over toward the F&F space and lifted a hand to wave. Every relative and friend in the place cheered and waved back, Catie included, but Catie knew whom he had been looking at, with a slighly somber gaze, and knew what the message was. We will not go quietly, I promise you!

  After the national anthems Catie sat through the first and second halves with little enthusiasm…or tried to. Around the middle of the second half, she found that the sheer élan with which South Florida was playing started to break her mood, which even the screaming and hollering of the fans gathered around the Slugs’ friends-and-family area hadn’t been able to do. Xamax was a good team, very good indeed. Over time they had carefully selected and recruited some of the best players in Europe. Then (for reasons Catie didn’t understand in the slightest) they had sent out for a famous English spatball coach who had been with Man United for a while, and who now shouted at his players from the outer shell in either a hilarious Midlands-accented form of Swiss German that made him sound like he had a throat disease, or a really barbarous French that sounded like someone gargling with Channel water. Whatever
they thought of his accents, his players loved the man and played their hearts out for him.

  But they didn’t play like the Slugs. Will it make a difference at this level? Catie had asked, and now she realized how dumb the question had been. The team’s friendship, their relationship, turned them into the closest thing to a bunch of spatball-playing telepaths that Catie had ever seen. They all seemed to know where they all were almost without looking. They passed and played, not like separate people, but like parts of the same organism. And they were not playing for a coach, however beloved, but for each other. It made a difference, all right.

  The trouble was that, at the end of the third half, it still wasn’t going to matter. At the end of the second half the score was already 3–2–0, and Catie knew that this was just an early indicator of the way the game would end. Already she had seen two goals which seemed to happen faster than any she had ever seen, situations where the balls had seemed almost to swerve on their way through the volume, as if the law of gravity had suddenly shifted in the spatball’s neighborhood, and the Slugs, even playing at their best as they plainly were, couldn’t cope. It was a lost cause, made more poignant because they just would not give up, would not play as if it was anything but a championship game. George had been right. They were playing out of their skins, out of their hearts, going for broke.

  He’s not the only hero out there, Catie thought as the horn went for the end of the second half.

  “It’s not over yet,” Hal was saying as the teams went out of the volume for their final break. “Only one more goal to draw—”

  Catie shook her head. “I know,” she said. She also knew that it wasn’t going to happen. But her mood was changing. Heroism was worth honoring, even if there wasn’t a win in prospect. Playing the game as if it mattered…that in itself, in a situation like this, was a win of sorts, though maybe not the kind that the world would recognize. Catie knew. George knew, too, and his team knew—