Death Match

“If you painted the words scared and upset on your forehead, it might just give me a clearer hint,” Catie said, “but only just. George, what’s the matter?”

He sighed.

“Pressure’s piling up, huh…?”

“Not just pressure.” George leaned back and looked at Catie and let out another breath. “More than that. Something worse.”

Catie sat and waited, and didn’t say anything.

“Well, I mentioned to you that we had an invigilator call up, didn’t I? That was Karen de Beer.”

“Yes?” Catie said.

“Well, she was invigilating a non-ISF server game. You can’t use the noncertified servers for tournament play, but a lot of teams have licensed the server software from the ISF for use in their informal or ‘fantasy’ play. Though the servers aren’t used for formal tournament play, the ISF sanctions their use in ‘fantasy’ tournaments and informal regionals. Karen went off to invigilate at a game between Denver and Flagstaff, and…” He trailed off.

“And what?”

George was looking even more uncomfortable. “Catie…I really shouldn’t be telling anyone this.”

She opened her mouth to say “Then don’t tell me,” and then closed it. Catie got up, went over to the chessboard for a moment, picked up one of her knights, and moved it to threaten one of George’s front-rank pawns.

For a long moment George sat there, saying nothing. Then he looked up at the dome of the Great Hall and said, “I trust you, Catie. And I don’t know who else to tell…. Some guy came to the door of Karen’s apartment this morning. He said he liked the way she’d handled the game at Denver…and he wanted to know, did she want to make some extra money.”

“Doing what?” Catie said, sitting down again.

He looked at her with an expression that seemed to say, Can’t you guess? “He said he represented some people who wanted Karen to invigilate spat games that they were going to be running out of another server, a private server that his people were going to be setting up. Now, this kind of thing happens…but never outside of the auspices of the ISF. The Federation publishes a list of non-tournament servers that have been inspected by them and passed for use by ISF member teams and team-candidates, spatball groups that are still serving their qualification period. Federation members don’t do invigilation work outside of the ‘passed’ servers; at least, not if they want to stay in the Federation.”

George got up and walked around the chessboard, looking at it. “It’s tricky business, invigilating a spat space,” he said, not looking at Catie. “Besides consulting with the referee before and during the game, you have to make sure that all the parameters for temperature and air density and rotation and friction and elastic collisions and so forth are set correctly in the software, and that they stay that way — that play, or hardware or code errors, which turn up sometimes, don’t alter them, so that play stays fair. There are about fifty sets of parameters that have to be managed during the course of a match, and you have to watch them all, all the time, and be ready to alter them if the computer messes them up. It’s real easy to handle a space incorrectly, get things wrong, if you don’t have enough experience. More…if you are experienced…it would be easy enough to set the parameters wrong on purpose. Or to let other people see how it could be done.”

“And Karen thought they wanted her to do something like that.”

“That, or something similar.” George breathed out, went around to his king’s knight and picked it up, walked out onto the board and set it down. The notation window flickered and said K-KB3. “The guy named a figure…said Karen could start any time.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she’d think about it. She told me yesterday that she was still thinking about it. She works in a convenience store, Catie. The figure was about three times her year’s salary. And she’s by herself, don’t forget, and she has a little girl to support.”

“I don’t suppose he left her a Net address,” Catie said.

“He said he’d come back in a few days and see what she had to say.” George looked at his move as if he was most dissatisfied with it. “He told her not to mention it to anyone, or there could be trouble. She told me…and now she’s scared. But she would have been scared even if she hadn’t told me, she said. And she’s scared for her little girl, too, for Carmen. Karen’s not stupid. She knows trouble when she sees it. She temporized…out of shock, I think. She was never in any doubt that she wanted nothing to do with the offer. But now she’s afraid of what the guy might say if she tells him no.”

Catie swallowed. This was something that James Winters was definitely going to need to hear about. As long as no one notices them contacting her… But naturally Net Force would have ways to do that discreetly.

She swallowed again. “I don’t suppose that anyone else on the team’s had anyone approach them that way,” Catie said.

George shook his head. “If they have, I haven’t heard about it. Got another move?” he said.

“I’m thinking about it.” But strategizing her next move was actually buried behind four or five other, more immediate concerns at the moment.

When she looked up, she found George looking at her again. It was another of those distressed expressions, though this time he was at least trying to hide it. To Catie, the effect was simply as if he now had NOT REALLY UPSET painted on his forehead…and suddenly she knew what the problem was, or thought she did.

“Look, I—”

“George,” Catie said, sounding extremely severe and for the moment not caring, “it’s not like that. You think you have a monopoly on ‘not married, not dating, not gay, and no plans’?”

He just kept looking at her. Then he sagged. “Uh,” he said, “maybe I’m doing you an injustice. It’s just that it’s rare…and seems to be getting rarer…to find friendship, in my situation. Just plain friendship. Sorry.”

“Well,” Catie said, and let it sink in for a moment. “All right. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Tomorrow morning is the draw. The play-offs will start on Thursday at the soonest, maybe Friday. Karen’s going to have to do something. I’ve got to find a way to protect my team….”

“If there’s anything I can do to help,” Catie said after a moment, “let me know.”

George got up slowly, looking down at the chessboard again.

“Call me when you have a move,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

And he went through the door that had been standing waiting for him off to one side, in the air, and it closed behind him.

Catie sat very still for some while, considering possible moves in two very different games.

6

She took the predictable amount of teasing about being late for dinner, and Hal punished her for this slight on her father’s cooking by the most straightforward means possible — eating most of the lasagna and leaving Catie just enough for one serving, and nothing at all for seconds.

When she complained, her father threw his hands up. “It’s all I could do to get him to leave the pattern on the plates,” he said. “At least there’s some sauce left. Make some pasta.”

Normally a turn of events like this would have left Catie furious. Tonight, though, she simply made pasta, completely confusing Hal, who had been expecting — looking forward to, in fact — a far more explosive response. When Catie finished gobbling up her pasta and went straight back into the family room to use the Net machine, she heard Hal saying under his breath to her father, “You think she’s coming down with something?”

She ignored him, got straight back into her workspace, and got back to work reviewing Caldera. Several hours passed, at the end of which her brain was buzzing with commands and obscure syntaxes that she had never thought she’d need any time soon.

But I need them now, she thought, getting up out of the Comfy Chair at last and picking up, from the floor beside the chair where she had left it, Mark’s shining green key.

She pulled down a window to check the schedule he had sent her of the maintenance schedule for the ISF