The Champion (10 page)

Quentin sensed people on his right: John and Ju. And on his left, Becca and George. George stared out, his face blank with shock.

“They’re
real
, Quentin,” George said, his voice a reverent whisper. “I can scarcely believe it myself. The elder gods ... they’re
real
.”

John laughed.
DON’T EAT THE SPACE-BOOGERS
flashed across his face.

“That’s not an elder god, Georgie,” John said. “Hate to break it to you, but that’s a
seriously
big ball of floating poop.”

Ju started to giggle. “Poop,” he said. “That’s a funny word.
Poop
.”

George frowned at the Tweedy brothers. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Who is to say a floating planetoid of feces can’t be a living god?”

Quentin hoped it wasn’t actually a living god; he’d met one of those already, and one was more than enough.

“If that thing will get us to the Portath Cloud, then let’s get it done,” he said. “Bumberpuff, can you talk to it?”

The captain joined them in the now-crowded viewing bubble.

“The Rewall language is more seen than spoken,” he said. “I don’t have the capacity to communicate with them, but Rosalind does. We have to be careful, though — they’re bloodthirsty creatures if you get near their borders.”

Kimberlin rubbed his face. “Let me guess ... we’re not
near
the Rewall border, we’re
across
it. Am I right, Bumberpuff?”

The Prawatt’s body rattled. “Well, we needed to get their attention.”

John groaned. “Oh, man, this is going to end poorly.”

“
Mega
-poorly,” Ju said. “Dying is going to suck.”

Becca gave Ju’s shoulder a backhanded slap. “Guys, knock it off. This is serious.”

John looked at Becca, then back out the viewport. He shrugged.
DYING SEEMS KINDA SERIOUS TO ME, BUT WHAT DO I KNOW?
scrolled across his forehead.

“It will be fine,” Bumberpuff said. “Rosalind, please show the Rewall what we want.”

“Very well,” she said. “I don’t mind, if that’s what makes you happy. I hope this works — I’m really not in the mood for a fight today.”

Part of Rosalind’s hull extended, a pseudopod of living black metal that flowed, then dissipated as if it were a gas. It looked like she was bleeding into space, a rip in some ship-sized artery spilling black blood into the void. The spray shimmered, took on a color: purple. In seconds, the purple haze started to take shape, denser at the middle, where it began to glow brightly.

Quentin had spent the past few days staring at an image just like that. He wasn’t the only one to recognize it.

“The Cloud,” Becca said. “Wow, that looks
exactly
like the Cloud.”

“I try,” Rosalind said. “I try.”

Just inside the edge of her glowing creation, an orange light pulsed rapidly. Her message could not be more clear:
this is where we want to go
.

“That’s amazing,” Quentin said. “I guess a picture really is worth a thousand words.”

“True,” Bumberpuff said. “And a scale model is worth a million of them.”

The Rewall Leviathan sat there, obscuring the universe.

“What happens now?” Quentin asked.

“Three possibilities,” Rosalind answered. “First, Joey does nothing and leaves. It depends on his mood. Second, he decides we mean no harm and takes us where we want to go. Third, Joey gets pissy and tries to destroy me.”

Quentin looked back into the bridge, once again instinctively seeking out something to visually connect with when he spoke.

“Rosalind, can you beat that thing?”

She didn’t answer right away. The pause added tension where there was already plenty to go around.

“I’ve done it before,” she said. “I actually killed a Rewall Leviathan some fifty years ago, but it was a close call. I didn’t truly understand what a glorious sentient being it was until it was gone. It is not my proudest memory.”

Quentin had never felt so small. Whatever happened next, there was nothing he or any of his friends could do about it.

Rosalind spoke again, her voice more clipped, more urgent.

“I’m detecting power fluctuations in Joey’s core. It’s getting ready to move.”

George pressed his hands against the inside of the viewport bubble. He leaned forward, eyes wide and gleaming.

The Rewall’s shape changed, the sphere flattening somewhat. Kilometers-long tendrils stretched toward Rosalind.

“It’s coming for us,” Quentin said. “What do we do? Is it attacking?”

“I’m not sure,” Rosalind said. “It could be, or it could be coming to take us to the Cloud. I’m afraid I’m not very good at reading Joey. If he
is
attacking, we’re sitting ducks. I think moving out of the way — fast — is a good idea.”

Quentin felt cold metal wrap around his upper arm: Bumberpuff, leaning close.

“You decide if we stay or flee,” the captain said. “The Leviathan is the fastest way to reach the Portath Cloud, but if you want to leave, we leave.”

The impossibly huge creature drew closer, so large it blocked out the vastness of space itself.

“Don’t panic,” Rosalind said. “To take us to the Cloud, Joey has to engulf us.”

Quentin didn’t like the sound of that. “And if he’s not helping, but attacking?”

“Oh, same thing,” Rosalind said. “He’ll try to swallow us up either way.”

“Then how the hell do we know the difference?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Rosalind said. “If the hull cracks and I fill up with acid that dissolves you, that means Joey is hostile.”

The tendrils closed in, not far now, not far at all. If Quentin made the wrong call ...

Bumberpuff shook Quentin’s arm.

“It’s not too late to run,” the Prawatt said. “But
decide
. Now.”

If Joey was attacking, every sentient on Rosalind — and even Rosalind herself — would die. But if Quentin gave the order to flee, it would cost them at least six days. Jeanine didn’t have six days, if she was even alive at all. An impossible choice, made worse by the huge creature that now filled up the entire viewport bubble.

It was a coin toss with lethal ramifications. Quentin didn’t know what to choose, so he did something he would have never considered before this moment.

“George? What do you think?”

John huffed in disgust. “
Crazy George
decides if we live or die? You do know his first name is
Crazy
, right?”

Becca grabbed Quentin’s other arm. “John’s right — you can’t let George make this call.”

George turned away from the bubble. He smiled wide.

“I sense no hostility from the elder god,” he said. “Trust in his ways, Quentin. Trust in his ancient wisdom.”

Quentin looked out the bubble. He saw the hot, glowing pit at the Leviathan’s center. The tendrils had almost arrived.

If he was wrong, he was dead, and so were these people he loved.

The hard call
. Someone had to make it. Someone always had to make it.

“We stay,” he said.

The tendrils wrapped around Rosalind, cutting off all light from the nearby star.

8

Surgery

QUENTIN DID NOT DISSOLVE
in acid.

Thanks to being inside of Joey, Rosalind couldn’t see anything, or pick up any signals. When she wasn’t complaining about how the Rewall Leviathan was making her outer hull itch and blister, she shared what little she knew — since she was still in one piece, Joey was probably taking them to the Cloud. Probably.

Quentin knew they had entered punch-space only because he’d felt the sickening shimmer. Hopefully, the next time he endured that sensation, they would be at the point where Frederico had sent his last message. If so, Rosalind figured, they had a good two or three hours yet to go.

Doc Patah was using the downtime to work on Quentin’s pinkie. The
Burly Brown
had been far too filthy, Patah had said, to risk anything other than changing dressings. For all of Rosalind’s peculiarities, the ship was immaculate. She had grown another new room: white and plain, as spotless as any high-grade hospital facility, with a white table upon which Quentin sat.

The tip of Quentin’s tongue poked at his repaired tooth. It always felt so strange to have something in that space after it had been empty, even briefly.

“Thanks for fixing my mouth, Doc.”

“A trivial procedure, young Quentin. Your finger, however, is more demanding of my skill.”

Thanks to nerve blocks, Quentin felt nothing, but he watched carefully — it wasn’t every day you got to see your own muscles, ligaments and bones laid bare.

At first glance, Doc Patah’s mouth-flaps looked like clumsy things: two flattened snakes on either side of a wide opening. Up close, however, watching them work, Quentin was always amazed at their dexterity. The tips of the mouth-flaps could fold, twist, bend and pinch, could manipulate two or even three objects at once. It was no wonder the Harrah dominated medicine across the galaxy, especially in professional sports, where a patient’s health could mean the difference between priceless victories and costly defeats.

“Doc, is that my pinkie bone sticking out there?”

“No, young Quentin, that is the
right fifth-finger metacarpal
,” Doc Patah said. “I severed it just above the knuckle when you made your idiotic decision.”

Patah’s backpack doubled as both storage for the doctor’s medical supplies and a speaker that translated his native tongue of hisses and breaths into English. Quentin noticed a circular metal badge on the backpack, one he’d never seen before: an image of the GFL championship trophy, with the English words
Galaxy Bowl XXVII
arcing across the top, and
Ionath Krakens, Galactic Champions
arcing up from the bottom.

Quentin reached over with his good hand and gave the badge two quick knuckle-knocks.

“Wasn’t enough time for you to make that after the Galaxy Bowl,” he said. “Seems to me you had that made
before
the game. Pretty confident in me, eh, Doc?”

“No comment,” Doc Patah said.

“Anyway, seeing as you’re proudly showing off that badge, looks like my
idiotic decision
turned out all right.”

The Harrah let out a grunt of annoyance. He could pretend to disapprove of Quentin’s decision all he liked; Patah wanted to win, just like everyone else in the Krakens franchise. When Quentin had told him to amputate the finger, Doc could have said “no,” and they both knew it.

The Harrah worked on the pinkie stump, cutting away a bit of flesh here, cauterizing a bit there.

It seemed so strange to feel no pain at all, especially after how badly it had hurt during the Galaxy Bowl. Quentin’s little finger had stuck in the facemask of Katan the Beheader and been bent back at a sickening angle. In all the injuries Quentin had suffered — both on field and off — he’d never felt such agony.

Doc wore attachments of some kind on two of his five sensory pits. Maybe a high-tech magnifying glass or something like that. His left mouth-flap pinched around a scalpel and white sponge that was already dotted with the red of Quentin’s blood. Doc’s right mouth-flap held some kind of delicate tool with multiple lights that lit up either blue or yellow when Doc pressed it to various areas of Quentin’s stub.

The lights were more blue than yellow.

“You have extensive nerve damage, young Quentin. When we return home, or go anywhere with proper medical facilities, I should be able to fit you for a prosthetic. It will function normally. You will have to remove it for football, of course.”

“Can’t you just grow a new pinkie? I’ve seen people with regrown feet, even entire arms.”

“Not in the GFL, you haven’t,” Patah said. “Nor in the fighting leagues, nor on any Human who plays professional sports. When a limb or digit is replaced, it might
look
normal, but that replacement never regains full coordination. The player loses a step or two, reacts a bit slower, loses some degree of balance. You can imagine how that translates when it comes to performance.”

Quentin could. Professional football was a game of intelligence and preparation, true, but those things didn’t matter if you didn’t already have strength, speed and reaction time. If a Human running back got hurt and lost a fraction of a second in speed — say, dropping from a 3.8 40-yard-dash time to 4.0 — that was the difference between hitting a hole clean or arriving after it was already closing up. In the Sklorno and Prawatt, that difference was even smaller: going from a 3.0 forty to a 3.1 was the difference between a starting role and a spot on the bench; dropping to 3.2 would probably take that player right out of Tier One.

Speed. Strength. Reaction time. If any of those factors dropped, your career could suddenly be in jeopardy thanks to the faster, stronger, more agile backup waiting to take your place. For all the advancements made in medicine, training, nutrition and the plain fact that athletes kept getting bigger, faster and stronger, one thing remained the same — injury and age were the worst enemies of any athlete.

Quentin stared at the exposed stub of skin and muscle, blood and bone.

“It just seems weird you can’t fix that,” he said. “We can make ships travel faster than the speed of light, but we can’t grow a new limb that works correctly?”

“False equivalency,” Doc Patah said.

“False
what
?”

“Equivalency. It’s a logical fallacy. Didn’t they teach you about that in school?”

Quentin’s face flushed red.

Doc Patah’s sensory pits tightened.

“My apologies,” he said. “You are so intelligent, Quentin, that I often forget how your homeland cheated you out of even the most rudimentary education.”

Quentin’s face flushed anew, but for a different reason. He knew how good he was on the field, knew that he was one of the best football players in the galaxy, but he’d left school after the sixth grade; he wasn’t used to people calling him
smart
.

Doc Patah again pressed the device to the stump, watched more yellow and blue lights twinkle.