Hokor cleared the pictures. The room remained quiet. “The Sky Demolition is not a deep team — if we stop those three, we win. I don’t care about the Tier Two tournament anymore. All I care about is the Sky Demolition. This game is all that matters to us. Let’s practice like we want to win back our honor.”
Quentin felt the change in the locker room. There was no yelling, no pushing, no testosterone-oriented boasting, but the air had changed nonetheless. Hokor’s quiet speech had affected them all, himself included. Quentin had four days to change the team. Four days to get them playing as a unit.
But was that enough time?
THE TOUCHBACK was in punch drive, en route to Orbital Station Two, home of the Sky Demolition. Quentin shut down the holotank in his room. He’d looked at the Demolition defensive players over and over again — now it was time to put that study into practical use. He headed for the VR practice field. Last night’s practice had gone well. The repetitive throws to the receivers had started to give him a better perspective on the speed involved. Practicing with holograms was effective, but a hologram couldn’t catch the ball, and therefore couldn’t give him a truly realistic idea of where to put a ball so that a talented receiver could haul it in.
Quentin walked into the VR field, expecting to see Denver and Milford — it shocked him to see not only the two rookies, but Hawick and Scarborough as well. In addition, two reserve defensive backs — Saugatuck and Rehoboth — stood ready to play.
“If Quentin Barnes approves,” Denver said with the Sklorno equivalent of a submissive bow, “these humble players would like to partake in the receiving of your gifts.”
Quentin felt slightly embarrassed to see Hawick and Scarborough, two starting receivers. Yet as soon as that feeling crossed his brain, he chased it away — he was the starting quarterback, and should have asked those two to practice with him from the beginning. The fact that they had come on their own, well, that was both emotionally flattering and strategically encouraging. Now he’d have an even more realistic version of a game situation.
“I approve,” Quentin said. “And thank you.”
All the Sklorno bowed as one. Quentin smiled as he walked to the rack of footballs, realizing that these teammates, at least, had accepted him as an equal.
FOR QUENTIN, the days blurred past, a run-on sentence crammed with practice and study with little of the punctuation that sleep would provide. He woke four hours before first meal, studied Sky Demolition defensive players, formations and plays, then went to eat with the team. He then sat in position meetings with Pine, Yitzhak and Hokor. Then team practice. Doc had said Pine could dress for the game, but he was not to practice, which meant Quentin took eighty-five percent of all reps. After practice came second meal, which Quentin now took with the rest of the team. He tried talking to as many teammates as he could. He got the impression his teammates knew he was trying, and it seemed to be making a difference.
After second meal, he studied some more. When most of the team went to sleep, Quentin set up shop in the VR field. By the third day, every Sklorno on the team was showing up for the late night sessions: Quentin practiced with three or four receivers, depending on the set, and a full compliment of defensive backs. The extra reps proved invaluable, and his timing started to improve, but it was the defenders that really got him over the hump. He could run whatever play he wanted, as many times as he wanted, gradually building up an instinctive knowledge of how fast the defenders could break on the ball, and how far away they had to be to constitute an “open” receiver.
And he made sure they came at him with plenty of safety and corner blitzes.
It would be a long time before Sklorno-level speed became second-nature to him, the way Human-level speed had been back on Micovi. But as he ran rep after rep, threw pass after pass, he regained the belief that he could handle the offense and throw with total confidence.
QUENTIN HAD ASSUMED that no construct could be larger than Emperor One.
He was wrong.
Orbital Station Two, or “The Deuce” as it was known across most of the Human worlds, reminded Quentin of an animal he’d seen in his science classes: the sea urchin. The Deuce was spherical, like a moon or a planet, with hundreds of massive, orderly, hollow blue spires jutting up and away from the surface.
He looked around the Touchback’s viewing bay. All of the rookies were there, of course, as they were to see any new planet. All of the Quyth Warriors were present, as was Hokor and at least two dozen Quyth Workers. Quentin hadn’t even known that many Quyth Workers were on the ship. All of them — Warriors, Leaders and Workers alike — stared at the viewscreen with a suffused reverence.
He looked for someone to talk to. Every minute of every day, he tried to find any opportunity to communicate with his teammates, to forge the bonds that Pine said were so critical to winning. He realized he’d spent absolutely no time with Quyth Warriors. He walked across the viewing deck to stand next to Virak the Mean.
“Just how big are those things,” Quentin asked, gesturing to the urchin-spikes that jutted from the space station.
Virak turned and looked at him. A Quyth Leader’s eye is a huge, glassy sphere that looks about as resilient as a Giving Day tree ornament. A Quyth Warrior’s eye, on the other hand, stares out from beneath thick, bony ridges. Even though a Warrior is more than twice the size of a Leader, a Warrior’s eye is about two-thirds the size of a Leader’s. A heavy eyelid, thick as Mason leather and coated with overlapping scales of tough chitin, hooded Virak’s eye from the top. Quentin’s childhood combat training taught him that the eye was the best place to attack a Quyth Warrior, but combat sims with realistic robots were a long way away from facing one in being-to-being combat. Now that he’d seen Quyth Warriors move in person, and on the field, the idea of poking out a Quyth Warrior’s baseball-sized eye seemed much easier said than done.
Virak looked at him with a combination of amusement and disdain. Of all the races, the Quyth seemed to share the most Human-like emotions. When Virak spoke, it was with an air of boredom. “They are about two miles long.”
“Two miles? That’s amazing, they look so thick to be that tall.”
“The spikes are about an eighth of a mile thick. They are beautiful.”
Quentin stared at them, and nodded. The symmetrical placement of the spikes did give the space station an ironically delicate appearance.
“The spikes are a life form,” Virak said. “A silica-based organism that grows in a dense crystalline matrix. They are like bacteria. They grow, feed, and reproduce in numbers beyond comprehension. Only the outside of the spike is alive — the inside is nothing but dead skeletons, but it is incredibly dense and hard. The crystalline structure gives it the strength to reach such massive heights.”
“What are they for?”
“They serve two purposes. They reach down to the core. We can vent energy through them to propel the station in any direction. They are also the main supports of the Deuce’s framework. Crossbeams connect to the spikes. You can see one below the equator, there.”
Virak pointed. Quentin saw another long, green structure, although this one was horizontal rather than vertical. It ran between two spikes.
“Why is there only that one crossbeam?”
“There are thousands of them, but they are buried,” Virak said. “The Deuce is built in stages, and each stage takes several cycles. With that crossbeam in place, workers will add to the station’s mass.”