Death Match - Diane Duane [1]
ISBN: 1-101-01038-X
BERKLEY JAM BOOKS®
Berkley Jam Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the assistance of Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, John Helfers, Brittiany Koren, Lowell Bowen, Esq., Robert Youdelman, Esq., Danielle Forte, Esq., Dianne Jude and Tom Colgan, our editor. But most important, it is for you, our readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.
—TOM CLANCY AND STEVE PIECZENIK
1
The score was tied all around, it was four minutes until the end of the third half, and Catie Murray was sitting literally on the edge of her seat, her fists clenched, staring into the gamesphere. All around her, arranged in concentric, nested spheres, hanging in what seemed like floodlit darkness, were the virtual “seemings” of about fifty thousand other people. Most of them were yelling with excitement, though some of them were silent and rigid with tension, and to Catie’s amazement, one of these silent ones, sitting next to her, was her brother, Hal, whom she had last noticed being silent sometime in 2009, just before he started learning to talk.
The sphere was transparent, and of full tournament size—ninety meters in diameter. Away down at what was presently the red goal “end,” seventeen people were gathered, floating just outside of the safe zone, jostling one another gently as they jockeyed for the best positions or tried to steal a little impetus from one another. They wore shorts and socks and T-shirt “tunics” in their team colors. One group of six wore a truly astonishing lime green with a blue horizontal stripe, another group white with a red chevron, a third group yellow with a pair of black circles emblazoned on each shirt, front and back, like eyes.
Five of the team wearing yellow were currently floating in front of the red “end” zone, marked out in the space by a red hexagonal gridwork of holographic lines, as the other goals were by hexes of green and yellow, at 180 degree angles to this one. The sixth player in yellow was hanging in midair not too far from the wall of the transparent sphere, holding a fluorescent orange ball, slightly smaller than a soccer ball, in both hands. As Catie watched, he let go of it. It hung in the air in front of him, wobbling only slightly. There was a sudden slight burst of pushing and shoving from the players not dressed in yellow as they boosted themselves off one another and toward the man in the end zone—
In a flash the man bent himself almost double, it seemed to Catie, planted his feet against the wall, and hit the ball with his head. Despite the best efforts of all the players of the other teams, it somehow managed to squirt straight through them, though their arms and legs flailed out in an attempt to stop it. There was a roar of satisfaction from parts of the crowd, and much waving of yellow objects, some of them resembling giant inflatable bananas. Still using the impetus from his push, the player who had made the throwback went after it as his teammates also used the curve of the nearby walls to launch themselves in various directions, but not, Catie noticed, at the ball. The other teams were left to chase that for the moment—
“Where are they going?” she whispered. Her brother didn’t say a word. Catie glanced at him, but got no response. He was sitting there tensely crouched over with his arms folded, all his attention fixed on a spot around ninety degrees around the sphere from where the team captain had taken the ball out for the throwback. In the center of the sphere, players from all three teams were now tangled up in what to Catie looked like a rugby “scrum”—a shapeless-seeming mess