The Champion (56 page)

“Your promises don’t mean a shucking thing,” she said.

Froese nodded. “For now. But I help those who help me, and you helped me significantly. Now get in the shuttle so we can get out of here.”

Her jaw clenched. Her lip curled up in a sneer. Quentin wondered if she might bite through her tongue.

“I’m not going anywhere with
you
” she said. “Or with that little cotton ball of a traitor. I’ll find my own ride, Froese.”

Quentin watched her storm out of the shuttle bay.

Froese rubbed at his face. He had won but seemed defeated. The effort of bullying Yolanda into silence had taken its toll.

“We had to do this, Barnes. You understand that, right? For the good of the league.”

Quentin’s heart hung leaden in his chest, but he nodded.

“What about Zak’s wife and kids?”

Froese shook his head. He couldn’t seem to make eye contact.

“They have to be questioned,” he said. “Local authorities are picking them up now.”

“Wait a minute ...
questioned
? You mean like on the
Regulator
?”

“No, worse,” Froese said quietly. “By the Creterakians. If Goldman’s family doesn’t know anything, they’ll be fine. If they do?”

He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to. Back on Micovi, Quentin had seen more than his share of kids cut down by the bats. Creterakians didn’t differentiate between children and adults.

Froese must have seen the look on Quentin’s face. For once, the commissioner’s expression softened with sympathy.

“If the wife or the kids get hurt, that’s not your fault,” Froese said. “Goldman should have thought about that before he started bombing innocent people.”

Quentin nodded again. Froese was right, Quentin knew it ... so why did this feel so horrible, so inexcusable?

“Barnes, thank you for your help. You’re
sure
there’s no one else on the team involved with Goldman?”

“No one,” Quentin said instantly, hating himself for it.

“Then good luck with the rest of your season,” the commissioner said. “Leiba, let’s go.”

Quentin walked out of the shuttle bay. This wasn’t over, not by a long shot. As much as all of this sucked, there were still more hard choices to be made.

“Computer?”

[YES, QUENTIN?]

“I want Kimberlin and Procknow in my quarters,
immediately
. Tell them they both know why.”

“YOU’RE CRAZY,”
Jason Procknow said. “You know that, right?”

His massive arms were crossed on his massive chest. At seven feet, eight inches tall, Procknow was one of the few sentients that Quentin had to look up to, and at 612 pounds, the HeavyG could probably snap Quentin like a twig.

Quentin desperately wanted to believe Procknow. Watching Yitzhak get hauled away — and his brave moment to take all the blame, to protect whoever he was protecting — had gutted Quentin. The guy was a terrorist. That should have made it easy to watch his demise, but it had not. If more teammates were taken away, it would be just as hard to handle.

Maybe Quentin had imagined the emotional reactions of Kimberlin and Procknow, read into them, perhaps. Maybe the two had nothing to do with Yitzhak. Quentin’s heart told him to think that way, but his gut said something else.

“Jason, stop lying,” Quentin said. “I
know
.”

Quentin didn’t actually know. If he had, he might have already turned Procknow and Kimberlin in to Froese. But Quentin only had a hunch, and you didn’t ruin a person on a hunch.

Procknow made a
pffft
noise and looked away. “Whatever. This is nuts. I don’t have to put up with this crap just because a dainty little quarterback wants to start something.”

And yet Procknow made no move to leave. Quentin could see right through the lie, could spot the second-year player’s tells. Procknow was a bad actor — but at least he was better at it than Kimberlin.

Mike sat on Quentin’s couch, taking up most of it, head in his hands. He was a wreck; not from fear for himself, although there was definitely some of that, but rather for Yitzhak.

“You don’t know what you’ve done, Quentin,” Mike said.

“Me? I didn’t do a damn thing. Zak’s in the Guild, Mike, and so are you. So is Jason.”

Jason came forward, pointing a finger.

“You keep shooting off your mouth, you little
orphan
, and you’ll find out—”

“
Stop it
,” Kimberlin snapped. He raised his head, looked at Procknow. “Quentin knows. It’s too late to do anything about that.”

Procknow glared at Kimberlin. “Well, he sure knows
now
, doesn’t he?” He returned to his spot on the wall and leaned back against it.

Quentin’s gut instincts were right. He wished they weren’t.

He hadn’t been called
orphan
in years. The infinity symbol tattooed on Procknow’s forehead should have been a constant reminder of the man’s true loyalties, but in seeing him every day, Quentin had visually tuned it out.

“Zak was your teammate,” Procknow said. “How could you rat him out?”

“I didn’t
rat out
anyone,” Quentin said. “I had no idea who it was until Whykor turned on that device. He hacked into the
Touchback’s
systems and accessed communication records or something like that, figured it out from there.”

“
Hacked in
,” Procknow said. “Any ship this big has secure systems, Barnes, I’m not buying it.”

“The
Touchback
is old, and so is its hardware,” Quentin said. “Whykor told me he could have taken over internal systems if he wanted to. I don’t know the details, Jason, and don’t try to blame me for any of this. I’m not in the ZG, you are, all
three
of you.”

“
Were
,” Kimberlin said. “Past tense, Quentin — you have no idea what you’ve done.”

“You can go ahead and stop repeating that,” Quentin said. “I’m not the one that helped start a goddamn
uprising
in Bord.”

Kimberlin’s face clouded over with rage. He stood up so quickly the entire couch shot away from him, tumbling across the floor like it had been tossed by a tornado. Eight feet of HeavyG muscle eyed up Quentin.

“Zak tried to
stop
the uprising,” Kimberlin said. “But you didn’t bother to
talk to him
before you ratted him out!”

Tried to stop it? What kind of crap was Mike trying to pull?

“I didn’t rat him out,” Quentin said. “Yolanda didn’t even know who was sending the messages. We had no idea until Whykor pinged that device.”

Procknow made the
pffft
sound. “Yeah, but you knew
somebody
was sending signals, right? You knew one of your teammates was going to hang, and you still helped that little purple bitch.”

Quentin pointed at him. “I don’t need your racist crap right now, Jason. You got it?”

The defensive lineman pursed his lips, stared back with disgust if not outright hatred.

Quentin turned back to Kimberlin. “You said you
were
in the ZG. What the hell does that mean?”

Kimberlin said nothing for a moment. He turned, picked up Quentin’s couch with one hand, set it back in place, then sat on it.

“I was in the Guild for years,” he said. “So was Yitzhak. But we got out.”

It had been heartbreaking to see Yitzhak taken away, but to finally hear this from Mike’s mouth ... from a man that Quentin respected, even idolized.

“How could you, Mike? How could you join up with those butchers?”

“We joined because we wanted to end Creterakian rule,” Kimberlin said. “We thought it wasn’t right to have one race controlling the others. That’s not democracy, Quentin. It’s totalitarianism.”

“This isn’t a tutoring session, so spare me the civics lesson,” Quentin said. “Or are you going to tell me the only path to democracy is by killing civilians?”

“Whatever,” Procknow said, “Like the bats don’t kill civilians? Maybe all your money made you forget where you come from, what it’s like back in the Nation.”

As if Quentin could ever forget. He’d seen dozens of people cut down by the bats, sometimes for something as simple as not getting on the ground when asked, asked just
one time
.

“Oh, you
do
remember,” Procknow said. “Then maybe the question isn’t why Mike was in the ZG. Maybe the question is why you’re
not
. You don’t give a damn about your people, do you, champ?”

Procknow spoke with conviction and energy, but something about it rang hollow; not
false
, exactly, but maybe not true enough.

“
My people
never gave a damn about me,” Quentin shot back. “Because I was an orphan, as you just pointed out.”

“Bats kill
orphans
just like they kill everyone else,” Procknow said. “More of them, even. Orphan or confirmed, it doesn’t really matter — the bats kill
our
people like they kill people everywhere they go.”

Kimberlin stood up again, slowly this time. “That’s enough, Jason. Look, Quentin, Zak and I were in the ZG. Yes, we facilitated violent acts, but we attacked
Creterakians
. I never attacked anything myself, I was just a go-between, shuttling information or other resources from one cell to another. Yitzhak recruited me while I was still in Tier Three. It paid well then, that’s how he brought me in, but I quickly saw the bigger picture, the importance of true independence. The Guild was always hoping to snag someone early in hopes the player would make it to Tier One and get full diplomatic immunity. With me, that strategy worked.”

Quentin remembered being bound hand and foot to a metal X, the bats asking him if he had involvement with the Zoroastrian Guild.

“The league caught on to that,” he said. “They gave me a lie detector at the
Combine
.”

Procknow raised his hand. “Same here. Easy test to beat, though, unless you have the pain tolerance of a five-year-old.”

Quentin ignored him.

“Don’t tell me you only attacked bats, Mike,” he said. “I watch the damn news. I’ve seen years of attacks on civilians. The Guild is a bunch of murderers.”

Which is exactly what the Creterakians are
 ...
so why is one better than the other?

Kimberlin shook his head. “Not when Zak ran it. The Guild
changed
, Quentin. New people came in, took over. Things got bad.”

The words danced in Quentin’s head.

“Wait a minute ... did you say when Zak
ran
it? Yitzhak Goldman was the
leader
of the Zoroastrian Guild?”

“A big chunk of it, yes,” Kimberlin said. “But like I told you, it changed. When Zak was in charge, we targeted only Creterakian military installations. Garrisons, barracks, troop ships, that sort of thing.” He stared at the floor. As he spoke, his words gradually became fainter and fainter. “Then new blood started coming in, around early 2675. By ’76, things got bad. The new guys weren’t patriots or nationalists, they were thugs. Thugs with money to buy loyalty. They started pushing to add sympathizers to the list of targets.”

“Sympathizers? What do you mean?”

“Like the holy men,” Procknow said. “Scumbags who win favor with the Creterakians by
helping
them.”

For that, at least, Quentin shared some of Procknow’s anger. Church leaders had embraced the Creterakians, used the bats to eliminate rivals. Sometimes holy men curried favor with local garrisons by publicly telling people to do whatever the Creterakians asked. Some religious leaders even went so far as to say the bats were a tool of High One himself, and that Creterakian orders should be followed without question. Those people were
traitors
, Quentin knew ... but to murder them for it?

“It started with sympathizers, but the new blood quickly ramped up their rhetoric,” Kimberlin said. “They claimed any target — including civilians — was justified as long as the attack damaged the Creterakian Empire. Zak tried to push back, tried to keep operations limited to military targets. The new blood then accused
Zak
of being a sympathizer, said that’s why he wanted to keep the attacks small. The two conflicting schools of thought turned into a genuine schism.”

“What’s a schism?”

“A split,” Procknow said. “Like when we were little kids and that group on Mason became the Purist
Orthodox
Church, and Butcher Smith ordered them all dead. Remember?”

Quentin did. For much of his life, he’d thought that maybe his parents had fled because of Smith’s pogrom.

“So now instead of one group killing random people, you had
two
,” Quentin said. “Awesome.”

Kimberlin shook his head. “No ... we killed
each other
.”

His voice was a husk, a dry leaf blowing on frozen ground. It held anguish, a deep pain that stabbed at the soul. Quentin’s anger and frustration receded, tidal waves frozen just before the crash.

“That guy you killed,” Quentin said. “The one you won’t talk about. It was because of this schism?”

Kimberlin nodded. “It was in a warehouse in Red Storm City. We were having a meeting to iron out the differences between the old guard, which I was a part of, and the new guys. One of the new guys, Farmar Lwazi, his name was, a backup rookie tight end for the Jacks ... he brought a gun. He started shooting. I took a bullet in the arm, but I got to him. I ...” Mike looked at his own hands, massive things as big as Quentin’s head, flexed them in and out, in and out.

“I
hit
him. I hit him so many times. I’m not sure which punch killed him, but I think it was one of the early ones.”

Procknow let out a long whistle. “Damn, Mike — that’s hardcore.”

Kimberlin moved his jaw side to side, gave his whole body a shake.

“Anyway, that’s what told me it was time to get out. They’ll kill me if an easy opportunity comes up, but I’m not that important and they won’t go out of their way to get me. Zak, though, that’s different. That device that beeped in his pocket? That let him talk to various cells. That’s why he kept it for so long. Zak had informers in areas of the Guild, and if he caught wind of an attack on civilians, he’d try to send out a counter message. The new blood runs the Guild now, Quentin, and they wanted Zak gone, wanted it
bad
.”