Death Match - Diane Duane [79]
“You going to let her get away with that?”
Darjan laughed. “It’s not vital. There are four other people being worked on in other cities. We’ve got other fish to fry, anyway. When they changed the schedule, everybody had to scurry to make sure that the mirror was working right. There’ll be some people pleased, anyway. The Slugs’ll be out of the running that much faster. How about your end of things? All the South Florida players’ servers taken care of?”
“All handled now.”
“Fine. Let’s go over all the other arrangements one last time.”
Heming laughed. “Always the perfectionist, huh, Armin?”
“Always,” Darjan said. “Just call me fond of keeping my skin in one piece.”
“They don’t pay you enough for the amount you worry,” Heming said.
“No,” said Darjan, “they don’t. Let’s start at the top….”
8
Despite Catie’s preferences, Thursday eventually came. The game was scheduled for nine P.M. Eastern time, and Catie went to her mom and dad to make sure that both the Net machines in the house were going to be available for her and Hal. But her mother and father already knew about the scheduling, and seemed surprised that she was bothering to ask.
“With all the coverage there’s been about this in the last couple of days, honey,” her mother said, “you know we wouldn’t deprive you!” She was unloading another pile of books onto the kitchen table, this batch, from the looks of it, was heavy on the classics again, but mostly sixteenth-and seventeenth-century French literature.
Catie sighed, picking up a copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel and paging through it. She hadn’t been looking at the spatball coverage. It made her heart ache to think of what was going to happen to South Florida tonight. Mostly she had been catching up on schoolwork and making the occasional chess move to match the two that George had made since she spoke to him last. But those were the only times she’d been online since then.
Her dad wandered through the kitchen then, holding a package. “Hon, what happened to my knife?”
“Your knife?”
“The one in the studio.”
Her mother went over to the dishwasher and pulled out a tired-looking plastic-handled steak knife, and handed it to her father. “I thought I would give it a scrub while its shape could still be made out somewhat under the paint,” she said.
“The dishwasher got it this clean?” her dad said, starting to work with the knife on the package he was carrying. “Amazing!”
“No, a hammer and chisel and elbow grease got the first inch of paint off it,” her mother said. “Hard work, not a miracle, paid off there. Catie, honey, did I tell you we talked to James Winters again?”
“Again?” Catie put the book down. “What did he want?”
“Just to thank us for letting you help,” her father said. “He thinks highly of you.”
Catie raised her eyebrows. “It’s nice to know,” she said.
Her father put the knife down on the table and started peeling open the package. “‘Nice to know’? Have you had a change of career goals all of a sudden?”
“Uh, no…I’m just tired.” She checked her watch.
“How long is that game, honey?” her mother said.
“About two hours or so, unless they go into overtime.”
“All right. As long as I can have one of the machines sometime before bed…”
“No problem.”
Nine o’clock came soon enough, and Catie took the machine in the family room. Hal took the one down the hall. In the Great Hall she paused to look over the chess-board for any new moves. There were none. “Space…”
“You know, you’re more beautiful every day.”
Catie looked up into the air with a cockeyed expression. “I think I liked it better when you were insulting me.”
“You’ll probably be sorry you said that in a few years. Was there something you wanted?”
“Friends-and-family space in the ISF spatball volume, please…”
A doorway appeared in the middle of the Great Hall. “Any messages waiting?” Catie said before she went through.
“Nothing, boss.”
“Okay. Flag me as busy for the next two hours.”
She slipped into the microgravity of the friends-and-family space and greeted some of the other team members’ relatives whom she knew slightly, then