Death Match - Diane Duane [3]
Sanderson hung there curled up like a poked caterpillar, gasping for breath. Muttering and the occasional sarcastic shout of “Aww!” came from the crowd, some of whom were plainly not convinced of how real the injury was…and they had reason, considering the venue in which this game was being played. But the ref soared over to Sanderson, kicked just hard enough off the wall to stop herself, and braced herself against the man. The two of them floated a little farther away from the wall with spare inertia. After a moment spent studying the hand interface she pulled out of her back pocket, and checking with the computer that monitored the vectors and forces expended against the wall, the ref said into the annunciator system, “Verified simulated injury, class-two fracture—”
A great moan of annoyance went up from about a third of the spectators. “Player withdrawn,” said the ref, “Sanderson, number eight. San Diego has fallen below six men and has no replacements left. San Diego is 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