Death Match

eliminated.”

The groaning turned into active booing as the remaining San Diego team members, their faces now twisted with anger or disappointment, spreadeagled or cannonballed themselves at the walls, to adhere, not to bounce, and made their way out of the access hex into the free space outside the sphere. “Resume play,” said the ref, taking herself out through the ref-hex again, and the count-up clock froze at 00:18:33, then zipped away and minimized itself into one of the display hexes scattered around the circumference of the sphere.

“Now we’re in for it,” Hal said, squirming a little in his seat. “Two-team game…”

Catie nodded, watching intently. In the regular season, play stopped and the game went by automatic forfeit to the highest-scoring team of the three when any one team dropped below minimum permitted strength, but this (as Hal had been crowing for the better part of a week) was no longer the regular season. This was the “shoulder season” during which weaker teams got shouldered out, and the number of stronger ones slowly started to reduce, preparing for the “high season” when only the best ones would be left. Looking into the sphere now, though, Catie began to suspect that she was presently looking at at least one of the best ones — and she started to see why her brother had been getting so excited about it lately.

In a flicker the goals had rearranged themselves into two-team configuration, one at each end, but even as they were reassigned to new hexes, they changed once more, mimicking the rotation of the volume as it would have shifted were this game actually being played in an orbital facility of the classic type. The computer managing the space snagged the virtual ball and slung it back into play along the same vector it had been following when the injury clock started running.

Green and Yellow players flung themselves at it from all sides, some impacting again into a central scrum, some jockeying around the sides of this for position, estimating or guessing where the ball would come out when the forces presently slamming into it from all sides finished their initial impacts. From outside the transparent sphere, cries of “Go, Slugs! Go, Slugs!” were getting deafening.

Can’t see a thing, Catie thought. Let’s try something different—

She clenched her jaw slightly and brought up the implant’s “heads-up display” for this environment, let the DISPLAY/EXPERIENCE menu scroll down past her eyes, and blinked at the choice that read PLAYER. A secondary menu now seemed to hang in the air in front of her, listing all the remaining players. Her eyes lit on the name at the top of the list, BRICKNER. She blinked at it—

— and suddenly Catie was in the middle of that scrum, and she was sweating like a pig, and someone was elbowing her hard in the ribs and someone else’s feet were pushing down on her head, and the whole world seemed to be made up of arms and legs and torsos straining against one another, like something out of one of Michelangelo’s nightmares. But she saw the opening in the tangled sculpture of flesh, the hands of someone else in her colors who had the ball; and she could see what they couldn’t, the opening that could be exploited to get it out of there. Two of the players who had been heading in the general direction of the Green goal were still outside this tight-packed pile of people, and she saw a flash of yellow go by outside, in the free space—

Her knee came up. Someone said “Oof!”—and in the slightly larger space made by that person’s body contracting, she fisted the ball down out of the hands of the White mid-forward who’d been clutching it, caught it from underneath, and with the leg she’d used to knee the other player, she down-footed the ball, stomping it out that little window of daylight and toward the flash of yellow that had gone by.

Catie swallowed with the other’s strain as the pressure of the people got fiercer all around him — and then the nature of the pressure changed, as everybody pushed off as hard as they could, trying to make use of the group’s mass and inertia for a good push before the group fragmented and became of less use for this purpose. Daylight opened up all around, but Brickner had eyes for only one piece of it, the piece where the ball had gone, and as the press lessened up around him and the other team went after the ball, his eyes tracked and caught on one particular figure, a slender little woman in yellow who caught the ball in an elbow-bend and flung it away—

Catie felt him swallow. Bad move, she started to think, for she couldn’t see anyone there to receive. But then another yellow T-shirt flashed in from the side, someone who had managed to get right out to an in-bounds part of the sphere and get a real good push, and the husky young guy hit the ball at full stretch with paired fists, a Superman strike, and yet managed to put enough spin on it so that it missed the White semiforward who was lunging for it. The lunge was a bad one, one of those I-remember-gravity moves that probably hit all but the most experienced spat-ball players every now and then — the sure sign of a body forgetting for a moment what was going on, and expecting mass to behave as if it were still in a one-gee field instead of microgravity. Beyond that semiforward, one of the other Yellow team members, a little broad-shouldered guy with a brushcut and a feral grin, was ready and waiting. The ball ricocheted off a knee that he seemed just to have left casually waiting there, except for the brutal force he put behind the knee-strike, enough to spin him where he hung. A second later the ball flew like a bullet at the illuminated White goal hex—

A shade too late. The goals precessed again, relocating themselves two hexes along. But Catie gasped as that ball flew straight at her, at the player whose experience she was sharing, and he hit it with his head, twisting his head as he did it, she could feel the muscles strain and feel the cramp hit him a second later, but he whipped his head around nonetheless to see the ball go straight across the sphere, through miraculously empty air, right toward the new location of the White goal, and hit it well inside the boundaries—

The roar of delight and triumph was deafening. The roar of blood in Brickner’s ears just about drowned it out, though, as the computer snagged the ball again and fired it back into the sphere’s inner volume from just outside the “scoring skin.” Catie gasped, trying to sort her own breathing out from his, as the score went to 4–3–3 in South Florida’s favor, and things started to get really frantic — for now the crowd had begun to count down the last minute of play.

Mostly when you were “riding” a player virtually via feedback from their implant, in this sport or any other, just about the only thing you couldn’t tell for sure was what the players were thinking. But sometimes you didn’t have to. Running in full virtual, you could see what they saw — especially one another’s eyes — and the opponents’ thought processes, at least, showed all too clearly. Every white-uniformed person that Catie saw, in the moments that followed, as the seconds slipped past, had a face which was wearing a terrible expression, a look that said, “I don’t believe it! We’re going to lose! I don’t believe it—” But disbelief alone wasn’t enough to help them. Play went on, and the White team regained possession and attacked the Yellow goal; but there was a scattered quality to the play, the forward lost the ball to a Yellow half-forward who came arrowing in on an unexpected vector and snagged it out of the air in mid-pass, between her feet.

The White team started to lose it after that. Some of them were already foundering in their own anger or astonishment, literally forgetting what to do with themselves. In spatball, reflexes are everything, and once a player is distracted, it can take time to get them back, but time was what there was less and less of, now, as the unforgiving minute became the unforgiving half-minute, as the truth sank in that there was no way to catch up, no way at all. And all their captain’s shouting at them could only reinforce what was happening, what should have been impossible and was happening anyway. They were going to lose—

“Nineteen!” Catie shouted, in time with a lot of the people in the “stands” around her, though her brother kept still and quiet, and just watched and watched, his attention absolutely riveted on the in-sphere volume. “Eighteen! Seventeen! Sixteen!” The crowd was roaring now, those of them who were in “empathy” with Brickner, seeing what he saw, feeling the abrupt adrenalin flush as he did, a physical thing, a sudden wave of fire in the lower back, the body echoing the mind’s realization, This is it!! The White team was coming at him all at once, a desperation move, crude at best, though possibly effective enough if it reached him in time, before he had time to act.

The half-forward threw herself into a spin, shot the ball at him like an arrow from a crossbow. And a second later Brickner felt the other push in his back, one of his team-mates impacting him at exactly the right moment, offering him for that split second before they “bounced” an opposing force to push against. Brickner rolled backward hard against his buddy’s back, kneed the ball as it came to him. It flew again at the White goal—

One of the White players rocketed toward the ball in stretched-out, linear configuration, trying to get there in time, but he didn’t have enough inertia to reach it, not having been able to push off soon enough, and his progress slowed, slowed more, he was going to come up short—

The orange ball slammed into the white-lit hex, and the score froze it, half-illuminated, in the very act of precessing.