Death Match - Diane Duane [4]
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