The Rookie Read online

  “Who would want Barnes?” Gredok said with disgust. “Purist Nation quarterbacks can’t handle the Upper Tiers, it has been proven time and time again.”

  Stedmar’s thin smile returned. “Kirani-Ah-Kollok.”

  This time, Gredok couldn’t control his quivering antennae. Kirani-Ah-Kollok, Shamakath of the Ki Homeworld Syndicate. The very being that Gredok hoped to someday replace.

  “Kollok? Why would he want Barnes when he’s got Frank Zimmer at quarterback?”

  “Zimmer’s getting old,” Stedmar said. “He’s 33. I know that’s not much to you, Shamakath, but for a Human that means he’s only got four or five good years left. Barnes is only 19. Kollok figures that by the time Zimmer starts to fade, Barnes will be in his mid-twenties, just hitting the peak of his abilities.”

  Few bosses were as ruthless and clever as Kollok, who was not only a shrewd businessman but also a great judge of football talent. Kollok’s team, the To Pirates, had won the GFL championship in 2681, and followed up with a trip to last season’s title game, where they lost to the current champions, the Jupiter Jacks.

  On the field, the Corsairs’ quarterback dropped back and threw deep downfield. The ball hung in the air for far too long, giving the Raider’s strong safety time to make a well-timed leap. His outstretched hands snagged the ball before the receiver dragged him down. The crowd roared in approval.

  “That’s the quarterback’s fourth interception,” Hokor said quietly. “He should be shot.”

  Stedmar laughed at what he thought was a joke, but Gredok knew it was no laughing matter. Hokor was a demanding coach, to say the least. Back in his days as a Tier Three coach in the Quyth Planetary League, he had executed more than one ineffectual player.

  A flock of Creterakian soldiers flew over the field, moving from perches on one side of the stadium to the other. As their small shadows zipped across the near stands, then the field, then the far stands, the crowd noise fell to a hush. The tiny creatures always made their presence felt during football games, where radicals were fond of deadly terrorist acts. Each one of the twenty or so winged beings carried an entropic rifle, capable of killing a man with even a glancing shot. Like any other public gathering, even ones with only a hundred or so people, the local Creterakian garrison wanted to see and be seen.

  “I hate those little shuckers,” Stedmar said quietly. “They do those flyovers on purpose, you know, to make sure the crowd doesn’t get too wild.”

  Over the years, Gredok had seen several ‘wild’ crowds of repressed Purist Nation citizens. Just during the drive from the spaceport to the city center and the football field, he’d seen two minor riots and one lynch mob. The lynch mob ended when a flock of soldiers flew in to break it up, then some Purist genius started throwing rocks at the ugly little flying creatures: the lynching originally intended to kill one man for an unknown crime ended in at least twelve deaths when the Creterakians opened fire. Mining Colony VI, or “Micovi” as the locals liked to call it, was little more than a barely controlled, overpopulated border outpost of a Third World system.

  The Raiders’ offense ran onto the field, led by the swaggering Barnes. The crowd noise picked up once again as hometown fans cheered for their star player.

  “He’s awfully big for a quarterback,” Gredok said.

  “Seven feet even,” Stedmar said. “Seven feet tall, 360 pounds.”

  So big, Gredok thought. Big enough, possibly, to stand up to the punishment that Upper Tier quarterbacks took week after week. Frank Zimmer was 6-foot-9, 310 pounds, and was one of the biggest quarterbacks in the league. “It’s amazing how players keep getting larger and larger. Fifteen years ago a Human that size could have been a small tight end.”

  Barnes barked out the signals, looking up and down the line as he did. He paused, stood for a moment, and his hands did a ba-da-bap on the center’s behind. Barnes screamed out an audible. Behind him, the tailback went in motion to the left, lining up in the slot between the tight end and the wide receiver.

  “Here we go again,” Stedmar said. “He sees something!”

  Gredok and Hokor also leaned forward, although they knew what was coming — any fool could see the Corsairs’ defensive backs were in man-to-man while the tailback’s motion revealed that the linebackers were in a short zone. Barnes now had three targets to his left — the wide receiver, the tailback, and the tight end.

  “Roll out?” Gredok asked. Hokor nodded.

  Barnes took the snap as the line erupted in the dirt-churning mini-war. He ran to his left, down the line, as the three left-side receivers sprinted straight downfield. But Hokor and Gredok weren’t the only ones to see what Quentin had seen — the much-maligned linebacker tore up field, blitzing just inside the sprinting tight end. Quentin and the linebacker seemed to be on a direct collision course. The 360-pound linebacker closed in and launched himself, at which point Quentin calmly sidestepped towards the line of scrimmage. The linebacker sailed through the air, not even laying a finger on the deft quarterback.

  The defensive end had separated from his block. Quentin’s cut inside the linebacker took him right into the defensive end’s reaching arms. Quentin cut back to the outside at the last second as the 400-pound end grabbed him with cannon-sized arms. The quarterback kept his feet pumping and pushed hard with his right arm. The end’s feet chopped at the ground as he tried to keep up, but Quentin’s stiffarm had knocked him off balance. The end fell, both hands wrapped in Quentin’s jersey, pulling the smaller quarterback down. Quentin stumbled, leaned, then seemed to take a step towards the defensive end and twisted his shoulders as he pushed out with his right arm yet again. The end fell to the ground, his big hands slipping free of Quentin’s jersey. Then the quarterback popped upright, like a stiff spring that had been bent to the ground then released.

  So strong, Gredok thought. I’ve never seen a Human quarterback so strong.

  Already moving upfield and now free of the clutching defensive end, Quentin tucked the ball and ran. The defense shifted from their pass coverage to come after him, but in the two seconds after his initial cut he was already ten yards upfield and cutting to the outside.

  “Hikkir,” Hokor said quietly — the Quyth equivalent of “oh my.”

  The crowd roared as the cornerback streaked towards Quentin, but the defender came in too fast. Quentin juked to the right, to the inside, but in the same second was moving back to the left. The cornerback stumbled and started to fall — he reached out for Quentin, who slapped his hands away like an angry parent scolding a spoiled child.

  “Hikkirapt,” Hokor said, a little louder this time, the Quyth equivalent of “that’s quite impressive.”

  Quentin sprinted down the sideline. The free safety closed with a good angle of pursuit. There was nowhere to cut this time, so Quentin lowered his right hand, and brought it up hard just as the free safety reached for the tackle. Quentin’s thick forearm caught the free safety under the chin, lifting him off his feet. The free safety seemed to float for a second, moving downfield at the same speed as Quentin, before crashing into the ground and skidding clumsily across the torn Carsengi Grass.

  “Joro jirri,” Hokor said loudly. That loosely translated into “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Stedmar jumped up and down and screamed nonsensical syllables, his drink spilling onto the floor. His bodyguards had lost discipline, straying from their posts to get a glimpse of the sprinting quarterback. Hokor leaned forward so far his neon-bright yellow eye pressed against the luxury box’s glass windows.

  It boiled down to Quentin and the strong safety, who closed in as the quarterback passed the 30-yard line. Quentin looked back once, then turned his head upfield and seemed to take off, as if he had booster rockets. Quentin strolled into the end zone for a 52-yard touchdown run.

  Raiders 41, Corsairs 3.

  “Just how fast is he?” Gredok asked quietly.

  “Yesterday in practice they timed him at 3.8 in the 40-yard dash.”

 
Gredok simply nodded. Of course. Why not? Why shouldn’t the nineteen-year-old huge quarterback, with a plasma rifle for an arm, the eyes of an aerial predator and the mind of a general run a 3.8 second 40-yard dash? That was faster than most Human running backs and definitely faster than the typical 380-pound Human tight end. It wasn’t nearly as fast as a Sklorno wide receiver or defensive back, but it was about equal with a Quyth Warrior linebacker. A Tier One linebacker — Quentin would leave most Tier Two linebackers in the dust.

  Hokor still leaned forward, his eye and both sets of his hands pressed against the glass, his antennae quivering like drug-addled snakes. Gredok poked him again — hard. Hokor looked up and saw Gredok’s eye clouding over with just a touch of black. Hokor swept a pedipalp over his head, submissively pushing his antennae back, then sat quietly in his seat.

  Gredok stared at his coach. Hokor had come across a holo of Barnes, and had instantly insisted the boy was Tier One material. Gredok had argued — there were reasons no Nationalite had ever quarterbacked a championship team. Most Nationalite quarterbacks, in fact, washed out within two seasons. Despite the boy’s skills, he had no experience dealing with other races, let alone leading them. There was more to quarterbacking than pure football skill. Far more.

  But Gredok believed in his coach. He’d already leveraged his entire organization’s finances to create the team Hokor wanted, the team that would make the leap from Tier Two to the big time ... to Tier One. Hokor wanted Barnes, but to get Barnes, Gredok needed to make a play that could have serious business consequences.

  Gredok’s wide eye asked an unspoken question: Are you sure? Is this kid really worth it?

  Hokor stared back with an unspoken answer: Absolutely.

  “I think Kollok is going to pay through the nose for this kid,” Stedmar said quietly, a smug smile on his lips. “Don’t you think he will, Shamakath?”

  The time had come to formally open up the power game. Gredok wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Actually,” Gredok said, “Barnes might do well on my team.”

  Stedmar raised his eyebrows in a Human expression for surprise. Gredok sensed Stedmar’s body heat — very steady, only a hair above normal. Stedmar concealed his emotions very well, which was just one of the reasons Gredok liked him. Stedmar was also smart and ruthless. But for all his strong points, he should have known better than to play the game with Gredok the Splithead.

  “You’ve got Don Pine,” Stedmar said. “Why would you want anyone else?”

  “Pine is not what he used to be.”

  Stedmar nodded. “But I’ve already got a considerable offer from Kollok.”

  “You should just give me Barnes’ contract as tribute.”

  Stedmar smiled. “Now come on, we both know tribute doesn’t cover something like this. You wouldn’t want me in your organization if I’d do something as stupid as give up this kid for free.”

  Gredok thought for a second, then nodded. Stedmar played it smart: polite, respectful, and logical. “What is Kollok’s offer?”

  Stedmar walked to the bar and poured himself another drink. “Well, Barnes’ contract is negligible,” he said. “I have him signed for another year at one million credits.”

  Such a low number for such talent, Gredok thought.

  “That is impressive, Stedmar. Barnes is worth three times that amount, even for a Tier Three team. How did you manage it?”

  Stedmar shrugged and smiled. “Technically, I don’t have to pay him at all. He’s an orphan, like about a million other Nationalite kids his age. Pogroms, coups, fundamentalist revolutions, power struggles — thousands of people die or just disappear every year. Quentin never even knew his parents. They disappeared when he was one, maybe younger. He had a brother, got hung for stealing food when Quentin was only five. That was all the family he had.”

  “How old was the brother?”

  “Nine or ten, Quentin doesn’t remember for sure. Anyway, in the Purist Nation, family members are responsible for crimes committed by other family members, up to three generations. Since Quentin was the only one left in his family, they put him to work in the forced-labor mines.”

  “A five-year-old Human, working in the Micovi mines?”

  Stedmar nodded. “Happens all the time. Makes for a very cheap labor source.”

  “Slave labor is always the cheapest.”

  “The nice term is ‘honor worker,’ as in working in the forced-labor camps clears your family honor, you know? Only takes twenty years.”

  Gredok’s antennae circled slowly. He didn’t like Human systems to start with, and the Purist Nation was by far the worst of the lot. “So if he was an honor worker in a mine, how did you discover him?”

  Stedmar laughed. “It was the craziest thing. I was driving out to the mines to conduct some business. So I’m driving by in my limo when the workers are on break. There’s a crowd built up like it’s a fight. Well, I love to watch a good fight, especially on this planet — did you know if you kill a man in a fair fight here, you don’t go to jail?”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Anyway, so people really go at it. So I pull up to see what’s going on, only there’s not a fight, everyone is laughing and clapping, looking at each other in amazement. There’s this giant-sized shucker, must have been 425 pounds, built like an air-tank with legs, you know? Anyway, this guy looks pissed. He heaves back and chucks a rock, maybe the rock is a pound or two, chucks it about sixty yards, really impressive throw. Some guy runs the rock back, and that’s when the workers start flashing money back and forth — they’re making bets. Then this scrawny kid steps up, he’s about six feet tall, but you can tell he’s real young. The big guy has a look on his face like he could eat a bat whole, entropic rifle and all, you know? He’s looking at this kid like he wants to kill him. And the kid is just laughing. The kid takes the rock, pretends like he’s lining up under a center and actually barks out some signals. He’s looking left, looking right, then takes a five-step drop like he’s quarterbacking the Rodina Astronauts or something, and he heaves that rock. I mean the thing flew eighty-five, maybe ninety yards. I just about crapped myself.”

  Gredok nodded. He was always amazed by Stedmar’s fascination with fecal euphemisms. “And that’s why you signed him?”

  “Partially. So this kid won the bet, obviously, the big guy hands him a wad of bills, and the kid starts doing this dance, really rubbing it in, you know? Well, the big guy, he just loses it. He throws a big sucker-punch that knocks the kid on his butt. The kid pops up like nothing happened, except he’s not laughing now, he’s pissed.”

  Gredok nodded again. Urine was also a key element of Stedmar’s stories.

  “So the big guy comes after this kid, and this kid lays into him. I mean he took this big guy apart. Three straight jabs and then a big left hook, and the guy goes down. But the kid isn’t finished. He jumps on the guy and starts blasting him with big haymaker lefts, over and over again. There’s blood all over the dirt, in a couple of seconds the guy’s face looks like hamburger. The workers are laughing and having a grand time, but you know what I’m thinking to myself, Shamakath?”

  “No.”

  “I’m thinking, ‘What if that kid hurts his hands?’ Swear to High One, that’s what I’m thinking. So I send my Sammy and Dean and Frankie over there to pull the kid off. But he’s like a wildcat — doesn’t know who my boys are or what they want, so he lays Sammy out with that same left hook.”

  Stedmar turned to look at one of his bodyguards, a thick Human with a nose that looked as if it had been broken a dozen times.

  “You remember that punch, Sammy?”

  “Yeah, boss,” Sammy said, laughing. “And he weighed about two hundred pounds less back then.”

  “I didn’t want the kid hurt, but you can’t expect the boys to take that, you know? But the more they hit him, the madder he gets, and he just won’t stay down. Finally, Sammy gets up and he whips out a stun stick and puts the kid out. They drag h
im over to me. I ask the kid if he knows who I am. You know what he says to me?”

  “No,” Gredok said, patiently waiting for the end of the story. Humans always took so long to get to the point.

  “Through a split lip he says to me, ‘You’re the new owner of the Raiders.’ Not ‘You’re Stedmar Osborne, notorious gangster,’ or ‘You’re that guy that shakes down the mine owners’ or anything like that. Just ‘The owner of the Raiders.’ That was it for me, I knew the kid lived and breathed football. So I ask him, ‘How old are you?’ And he tells me ‘Fifteen.’ Fifteen. You know what I almost did?”

  “Crapped yourself?” Gredok said.

  “Yah! I almost crapped myself! I paid off the kid’s family debt. That’s why, technically, I don’t have to pay him at all, I sort of own him. And just to let you know, a million a year is probably more than his entire family saw going back three generations, if not four or five. He thinks he’s rich. So I signed the kid and put him on the team. He’d never played organized ball before, and the next year, at sixteen years old, he’s the backup quarterback.”

  At this, Hokor looked away from the field and listened attentively. Gredok knew why — this quarterback already had four years of professional experience, albeit in the lowly PNFL.

  “At seventeen he started for me,” Stedmar said. “We went 5-4 that year, he won his last three games. The next year, this eighteen-year-old kid wins it all for me, 9-0, and two more wins in the playoffs to give me my first championship. This year, we’re 9-0 again, we’ll obviously win today, and that’s 21 games in a row for him. Next week the championship game should be a cakewalk.”

  “All because you were driving by and happened to see him throw a rock.”

  Stedmar laughed, he obviously relished telling this story. “Yah! Crazy, isn’t it?”

  “You still haven’t told me Kollok’s offer.”