Tournament games are held on League fields in open space, far from planets, politics, influence, and menacing fleets. No locals to intimidate spaceball players and sway the gambling too far in any one direction. People tend to be more liberal with their money if they think the game isn’t fixed.
Remote locations also promote safety. Interstellar travel is all routed through the Gates. All Gate traffic is monitored and it’s easy to tell what sort of ships are in each sector and what kind of mischief one might expect on any given day. Granted, you have to still protect yourself from assassins, but you can rest assured that the assassins won’t be piloting capital cruisers when they run you down. It gives everybody a bit of breathing room and it’s supposed to encourage calm.
Unfortunately, my team is full of killers. Oh, you can argue that every spaceball player is a potential killer given the dangers of the game, but my people kill other people outside of spaceball games. They do it on purpose and may even do so for sport. It’s one thing to imagine that the team you’re facing might be deadly, but it’s quite another for it to be publicly known that they are deadly. And now they’re looking at you on the other side of a spaceball in the same manner that predators regard small critters – you’re too small for a satisfying meal, but they’re hungry enough to make an exception.
Pylons mark the edges of the field and serve as beacons in case any player goes out of bounds. Not so the game can halt, but so that the dozen or so medevac shuttles littered around the field have a starting point for their search and rescues.
Hundreds of camera bots hover over the field and record everything. The League AI splices the footage into meaningful stories for each play, lists the players and their stats for the fantasy spaceball leagues, and compiles all the quick replays from the great angles. All told, this creates more than twelve standard years of footage for every game. I’ve seen time travel. It’s the Spaceball League Game Day Broadcast.
But let’s be clear on one important point. All the cameras, all the angles, all the slow-motion shots – it’s not to help spectators. It’s to spot cheaters. Because if you’ve got your own secret AI that watches the referees and sees what things they’re looking at, you can infer what things they’re not looking at – and if one of those things is a player in a suit with adaptive camouflage mimicking the paint and lighting scheme of the opposing team, the referees won’t catch you switching sides long enough to fake the quarterback into throwing an interception. The cameras popped up back in 2741, after somebody with a guilty conscience tipped off the League that the Gikathka Stormblades used the technique to win the Cup. When the new camera setup appeared at the start of the following season and caught them red-handed, the League banned the Stormblades and struck their wins from the records. The Gikathkas are still trying to live it down. Calling anyone a Stormblade is synonymous with “a dirty cheater who’d sell his own mother just to get half a graham cracker.”
We arrive at the field after the scouts report back that all’s clear. When you’ve got as much money tied up in suits as us, scouts are a prudent measure. Even though Gates are two-way, you have to go around to the other side to travel back the way you came. It makes for a long trip when someone’s shooting at you. I don’t know what happens to ships that try to go back through the same event horizon they arrived through. The Edochians are tight-lipped about it. I just know they don’t come back.
It’s precisely this reason that we didn’t come in the Hercules. It’s too slow, doesn’t turn worth a damn, and doesn’t stand up very well to incoming attacks. We used the Blood Suns’ team bus instead. If a commercial freighter converted into a blockade runner counts as a bus, that is. Someone had found the time since last night to acquire the ship, paint it the same matte black as the suits, and put a huge starburst with a bloody handprint right on the nose of the crew compartment. Jager said he found the freighter somewhere and I don’t feel like asking. Well, I do feel like asking, just not him.
I like team buses. Everybody rides together. No special compartments for star players. If we win, there’s a party. If we lose, there’s teambuilding. It occurs to me that if we lose because of a player’s mistake, the teambuilding here might involve murder.
The mood in the crew compartment is expectant. I’m feeling the same way. Though they probably don’t want to know what I’m expecting, because then I might be the one to get murdered. I’m expecting to lose.
“Hey, Coach?” a voice rings out. I didn’t recognize it.
I unbuckle from my chair next to Bucky and stand up. “Yeah?” I ask the upraised hand six rows back. “Who’re you?”
“Huck Fitzberg, wide receiver. Do you know who we’re playing today?”
“Joomit Clan, you dumbass,” someone snorts. “How do you not know who we’re playing?”
“I know that,” Huck said. “Do you know what they’re good at? How do they suck?”
This is why pirates make such good spaceball players. They want to know what strengths to avoid and which weaknesses they can exploit to get their job done as fast as possible. Before today, that was to commit atrocities on the intergalactic shipping community. Today, it will be on the intergalactic spaceball community. “The Joomits are a sixth-generation family of spaceball players,” I say. “They’re really tight with each other.”
A rumble of chuckles and snorts.
“Yes, I’m sure the discussions on the ACS will be colorful. That also means that they know each other really, really well. They’re a more tight-knit team than you. They know their plays cold. They know what to do when the game goes sideways. They’re really good at passing the ball to more than one person to advance down the field. You might think you’re in the middle of run play, when they change it on you and throw it.”
“What do they suck at?” Fitzberg asks.
“Besides each other,” someone says.
I wait until the laughing subsides. “Their quarterback is weak. Old and a bit slow. Great arm and accurate. But takes a while to throw the ball. We’ll pressure their offensive line and create opportunity. He won’t throw a lot of interceptions, but we’ll force turnovers on downs because of incomplete passes.”
“What about their defense?”
“The Joomits think they’ve seen everything in League ball. In some sense they have. But they’ve never seen you. You’ll get a couple of games where people will be scared to death of you, but that will wear off. Not today, though. One of your best weapons today will be the ACS. Rattle them and we’ll see if we can grab any plays from that. Your suits are the best in the League. Your quarterback will not miss. The bees are going to be all over us, so we’ll have to catch the breaks as they come.”
“So, scare the shit outta them and blitz their quarterback. We can handle that.”
I nod and sit back down. I hear the team suggest insults and threats of unmentionable harm to the Joomits. Amping themselves up. Good. Makes for a bigger crash. The Joomits are a tired, broken-down team with aging hardware and a quarterback who’s rumored to take naps in his suit. They’re still a better team on their worst day than the Blood Suns. That will change after today’s game. Well, hopefully. Otherwise, I’ve grossly overestimated our chances.
“Nice speech,” Bucky says to me.
“Thanks.”
“Think they know what’s about to happen to them?”
“Not in a million years.”
***
Everybody’s got a pre-game ritual. Some pray. Others call their moms. I’ve seen one player drink a gut-curdling concoction of raw eggs, whiskey, and cat milk. I used to be a fan of the pre-game blowjobs, but I lost my arm the last time. I’m down on that activity as a whole. Trauma runs deep.
Today I started a new ritual of getting into a suit. I swore I’d never step foot in one again, but with my team watching me and my partially-estranged wife egging me on and telling me to stop being such a fucking pussy, well – there isn’t a whole lot a man can do but to say yes at that point.
“You sure it isn’t going to try to fix me?” I ask Laura for the fifth time. I’m still outside the suit. The rest of the team gave up watching and were busy donning their armor. I’m relieved I’m no longer the center of attention. I hate that. I know, you’re thinking I’m the coach. I must love being the center of things, telling everyone what to do. I like to make sure that things go right, sure, but I’ve never been a glory hound. People say glory lasts forever. They're wrong. It’s infamy that nobody forgets.
“Nothing can fix you,” Laura says. “You’re terminally broken.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Stop being such a baby and get in. I’ve got a shitload of work to do and you’re holding me up. You do remember how to put one of these on, don’t you?”
“Of course, I know,” I say. “It’s just the last time I was in one of these, I came back in pieces.”
“You’re going to go into it in pieces if you don’t get your ass in gear.”
“I’ll get in if you kiss me.”
“It’s going to be a kick in the nuts if you don’t get in.”
She says it with a smile, so I know she’s kidding. At least, I think she’s kidding. I don’t want to test the theory, though. I clamber into the suit. It’s cold against my softsuit but otherwise very comfortable. Military grade. Used to be, military grade meant functional and comfort be damned. Someone discovered that soldiers perform better when concentrating on the enemy, and not how their armor pinches them in their tender bits.
The back of the suit closes with a low whirr and the hiss of pressurized air. I feel the vibration of the reactor spin up. The heads-up display jacks into my ocular implants and then the room appears as if the helmet were transparent. Diagnostic information that I never read scrolls by and targeting data – targeting data? – flickers whenever I look at someone.
“Are you okay in there?” Laura asks. The electronic sound amplifier distorts her voice.
“I’m fine, thanks for asking. Why is this suit showing me your heart rate and the three best places to cause hemorrhagic trauma?”
“Because some of these suits were diverted from the Fleet armories,” she says. “You got one that was pre-loaded for riot and crowd control.”
“Eviscerating civilians is considered crowd control?”
“It is when the civvies-to-suit ratio is 10,000:1. Everyone else is set. You ready to drop?”
“All boards green.”
“Good luck, Rick.”
“Hey, than—”
She ejects me out of the suit tube into open space. Shooting out of artificial gravity into weightlessness makes my stomach do a lurch-clench-almost throw up dance. I grit my teeth and think of boobs. Breasts are the universal mental reset buttons. Bounce, bounce.
The Joomits are already on the field. My HUD indicates that the rest of my team have dropped, so I lead them over to our side of the field. Bucky and Jager organize them for action while I study the other team’s armor. My implants allow me to zoom in close to see their markings and configurations. Still the old Solarum suits. Lots of patchwork on the armor. Old suits meant not much money flowing. The Joomits had hit hard times. Wars do that to everybody except the gun runners.
I notice they’ve written something on their suits. Names. Different names on different suits, Every Joomit has at least five painted on their breastplates, along with the word Babykillers. An invisible hand grips my stomach. I do a Net search on a name at random and grab the first headline. “Billy Joomit, age 6, died today alongside his parents when the Black Goose was hijacked in the Hades Cluster…”
Oh, fuck. Oh, FUCK. I flip on the ASC, team only. The kiddies are already talking. They’d seen the suits, too.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Hey, I remember this one, the Vanguard,” someone says. “That ship was carrying some juicy medical supplies without any escorts. Just begging to get jacked.”
“Hey, Carter, do you remember Jiri Joomit? On the Bellweather? It’s ringin’ bells, haha.”
“I know that one, sure,” another voice says. “Some little tyke running around on the ship. Knew all the boltholes. Took us hours to root her out. Her parents were more interested in the guns they were running than keeping their daughter alive. The kid is a rising star in our clan, now.”
“Ha! I know that name! Finley! Finley! Search on this name, Gerald Joomit! You get it?”
“Oh, my mom’s teats,” a voice presumably belonging to Finley says. “Are you shittin’ me? That asshole tried to shoot at me with a fuckin’ harpoon! A real live harpoon! Who does that shit?”
“What’d you do to him?”
“Shot him in his fucking nuts with his own goddamn harpoon, is what I did.”
There are stories for all the names, all the ships. I turn the ASC to broadband and sure enough, the Joomits are listening – and pissed.
“Those were our family!”
“You killed them, you fucking bastards!”
“They were on their honeymoon!”
“My children! My poor children!”
“You’ll pay! You’ll pay!”
I turn off the ASC so I can concentrate. It’s not that I don’t sympathize with the Joomits, I do. I’m not a total degenerate. But space travel is dangerous, and from what I’ve just heard on my own team’s ASC, many Joomits are smugglers. If the Joomits think their graffiti stunt is going to get a reaction in their favor, then the inbreeding has taken hold and done significant brain damage.
***
The head referee flies over to me. “Coach Stern, I expect a clean game today.”
I squint and my helmet’s visual filters automatically reduce the glare shining from the blinking black-yellow stripes. Referees are clearly visible at five kilometers. I’m only ten meters away. I feel like a tiny creature looking upon some twisted ancient god that gnaws upon souls. Okay, so maybe I still have some issues to work through.
“I’ll play fair if you play fair,” I say.
“I am aware of the circumstances of your suspension. I am aware of how many bribes were placed to have that suspension lifted. I am aware that your team is comprised of many wanted criminals, and of how many more bribes were placed to keep them from being arrested.”
I really wish we could dispense with organic referees, when the field AI does the job much better. They tried that and people hated it. Fighting with organic referees makes for better drama. I still hate it. “If you’d like to arrest them, go right ahead. I’d pay to watch that.” This could go on for a while, and I don’t feel like fencing with this dickhead. “Did you have anything else you wanted to get off your chest? We came here to play.”
“We are watching you today, Coach Stern.”
“Very good.”
He buzzes off. Asshole.
***
We still have coin tosses in the 29th century, but it’s not a real coin and it’s not even a toss. It’s a 10-centimeter silver box called the Quantum Coin Randomizer. I have no idea how it works. I don’t even like being near the thing. A techhead once famously remarked that since the coins are in many places at the same time, there’s no guarantee that at any given moment, somebody isn’t touching them and fooling with their randomness. I hate that. Who can think straight trying to wrap their brain around something like that? So, I try to believe that it’s still random and somebody somewhere doesn’t have their grubby mitts on my shit.
We lose the fake coin toss and have to kick.
***
Dexter Cribbens puts the ball just outside the Joomit’s endzone. God, that kid is good. A Joomit flies over and scoops up the ball and doesn’t make it 100 meters before getting clobbered. Great field position for us.
***
Watching Bucky work is like watching somebody hump air. He tells his defensive line to fuck the quarterback and emphasizing each “fuck” with an angry hip thrust. I don’t know if Bucky has angry sex, but he’d be a master because he gets a lot of practice at spaceball games.
The Blood Suns continue to taunt the Joomits on the ASC. The Joomits get false start penalties right off the bat and push their quarterback into their own endzone. Four players jump the line of scrimmage and try to grapple our defenders.
After the play is dead a single Joomit floats away. At least he’s in one piece. A medevac swoops in and slurps him up. Standard practice is to slurp first and ask questions later. The extent of the damage is rarely known and it takes many precious seconds to find out, so medevacs zooms in and sucks the player into a small bay filled with nanogel.
If there’s a suit breach, then the trillions of microscopic robots in the gel get in and start to work immediately. But if the suit hasn’t been compromised it gets a little tricky. Some of the nanobots within the gel are tasked with removing the suit as fast as possible. If no communication can be established with the player, fast as possible used to mean absorbing the suit itself. Spaceball team finance managers complained a lot. Destroying a suit every time someone gets hurt is expensive. Nowadays, the nanobots tunnel through a special entry point to gain access to the player. This process takes ten seconds. Sure, the player might die in those extra seven seconds, but replacement humans are much less expensive than spaceball suits.
Back before there was nanogel, the suits actually allowed external radio commands. Activate the emergency release clamps and the suit fractures apart at the seams. It was a nightmare. Whole cottage industries sprung up around hacking into suits and causing an emergency clamp release in the middle of a game. Not the case anymore, though. Once you step into a suit, you are your own sovereign nation. Nobody is getting in unless you say so – except for the tiny buggers in nanogel who have a secret access hatch in the basement.
The medevac flies over to the sidelines so as to not impede the game. There used to be injury timeouts, but we’re too busy crushing each other to pause while the crippled and maimed are carried away.
I’m not sure what happened to the guy, though, and neither do the bees. They flit about but don’t sting anyone. The game resumes. Two more false start penalties in a row from the Joomits. Another immobilized player slurped up. They call a timeout.
***
“Bucky,” I say on the Coach’s Comlink, or the CC, a special secure channel between myself and someone else on my team. This isn’t something I’m broadcasting on the ASC.
“What?”
“What are your guys doing to the Joomits?”
“How do you know we’re doing anything?”
“Don’t be cagey, you suck at it. I can see the field AI repositioning its cameras around the defensive line. Something’s going on and I’d like to know what it is.”
“It’s no big deal.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“Here, I’ll let you talk to Carter, he can explain it better than I can. He and his twin sister Samantha are the ones who flew between the mines on the–”
“I know who they are, Bucky.”
“Oh. Well, he can tell to you.” Bucky keys in Carter’s suit to the conversation. “Carter, this is Bucky. Coach is on the line, and he wants to know what’s going on with the Joomits.”
“Hey, Coach, how you like us so far?”
“I like you a lot, but we’re two plays in and you’ve already got the field reconfiguring its eyes to better see what you’re doing. What happened to those two floaters?”
“Um, is this channel secure?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Well, it’s sort of a family secret. But we’re family now, so I can tell you.”
I’m not sure if I should be flattered or frightened. A little of both, maybe. “Go on.”
“It’s those Solarum suits. The Blacksilver clan used to play in them, too, until my grandfather figured out how to crack the encryption on the reactor shielding protocols.”
I realize what he’s saying. “Holy shit.”
“Yeah, holy shit is right. Drop the reactor shielding for even half a second, and the reactor will scramble.”
“And those Solarum suits have that old problem where they’ll get stuck in recover mode after a reactor shielding failure,” Bucky says. “No reactor shields at all. The player is perfectly healthy in the suit, but they’re helpless until they restart their reactor.”
I chuckle. “Which nobody in their right mind does unless they want all sorts of cancer. The Solarum suits don’t have any backup shield generators that turn on before the reactor does. Nice.”
“It doesn’t work all the time, though,” Carter says. “You have to get in real close, and you have to catch the shield frequency rotation at just the right moment. My daddy was the master at it, and he taught me everything I know.”
“Thank your dad for me the next time you see him, Carter.”
“Hopefully it won’t be for awhile yet, Coach.”
“Why’s that?”
“Dead.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry,” Carter says, “I’m the one who made him that way. No need to feel awkward.”
“That makes it worse.”
***
The Joomits calm down after their timeout. I’m sure the family patriarch had done one of his booming sermons and brought them all to heel. I've listened to those sermons before. His speeches are in the Spaceball League History Archive, where everything spaceball is recorded for history, cultural education, and team espionage. The Joomit patriarch, a fat man named Quentin, is a regular old gasbag with a beard that looks more at home on a hedge than a human being. It takes a lot of grooming to pull off a long beard without looking like a crazy person. The Joomits don’t do a lot of grooming. Quentin’s word is law within the Joomit clan, and whatever he said to them settles down the Joomit players. No more false starts.
They start off their series with a couple of running plays to get back the ground they lost due to the penalties. Then they throw their first pass of the game.
Crazy Eddie reaches up and intercepts the ball.
Maybe Eddie actually can teleport. He tucks the ball under his arm.
Three Blood Suns form a wedge in front of him and they take off up along the sideline.
The Joomits are out of position!
Eddie gets to the 150 meter line. 100 meters. 75 meters!
Two Joomits hurtle in from the backfield. One of them mistimes the intercept and overshoots. The other crashes into the wedge, but Eddie sees it and sails up and over and into the endzone.
TOUCHDOWN!
***
“Jager,” I ask after Cribbens kicks another extra point, “have these guys been practicing when I wasn’t looking?”
“Explain,” he says.
“Well, our players all come from different clans. I didn’t think they’d work all that well together in the first game.”
He laughs. “You expected them to lose, didn’t you?”
“Well, yeah. It always happens with a green team, and it either makes ‘em or breaks ‘em. I figured it would be the glue that would bind our guys together.”
“Unnecessary,” Jager says. “We are brothers and sisters now. One failure is a failure for all.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean, some of the different clans hate each other. I didn’t think our players would work together well at first.”
“The camps,” Jager says.
“What camps?”
“All children from all clans are sent to the camps. We teach them how to work as a team. Even if their clans are feuding. Especially if their clans are feuding. They play spaceball. They live with each other, eat with each other, and learn with each other. We know that some of them will die. Some new feuds start between clans because of the camps. Those incidents are few. A greater number return with a better appreciation of both the game and each other. Those camps are responsible for the teamwork you see today.”
If I could jump up and down inside a spaceball suit, I’d do it right now. Spaceball training camps! Holy shit! Holy fucking shit! It was the best news I’d gotten since Laura agreed to help with the suits. I suddenly see a bright light at the end of the tunnel.
“Just so you know, Jager, I’m having a hard time expressing how excited I am right now. How come nobody knows about this?”
“Everyone thinks we are born pirates, that our young ones earn their wings fighting other children to the death in dirty spike-ringed pits. We encourage this view. It helps strike fear into the hearts of our enemies. If everyone knew about our camps, it would be harder, and prey would fight back more. I would appreciate it if you would keep this information to yourself.”
“Are you kidding me? I’m not going to blabber this around and let other coaches know there’s an untapped pool of trained spaceball players on the Rim. I’ll keep you all to myself, thank you very much.”
***
Cribbens kicks another perfect shot, and the Joomits return it 300 meters. They’re all business now, but their quarterback seems hesitant to throw. I would be, too, if I knew Crazy Eddie were out there somewhere. They don’t get very far on the ground and have to punt after a three and out.
One of the Mine Twins receives the kick at our 300 meter line and starts zipping back up the field. He bobs and weaves around two tackles before getting swarmed at midfield.
Our offensive line goes onto the field for the first time in the game. It’s also the first time everybody sees Kissy’s armor.
She’s naked and the same matte black as the regular suits. Wild white tattoos snake up her arms and legs and writhe across her abdomen. She’s bigger, a full head taller than the suit armor, and perfectly formed like an Amazon warrior. Where the other suits are angular with hard edges, Kissy is smooth and curvy. Her eyes glow red, her hair is a wild shock of coppery curls, and the suit vents on her back make her look like she has faint reddish wings. Her whole form oozes malevolence.
“Do you like it?” Laura asks on the CC.
“Like it? I want to hump your leg. Laura, she looks like a succubus queen. Who’s idea was this?”
“Kissy and I came up with it after the naming. I wanted it to be a surprise.”
“Well, count me surprised. Let’s see what everyone else thinks.” I keyed us in the ASC. The Joomits are duly impressed.
“What is that?”
“Is that legal?”
“She looks amazing!”
“Look at those perfect tits!”
“I’d like to show her a thing a two about my spaceballs.”
The Blood Suns don’t let them get far, though.
“Yeah, like your balls are big enough to see without a microscope.”
“Or your courage, that’s pretty insignificant, too.”
“Speaking of extremely small, can you even tell when you get a hardon?”
“Maybe they have tiny women to go along with their tiny wieners.”
I leave them to it and got on a new secure channel with my quarterback.
“Kissy,” I say.
“Yes?”
“You look incredible.”
“So, do you want to have sex with me now?”
“You look like a demon, Kissy.”
“So no, then. Hmph. Some people are into that.”
I laugh. “Good luck out there, Kissy.”
“Thanks, Coach.”
***
Kissy takes the snap and drops back into the pocket. The Blood Suns have worked together before today and it shows. Kissy takes all the time in the world and then drills it straight down the field. The ball doesn’t even arc. She connects with a receiver – Fuckhead #2 – on the 100-meter line and the impact of the spaceball propels him straight into the endzone.
TOUCHDOWN!
***
The Joomits never had a chance. We crush them, 46-3. They manage a desperate 400-meter field goal, and that’s it. The game win party back at the KornerStone in Freehaven is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Pirates really know how to throw down. There’s booze and wrestling. Kissy changes out of her battle exosuit but she’s still naked. She’s with a bunch of her Pleasure Palace colleagues and there’s an old-fashioned orgy going on at the other end of the room.
I sit at the bar with Laura. Bucky and Janine are slow dancing nearby, at completely the wrong tempo for the music. They don’t seem to care.
Jager is nowhere to be seen. Maybe he has his own post-game ritual that involves adding more teeth to that necklace of his. The more I think about it, the more I don’t want to know.
I’ve got a buzz and I’m feeling good. I lean over to Laura’s ear and yell over the music, “You want to get out of here?”
She smiles and when I turn my head so I can hear what she says, she sticks her tongue in my ear. An electric chill zings right through me. My eyelids can’t decide if they wanted to stay open or closed. She nibbles on my earlobe and her breath is hot against me. Holy fuck, she’s good at this.
But when I reach for her, she pushes off of me, holds out one finger, and says, “Don’t get any ideas. That’s just for winning today’s game.”
I lean back against the bar. “What do I get if I win next week?”
She pushes her knee between my legs and leans into me. “Maybe I’ll kiss your other ear,” she says, and then turns and walks away.
I sit there with a stupid grin on my face as my heart rate attempts to climb back down.
Game on.