Scott Sigler - The Rookie

“Fayed!” Quentin said. He reached for his teammate, then kept his hands away, remembering someone telling him once not to touch a head or neck injury.

“The banana… meteors…” Fayed said. His foot kept twitching, but his hand suddenly stopped the spasmodic opening and closing. The fingers froze in mid-move, curled rigid like a talon.

Quentin was distantly aware of a medsled racing out, of Doc fluttering down next to Fayed. Quentin felt a hand, or a tentacle, he didn’t know, grab his shoulder pad and gently pull him back.

Doc pulled a laser scalpel from his bag and deftly sliced off Fayed’s back armor. Doc then removed a small, rectangular device. He punched a few buttons on the device, then pressed it against Fayed’s back. There was a sickening squelching sound as tendrils reached out of both sides of the device and penetrated Fayed’s skin, curing in towards his spine. A soft orange light started flashing on the device — blink, blink, blink, blink…

Doc zipped to the medsled and maneuvered it over the top of Fayed’s body. The metallic tendrils reached down. The medsled lifted, and Fayed rose off the ground without his body moving an iota, like some magician’s trick of levitation. Doc flew off the field, the medsled moving behind him, slowly, so as not to jostle Fayed.

As the cart and patient slid noiselessly towards the tunnel, Quentin’s sharp eyes remained fixated on the orange light.

Blink, blink… blink…. blink….

Then nothing.

Before Fayed slid into the tunnel, Quentin knew the orange light had stopped flashing.

HE FINISHED THE GAME. He didn’t know how he did it, but he did it nonetheless. He even scored another touchdown, this one a twelve-yard run. He had to do the running himself — Yassoud’s face went pale each time Hokor called his number, and ran with all the intensity of a galley cook. When the game was on, Quentin didn’t have to think about it; he either ran the offense on the field, every last scrap of his intellect devoted to analyzing the defense, or he sat on the sidelines, intently studying a holotable of the last series in case he found a weakness to use on the next possession.

But when the final seconds ticked off the clock, and the scoreboard read Krakens 35, Survivors 7, he didn’t have anything else to distract him. The team gathered in the central meeting room. Hokor stood in front of the holoboard, as usual.

Except this time, his eye wasn’t black or orange or even pink.

It was deep purple. Opaque purple.

Quentin had never seen that color before, but somehow he knew exactly what it meant.

“First of all, I want to sing all of your praises for a hard-fought game,” Hokor said. “We played, and won, as a team. I have very little to say of negative things. The Ionath Krakens are now the champions of the Quyth Irradiated Conference.”

A half-hour ago, that same phrase would have drawn a deafening roar from the assembled players. Now it was met with silence, a silence broken only by some Human trying to clear phlegm from his throat.

“We have lost one of our warriors,” Hokor said. He looked down at a palmtop. “Mitchell Fayed suffered a severed spinal cord and a collapsed lung. Doc tried to used a Galthier Spinal Cord Controller to regulate Fayed’s breathing and heart rate, but there was too much damage, too soon. Attempts to repair the damage and reanimate him failed.”

There was a loud sob. Quentin looked over to the source of the sound. John Tweedy, big, dangerous, deadly John Tweedy, sat on a bench, his elbow on his knee, his forehead propped on his hand, his eyes squeezed shut, his solid shoulders shaking in time with his sobs.

The noise seemed to open a dam of emotion. Other Humans started sobbing, or sniffling, or coughing to hide their self-perceived weakness.

One of the Ki linemen produced a long, serrated knife. They passed it from one to the next, taking turns cutting a long gash into their own upper left arm. With each cut, black blood spilled down in a noisy, splattering rivulet, spreading out across the tile floor.

They’re letting their own blood , Quentin thought. So it can join Fayed’s blood on the field of battle.

Messal the Efficient silently slipped out of the Quyth Warrior locker room. He walked over to Virak the Mean who sat limply on the floor. Messal opened the box and removed a metallic, penlike instrument. The instrument hummed lightly as Messal started moving it across the chitin on Virak’s left forearm. Choto the Bright stood behind Virak, Killik the Unworthy behind him, a line of Quyth Warriors slowly forming. Quentin didn’t recognize the new writing on Virak’s shell, but he knew it was a Quyth rendition of Fayed’s name. It stunned Quentin to see a Human name being written on a Quyth Warrior’s shell.

But that’s what Fayed’s constant, punishing work ethic had meant to everyone.

Quentin felt cold. Fayed had been on the field with him, battling away, not even an hour ago. And now he was gone. Horrible injuries were part of the game. Big bodies, strong bodies, and speed. Force equals mass times acceleration. Beings got hurt, but then beings got fixed. All the plaques he’d seen in all the stadiums, commemorating those who died on the field — it had seemed somehow, distant , something from the game’s past, from before the reality that embraced him once he joined the ranks of the elite.

Fayed was dead.

Quentin wasn’t about to let that death be for nothing.

He looked at Donald Pine. Instinctively, he expected Pine to stand and say something, anything, talk of how the team would win for Fayed. But Pine said nothing, he just sat there, head bowed. He was a disgraced man. Even though the team didn’t know it, he knew it. Pine was broken, his mantle of leadership… gone.

With sudden clarity, Quentin realized that he now held that mantle.

Something had to be said. And he was only one who could say it.

The team started to head to their separate dressing rooms when Quentin stood and spoke.

“I need to say a few words.”

The players stopped where they were. They looked back at him. They looked at him in the same way he’d just looked at Pine.

They wanted someone to lead them.

“Fayed… ” he started to talk, but his voice cracked. He felt his throat thicken, felt tears try to fight their way out of his eyes. He held his eyes shut tight and took a deep breath.

“The Machine, he was a great running back,” Quentin said. “All he wanted to do was play Tier One ball. It was his dream.”

Quentin looked around the room, in turn staring each player in the eye. His voice suddenly changed, from on-the-verge-of-tears to a cold, steel baritone that rang through the soul of every being in the room.

“He’s with us, he’s still on this team,” Quentin said. “And if we make it to Tier One, he makes it to Tier One. No one in this room will let him down. Coach, who do we play?”

Hokor tapped a button on his palmtop. “We have the second-best record in the tournament, based on a points-scored tiebreaker with the Texas Earthlings. That means we have a bye the first round. We play the winner of the Texas Earthlings and the Aril Archers.”

Quentin nodded slowly, turning so that he could look every player right in the eyes. None of them said a word.

“A bye. That means we’re automatically in the semifinals. We win that game, that one game, and we’re in Tier One. We win that game, and Fayed gets his dream.”

Tweedy’s sobbing slowed, becoming just a sniffle.

“I don’t care who steps on that field,” Quentin said. “Earthlings, Archers, it doesn’t make any difference. Either way, they’re going down. ”