The Starter Read online

Zak was so calm, so patient. Even after Quentin had all but punched him out, Zak still had that expression of concern on his face. Concern for Quentin.

  “Back on Micovi,” Quentin said, “your place is kind of... sacred. Someone goes in there without your permission, they’re trying to steal from you, or...”

  Yitzhak crossed his arms and waited.

  Quentin sighed and continued. “Or maybe they’re putting a trap in your room, like a hidden roundbug, something to hurt you or kill you. It’s a Micovi thing, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “You know what? You’re not on Micovi anymore.”

  Quentin rolled his eyes. “I know that, Zak, I’m not stu—”

  “Yeah, you are stupid. And you don’t know it. Not in your heart. Everyone on this damn ship will fall all over themselves to help you, to back you up whenever you need it. So you had to go through some hard times on Micovi? Well get over it. You can’t react with violence all the time.”

  “Right,” Quentin said. “They brought me here because I’m violent. I get paid to be violent, and I’m just supposed to shut it off?”

  Yitzhak nodded. “That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do. You’re in the GFL now. Start acting like a professional athlete and stop acting like some two-bit bully.”

  Yitzhak was right — that behavior was unacceptable. Quentin felt his face flush red. He knew better. He had to start controlling his reactions.

  “Sorry,” Quentin said again.

  “You’ve already apologized to me,” Yitzhak said. “Maybe you should apologize to Pilkie.”

  Quentin turned and looked down at the wide-eyed Quyth Worker. Pilkie looked scared, but his eye kept flicking to Quentin’s bag. Quentin sighed, slid the bag off his shoulder and held it out.

  Pilkie grabbed it and shot off to Quentin’s small bedroom. Everything clean would be put away; everything dirty would go into the laundry.

  Quentin rolled out his neck and looked around the room. Yitzhak had gone to all this trouble. Since Quentin had made an ass out of himself the least he could do was check it all out. He casually sorted through piles of stuff, picking up a black baseball bat. He looked at it closely, and saw that his face was burned into the wood.

  “Hey, I didn’t give permission for this.”

  “It’s just a mock-up,” Yitzhak said. “Companies want you to see what things will look like.”

  “Yeah, but I play football, not baseball.”

  “That’s the beauty of it, Q — you don’t have to use the products, you just let them put your name and face on them and collect a paycheck.”

  Quentin set the bat down and picked up a strange plastic device that dangled with tubes and long, narrow cups. “No idea what this is but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t use it.”

  “Probably not,” Yitzhak said. “Unless you are a menstruating Sklorno.”

  Quentin dropped the device like it had suddenly turned into a spider. Pilkie shot out of the bedroom, grabbed the device off the floor and placed it neatly in the pile.

  “Quentin, look,” Yitzhak said. “I’m not trying to get into your business here, but you are a starting Tier One quarterback. There are only twenty-two starting T1 QBs in the galaxy. You’re about to become a major star, and people are willing to pay you a lot of money just to be associated with you.”

  “I get that,” Quentin said. “I get the whole concept. But all this...” he gestured to the piles of merchandise, “all this crap isn’t what football is about. And besides, I make plenty of money.”

  Yitzhak laughed. “That’s a good one.”

  “Why do you keep saying that? I’ll make a million credits this season. That’s a ton of money, Zak. I hate to break it to you, but I’m rich.”

  Yitzhak laughed again, then the sound faded, the smile slipped from his face. “Quentin, you’re serious? You think you’re rich?”

  Quentin’s eyes narrowed. He suddenly wanted to punch Zak in the mouth, and wasn’t sure why. “Yes, I am rich. Didn’t you hear what I said? I don’t want to brag or anything, but I make a million credits a season. That would make me one of the richest people on Micovi.”

  “You’re not on Micovi anymore. And yeah, a million is a good grab, but you have to understand just how much you can make from endorsements. You could make ten times that much, maybe twenty times.”

  Quentin rolled his eyes. Yitzhak’s exaggerations weren’t appreciated, even though he knew his teammate was just trying to help.

  “Look, Zak, maybe I honestly don’t care, okay? My little apartment in the Krakens building is paid for. When I’m not there, I’m here. My food is paid for, clothes, all that stuff. I have a million credits and nothing to spend it on, so why bother?”

  “Sure, all that stuff is paid for, as long as you don’t get hurt. That’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. Do you mind a little advice?”

  Quentin looked to the ceiling and sighed. “Sure, why not?”

  “You’re a starting Tier One quarterback, which means you’re going to get hit like a starting Tier One quarterback. Even as good as sports medicine is these days, you are one play away from being finished. There goes your million credit salary. What are you going to do then?”

  “I won’t get hurt.”

  “I bet that’s exactly what Paul Pierson thought.”

  The name stopped Quentin cold, made the image of a chrome foot flash into his brain. For just a second, Quentin pictured his own leg replaced by such a contraption. He shook his head, forcing the image away — it was ridiculous to think that would happen to him. Still, even if he had a career like Pine or Frank Zimmer, Quentin might be done with football in fifteen years. Yet fifteen years seemed like an eternity... he’d only been alive for nineteen.

  Quentin picked up a set of golf clubs.

  “Quentin, do you golf?”

  “No. Never been. I should pick up the game, though, so I can drive around in a stupid golf cart all the time like Coach does. Are there courses on Ionath?”

  “Sure, if you don’t mind wearing a rad-suit, there are some of the best courses in the galaxy, right outside the dome. And if your suit fails in any way, it will still hold your biomass together nicely while you melt.”

  Quentin let the golf bag drop to the floor. “Wow, I can’t wait to get out on the links.”

  Pilkie shot in from nowhere, grabbed the clubs, then vanished. The little guy was crazy fast.

  “Zak, maybe we can talk about it later,” Quentin said. “I just don’t want to deal with this now. I appreciate you trying to help, but I’m going to have Pilkie throw all this garbage out the...”

  Quentin stopped when his eyes fell on a model of a luxury yacht. About a foot long, with sleek lines that screamed wealth and speed. But it wasn’t the model itself that caught his attention but rather the holo-card hovering just above it. He knew that face. Quentin picked up the model.

  “You like yachts?” Yitzhak said. “I figured you as a pitchman for some swillish, watery beer.”

  Quentin’s head snapped up. “Wait, a beer company wants to talk to me?”

  Yitzhak nodded. “Yep. Miller Lager. Interested?”

  Quentin blinked. Yitzhak was messing with him.

  “You’re messing with me,” Quentin said.

  Yitzhak shook his head. “Nope, they were the second company to call.”

  When Quentin had watched pirated football game coverage back in the Nation, he’d loved those funny beer commercials the former GFL players did. To actually be in a commercial like that? Other than a championship ring and the cover image of Galaxy Sports Magazine, that was the biggest level of success a player could imagine.

  “Interested?” Yitzhak said. “Not that you have a bad poker face or anything, but it sure looks like you want to know more.”

  “Yeah, I do. Can your agent set up a meeting with them?”

  “No problem. They’ll be thrilled to talk to you.”

  “Miller was the second company to call,” Quentin said. “What
was the first?”

  Yitzhak pointed to the yacht model in Quentin’s hands. “You’re looking at it. Word is they’ve been calling everywhere for months, trying to find out who represents you.”

  Quentin nodded. “Okay. The yacht company, and Miller Lager. Please set those meetings up.”

  “Consider it done. Any others?”

  “No. Not interested in the rest. Just Miller and this. I’ll have Pilkie get all this out tomorrow, Zak, but if you could take off, I wanna get some sleep.”

  “Right,” Yitzhak said. “I’ll get out of your way. Rest up, the free agents arrive tomorrow.”

  “Free agents?”

  “Yep. Free agents tomorrow, rookies the day after. Season begins in three weeks, Q. Gotta load up on new talent.”

  The helpful third-string quarterback walked out of the room. Quentin sat on his couch — one small cushion was the only uncluttered part of his apartment on which he could sit — and stared at the model of the yacht.

  And the face above it, the face that had told him all about the prison ship that had become the Combine.

  He stared at the face of his countryman, Manny Sayed.

  • • •

  QUENTIN HURRIED DOWN the corridor toward the Touchback’s practice field. He’d slept soundly, and awoken to find all the crap cleaned out of his quarters. Pilkie had been a busy boy in the night — quiet, but busy.

  The modifications to Quentin’s quarters weren’t complete. Contractors would be working on the walls during the day while Quentin was out of the rooms.

  He’d been called to the practice field to help evaluate the free agent candidates. It excited Quentin to have some control over personnel decisions. He would meet the rookies the next day. They had been selected without his input, mostly because the research on them had been done while Quentin was busy quarterbacking the Krakens in Tier Two. This season, there was nothing he could do about that. After the Tier One campaign finished in sixteen weeks, however, Quentin envisioned himself locked away with Hokor during the off-season, reviewing holo after holo of keyfree agents and potential rookies from around the galaxy. From here on out, every player decision would have the Quentin Barnes stamp of approval.

  He walked down the tunnel, happy to be back in the Touchback’s familiar surroundings. Despite the parade bombing and the fear it brought, he felt safe up here. Safe, and relieved to once again focus on the only thing that really mattered — football. Everything seemed possible. He tasted eternal life in his mouth, felt it on his skin. A logical part of his brain said this can’t last forever, but his soul knew better. All of his hard work, a lifetime of dealing with a deadly culture, three seasons of putting up with teammates who treated him like a second-class citizen, all of it had led him to this church. His church, the Church of Football, a religion he created with his own feet, miracles he made with his own arm.

  He exited the tunnel into the Touchback’s full-size practice field. The nano-grass didn’t have a smell, which was a shame — Quentin loved the smell of a gridiron, loved to breathe in the scents of dirt, of plants, of the essence of football.

  Patches of small, flat, circular, white clipper robots roamed across the green practice field, eating the ever-growing nano-grass and keeping the surface perfectly trimmed. As he walked, the little robots cleared out of his way, then scooted back to their places after he passed.

  It was the same ship where he’d spent the last three months, but it felt different. He wasn’t the bush-league upstart anymore. He was the starting quarterback of a Tier One football team. He knew this ship now, knew the eighteen decks that rose up beyond the end zones. Well, no, actually that wasn’t true. He knew very little of the ship — pretty much just his quarters, the cafeteria, the Kriegs-Ballok Virtual Practice System and this field. Huh. He’d been so busy doing his job, fighting for this opportunity, that he’d barely explored the ship. Maybe he’d correct that sometime soon. He’d heard rumors that Captain Cheevers was pretty hot. Maybe he’d introduce himself.

  At the eighteenth deck, a clear, shallow dome crossed high above the field. Beyond that dome, black space and twinkling stars. So many stars. People said there were something like 400 billion in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. Only a fraction had been explored so far, little more than a half billion or something like that. He didn’t pay much attention to such things, but he’d heard it would take thousands of years just to see all the stars in this galaxy alone... just one galaxy out of 500 billion known galaxies. At best, only a fraction of the Milky Way’s stars would be explored during his lifetime.

  Quentin jogged to the middle of the field, where Don Pine and four Human players were waiting by a rack of footballs. Hokor, as always, floated about ten feet above the field in his stupid golf cart. Three of the new Humans were dressed in armor and white practice jerseys. One wore street clothes. Don gave Quentin a smile and a wink, the Hall-of-Fame quarterback’s way of saying it’s your show, but I’m here if you need me.

  Hokor looked so idiotic in his golf cart. The thing was built for a Quyth Leader’s small stature, like a child’s toy driven by an angry, one-eyed stuffed animal wearing a Krakens wind-breaker and baseball cap. The visual was a bit comical, but the audio was not — Hokor’s cart had powerful speakers, and when he yelled through them every player winced.

  “Barnes!” Hokor said. “We picked up a free-agent running back to play behind Yassoud, but we need to see if any of these tight ends can replace Saulsgiver.”

  “Okay, Coach. What do you want me to do?”

  Hokor waved to the four new Humans, calling them over. Of the three wearing football gear, only one had a helmet on. The man dressed in street clothes shook Quentin’s hand.

  “Jay Martinez,” he said. “Free agent running back, happy to be here.”

  The man looked agile, but somewhat small. He wasn’t even as big as Yassoud, whom Quentin considered a bit undersized for the position. No one, it seemed, measured up to Mitchell Fayed.

  “Jay, I’m Quentin Barnes. Not dressing today?”

  Jay tapped his left knee. “Still healing up from an injury I got in the last week of Tier Two. I played for the Damascus Demons in the Union Conference.”

  Quentin couldn’t remember the Demons’ record. Damascus was a middle-of-the-pack franchise in the Planetary Union Conference. Martinez didn’t seem like a major acquisition. The Krakens had also signed rookie running back Dan Campbell, but with both Fayed and Pierson gone, Yassoud needed at least one more backup.

  “Welcome,” Quentin said, then turned to the first of three men dressed in gear. His skin was the bright white of a Tower native. Not quite as big as Quentin, but young and solid.

  “Pietor Jewell,” the man said, shaking Quentin’s hand. “I’m still under contract with the Aril Archers in the Ki League, but they’ll loan me for the season if you guys want me.”

  Jewell was a name that Quentin did know. The Archers had entered the T2 Tourney, losing in the first round to the Texas Earthlings. Jewell might not be a super-star, but he was a quality tight end.

  “Happy to see what you got,” Quentin said. “But, a loan? How does that work?”

  Don Pine put a hand on Quentin’s shoulder. Don did that whenever the older quarterback wanted to provide a bit of knowledge. Everyone else gave mostly useless advice — Don just shared his experience, then let Quentin figure it out for himself.

  “Because Tier Two teams are off when Tier One season is on, and vice versa,” Don said, “T2 teams can loan players to T1 teams, for a fee. Helps give the T2 players top-flight experience, which they bring back to their teams.”

  “And bruises,” Pietor said. “We bring those back as well. I got loaned to the Vik Vanguard last year, then went back to the Archers. I’ve been playing non-stop for three straight seasons; if you guys pick me up it will be my fourth, then back to the Archers for my fifth.”

  Quentin nodded, impressed by the man’s work ethic but also concerned about that much constant play. Quentin himself had go
ne from Tier Three straight into a Tier Two season, and now was heading into a Tier One campaign. His body still hurt fromthe T2 Tourney — he wondered if Jewell’s could hold up through another twelve games of elite football.

  Pietor stepped back and the second Human stepped up.

  “Claudio Morgaine,” the man said. “I was with the Blar Bastion, but hoping to catch on with a Tier One team.”

  The Bastion played in the Sklorno Conference. The franchise had been around for two decades or more, and had never made it into the T2 tournament. Quentin couldn’t blame Morgaine for wanting to find a way into Tier One.

  “Good luck,” Quentin said. “We’ll see what you’ve got.”

  The third Human walked up, but didn’t offer his hand. Instead, he took off his helmet, and Quentin took in what he assumed to be some kind of practical joke. The man’s facial features made him look black or white, maybe even blue, but it was impossible to tell because bright yellow greasepaint covered his skin.

  It looked odd, but then again Quentin had touched the slimy raspers of a Sklorno... a little yellow greasepaint wasn’t going to bother him. Maybe the color was a religious statement or something. He offered his hand. “Quentin Barnes.”

  The man stared at the hand. Quentin let it hang there for an uncomfortable five seconds, then lowered it back to his side. The yellow-faced man stepped back. Quentin leaned in close to Pine.

  “Hey,” Quentin whispered. “What’s the deal with this guy and the makeup?”

  Pine shrugged and whispered back. “Heck if I know. His name’s Jorje Starcher. Seems kind of familiar to me, but I haven’t seen any holos of him yet. He’s been with the Moscow Hammers for two seasons.”

  “Moscow? Never heard of it. That one of those floating cities in the Harrah system?”

  “Nope, Earth,” Pine said. “It’s an NFL franchise, Tier Three.”

  The NFL. Real bush-league stuff. Better than the PNFL, sure, but not much better.

  “Why wouldn’t he shake my hand? That annoys me.”

  Pine put his hand on Quentin’s shoulder. “As long as yellow-face can catch, does it matter?”