Death Match - Diane Duane [5]
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.
The roars were making it impossible to hear anything, and when the ball impacted just inside the goal hex, there was no hearing even the usual earsplitting hoot of the scoring alert. It seemed only a few seconds more before the injury-time clock expired, and there was another howl of alarm meant to signify the end of the game, but it was completely lost in the collective howl of the crowd, frustration on two sides, absolute triumph in the third. Suddenly the volume was occupied by a scrum of another kind, one in which George Brickner was completely buried, and deafened by his own hollers of delight and those of his teammates. The world dissolved in yellow.
Catie took a deep breath and brought the menu back, selecting GENERAL and ANNOUNCER. The familiar dulcet voice of the Flyers’ home-game announcer was saying, “…astonishing comeback from three hexes down, just one more in a series of hairsbreadth saves for South Florida Spat, but a sad moment for San Diego fans, and also for the Seattle High Flyers, after a season that began with such promise but seemed to go rapidly downhill due to injuries and player-contract issues. Again the score, the San Diego Pumas three, the Seattle High Flyers three, and the new interregional title six champions, the South Florida Spatball Association, the ‘Banana Slugs,’ five—”
Catie blinked to kill her implant. Everything went white, but before she was allowed to shut the feed down completely, a sweet female voice said, “The