THE ALL-PRO (9 page)

“Can we outrun pirates?” Quentin knew the Ki Fangs franchise had been wiped out by an explosion in 2667. Many speculated that was an accident, but plenty of people thought it was pirates. The New Rodina Astronauts had also suffered a disaster when the Purist Nation — Quentin’s own people — had caught the Astros team bus and executed all non-Human players.

“If we hit V
_max
, we can outrun just about anything,” Cheevers said. “But until we hit that speed, we’re vulnerable to smaller ships that can close in on us.”

“Like fighters?”

She paused, thinking, then nodded. “Those can be a big problem if they catch you close enough to a planet, but they need a bigger ship to support them. The real pirate problem comes from ships about a quarter the size of the
Touchback
. They have a low enough mass that they can accelerate fast and make a run, try to knock out the engines of a larger ship before the larger ship can accelerate away.”

Quentin thought back to his physics lessons with Kimberlin. Pirates weren’t that much of a threat these days, but
not much of a threat
was a far cry from
no threat at all
. He needed to learn all he could about this. As Michael said, it never hurt to have too much knowledge.

“How big is the
Touchback
, anyway?”

“He’s two hundred meters long and twenty-eight meters wide.”

“Meters? What’s that in feet?”

Captain Kate laughed and shook her head. “You never learned metric?”

Quentin shrugged. “I sort of know it. I just think of things in football terms, mostly. Yards and feet and inches.”

“A football field is one hundred yards, right?”

“One-twenty,” Quentin said. “Two ten-yard end zones, so one-twenty total.”

“Then think of the
Touchback
as two football fields, end-to-end. Got it?”

Quentin nodded.

“Eighteen decks,” she said. “Fourteen Semini-class P-22 impulse engines. He’s big, forty-two thousand GRTs.”

“What’s a GRT?”

“Gross register tons.”

“What’s a gross register ton?”

“If you can’t do
meters
, how about we skip the GRT explanation, okay?”

Her condescending tone annoyed him, but he nodded anyway. No, not
condescending
, more like ...
patronizing
. She didn’t think he was smart enough to handle all of this, but she also didn’t seem to think that was necessarily a bad thing.

“He’s also got nine quad guns,” she said. “Three of them are broken, but he’s still got enough to fend off most pirates.”

“Why do you keep calling the
Touchback
a
he
? I thought ships were thought of as girls. Women, I mean ... thought of as women.”

Kate shrugged. “People think of ships as the fairer sex. So, I think of them as male. Hey, you want to see the guns?”

Quentin had never seen actual ship weapons before. “Sure, yeah.”

“Come on, big boy,” she said. “Captain Kate will take you all kinds of new places.”

• • •

“HIGH ONE,” QUENTIN SAID.
“This is a
cannon
?”

Captain Cheevers nodded. They stood in a small, plain room. A four-foot by four-foot, flat-black platform rose a few inches from the metal deck. The walls were also black, the whole room lit up by a few overhead lights. The room didn’t look dirty, exactly — it just felt
unused
. Opposite the entry door, Quentin saw a long, horizontal crysteel port, about ten feet long but only a foot high. Through that port, out on the hull of the ship, he saw a long, armored shell, paint scratched by countless miles of interstellar travel. Beyond that, faded by distance, the far wall of the
Torvalds
.

“Welcome to Gun Cabin Six,” Kate said. She punched a three-digit code — 726 — into a keypad. The platform surface changed from a flat black to a glossy sheen. She stepped onto the four-by-four platform. She held her hands at chest level, palms down, fingers outstretched.

Quentin felt the deck vibrate, just a bit. Through the port, he saw the armored shell split down the middle and slide into recessed housing, revealing a lethal-looking, oblong gun-mount that ended in four barrels pointing away into the void. The barrels alone had to be ten feet long each. He’d never seen an active, ship-sized weapon before — that thing out there could destroy an entire shuttle and every sentient on it. The concept scared the crap out of him.

A holographic ball of light appeared in front of Captain Kate. Lines stretched up from it, out from it, and forward and back from it. Each line showed a regular series of hash marks.

“This is your X-Y-Z axis,” she said. “Each slash is a kilometer. You can zoom out ...”

She lifted her fingers so her hands were palm-out. The distance between the hash marks shortened. Quentin instantly saw the relation — the shorter the distance between the hash marks, the bigger the scale of the X-Y-Z display.

“ ... or you can zoom in.”

She turned her hands palms-in, fingers up. The hash marks started stretching away from each other, signifying the scale was closing in.

Captain Kate twisted at the hips, moving her hands to the right. The X-Y-Z display changed direction in time, as did the direction of the four cannon barrels.

“It points where you point,” she said.

“It doesn’t follow eye-tracking?”

“Human eyes flick around too fast,” she said. “Eye-tracking might work in a ground-based combat system, where you can sight a target as it’s flying, but things move too fast up here. You flick your eye for a split second, you’re wasting rounds. So it’s hand gestures with the computer auto-correcting.”

“How do you fire?”

She looked back at him and smiled. “You want to see me shoot the scary cannon, pretty boy?”

“Uh ... well, I don’t know.”

Wink-twitch. “It’s okay. I’m the Captain. We’re loaded with blanks for stress testing in dry dock, but you’ll get the idea.”

She turned back to face forward, leveled her hands, then clenched her left fist. The top two quad cannons roared, cones of smoke blowing out their rears. She clenched her right fist, and the bottom two barrels fired.

The deck vibrated in time with the shots, insinuating the cannon’s awesome power.

She paused, then made left-right-left-right fists, a
bam-bam-bam-bam
of vibration and smoke plumes. Had they been live rounds, aimed at a ship like his yacht, how bad would the damage be? Would sentients be dead?

Captain Kate again pointed her fingers out, hands palms-down, then slowly dropped them to her thighs. The gun turret fell still, then lowered. Kate stepped off the holoplate. She punched the three-number code into the keypad. The holoplate’s glossy light faded. Once again, it was just a flat-black piece of flooring.

She walked back to Quentin, smiling confidently.

“Did you like that? Did it scare you?”

“A little.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, “Captain Kate is here to take care of you. I’ll keep you safe.”

She was staring at him, smiling, but it wasn’t a friendly smile. He felt an urge to get out of this confined, secluded space.

He turned and walked to the door, talking over his shoulder so he could see her but didn’t have to make eye contact. “You just point and shoot? It seems so ... easy.”

Captain Kate nodded. “Sadly, killing usually is. Shooting is easy, anyway. Out in the void, things move fast. We would be shooting projectiles at objects moving at thousands of kilometers an hour, projectiles that themselves have to travel several kilometers to hit that moving target.”

“So why don’t computers handle it?”

She shook her head. “Computer-controlled weaponry is illegal. Creterakians rarely allow a ship to have defensive weaponry at all. Computer-controlled guns can hit just about anything, including Creterakian ships that might come to board us.”

“So if we do get attacked, who does the shooting?”

Captain Kate waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t worry your pretty head about that. The Krakens staff is trained to handle emergencies.”

Quentin thought of Messal the Efficient, tried to imagine the Quyth Worker firing the anti-spacecraft cannons. “Captain, are you sure? I mean, the guys and girls on the team, they have really great reaction time, and as for coordination, they—”

“Just worry about football,” Cheevers said, her tone still sweet but also a bit annoyed. “If it makes you feel better, the Quyth Warrior players man the guns. They’re experienced soldiers. We have things under control, Quentin. I have to get back to my duties, but if you have any other questions — or you want anything else — I’ll be in my cabin after ship-dusk.”

Something about her smile, again it made him uncomfortable. Quentin wondered if he would ever get used to all of these women who were so different from what he’d known back in the Purist Nation.

“Thanks, Captain Cheevers.”

“Call me Kate,” she said. Wink-twitch. “But only when no one is around.”

“Uh ... okay, Kate. Thanks again.”

Quentin turned and walked off, as quickly as he could without running.

HOW MUCH FOOTBALL
had he watched in the past six months? Too much. Too much experiencing what others did, not enough doing it himself. He had played three seasons in a row, from his Tier Three campaign with the Raiders to the Tier Two season with the Krakens, then straight into Tier One. After all of that, he’d thought he
wanted
time off.

His body had healed up within a month. That left five months of his body screaming at him to
find a game
, to
run
, to
throw
, to
hit
. That itch could not be scratched. He’d had to wait.

But the wait was almost over.

Quentin Barnes sat in a luxury box in Earth’s Hudson Bay Stadium, watching two teams that would be his competition in just a few more weeks. The T2 Tourney championship game — Orbiting Death versus the Texas Earthlings. Win or lose, both of these teams were on their way to Tier One.

No teammates with him this time, no coach. He watched alone.

A year ago, he’d played in this same tournament, leading the Krakens to the semi-final win that put them into Tier One. The Krakens had finished 9-2 that year, winning the Quyth Irradiated Conference en route to their promotion to the big-time.

Quentin watched the Orbiting Death quarterback drop back. Condor Adrienne. Before Death owner Anna Villani signed him, Condor had been with the Whitok Pioneers, another team in the Quyth Irradiated. People had said Condor was better than Quentin. Most people still did.

But this season, Quentin would show everyone who was the best of the best.

Adrienne stood tall in the pocket, his flat-black uniform and metalflake-red helmet making him look like a perfectly posed actor on a movie poster. He calmly waited as a blitzing linebacker rushed in. Quentin recognized the linebacker — Alonzo Castro, whom Quentin had battled with in last year’s T2 Tourney.

Adrienne looked like a sitting duck, but an effortless step forward left the diving Castro grabbing only empty air. Adrienne fired the ball far downfield, where Coalville hauled it in. Touchdown. Just like that, the Death was up 7-0.

Adrienne might stay in for the first quarter, but after that he’d sit to make sure he didn’t suffer an injury that might impact his Tier One season. The Earthlings would replace the demoted Chillich Spider-Bears in the Solar Division. Quentin would only face them if both Texas and Ionath made it to the Galaxy Bowl — highly unlikely. The OS1 Orbiting Death, on the other hand, had replaced the Mars Planets. That put the Death in the Solar Division, the same as Ionath — the two teams would face off in Week Six.

In last season’s Tier One campaign, the Krakens had scraped by with a 4-8 record, needing to win their last two games just to stay in Tier One.

Four and eight.

As a seventeen-year-old rookie in the Purist Nation Football League, Quentin had led his team to a 5-4 record. He’d gone undefeated the next two seasons, 22-0 and winning a pair of PNFL Championships. The season after that, the Krakens went 9-2. Then last year,
4-8
.

His first losing season.

His
last
losing season.

Never again would the Krakens be on the bottom of the table looking up. Never again.

Quentin concentrated on watching the Orbiting Death defense. He’d line up against these very players in Week Six. His brain cataloged thousands of bits of information about his future opponents.

He watched one player in particular — middle linebacker Yalla the Biter.

Yalla the Biter, who two seasons ago had maimed Krakens running back Paul Pierson. Yalla the Biter, who had torn open Quentin’s hand and spilled his blood all over the field.

Quentin had payback planned for that player, oh yes he did.

Come and play. I’ll be waiting.

Transcript from the “Galaxy’s Greatest Sports Show with Dan, Akbar, and Tarat the Smasher”

DAN:
Welcome back, sports fans! Dan Gianni here once again to anchor the Galaxy’s Greatest Sports Show, along with Akbar Smith and the legendary Hall-of-Fame linebacker known as Tarat the Smasher.

AKBAR:
Thanks, Dan.

TARAT:
Yes, Dan, thank you for such a kind intro.

DAN:
Guys, it’s our favorite time of the year.

AKBAR:
Giving day?

TARAT:
The Feast of Bugs?

DAN:
You
know
what time of the year it is. Today is the first day of Tier One preseason. Teams have reported to training camp.