Catie found herself wondering later, The latest what?--for when things quieted down again enough for her to notice things, she was in the "locker room" with the Slugs, their entourage, and about fifty other people, mostly from the sports networks. The locker room wasn't any such thing, of course, any more than it had to be in any other virtual sport. The players' actual bodies were mostly in their own homes, and if they needed showers, or someplace to change their clothes, such things were only steps away from their own implant chairs. But the need for a place to celebrate after a won game, and to deal with the press, still existed, and so here they all were, the Slugs laughing, shouting, jubilant even after only achieving a draw. At first Catie tried to keep herself calm in the midst of all this, but it was just silly. So much excitement, so tightly concentrated, simply overwhelmed your senses--the reporters running around sticking virtual mikes (representative of link-out programs to their own broadcasters' servers) into people's faces, the champagne being squirted around with total abandon--for when the session finally broke up, no one would actually be sticky, and no money for the bubbly stuff would actually have been wasted--the hoots and shouts of victory, the jokes and jibes, and the big stuffed banana slug being paraded around the locker room, with some team members and hangers-on bowing to it ceremoniously, and others following it around in an impromptu conga line--Catie couldn't help but laugh, especially when George's co-captain, Mark, left one interview with the CNNSI reporter and came up to her with what looked like a very big peanut butter jar wrapped in prismatic gift paper. He was holding the lid on, and he said to Catie, in a mysterious voice, "Want a look?"

  "Sure," Catie said.

  He opened the lid. She peered in. Then she raised her eyebrows and said, "I thought they were bigger."

  "Aww," Mark said, sounding disappointed. Plainly he had been expecting a more emphatic response. "And you looked like such a sweet, innocent little thing, too."

  Catie grinned. "Guilty on one count, maybe. But when you've had as many weird things put down your back by your little brother as I have over the last seventeen years, one slug more or less doesn't matter much. Besides, I think that one's asleep."

  "Asleep? How can you tell?" Mark stared into the jar. "Listen, seriously, how can you--?" But at that point one of the reporters from AB/NBC came up to Mark with a "mike" and started asking him questions about Chicago's "front five," and Catie slipped away, grinning. That response had paralyzed her brother, too, a few years ago, and had won her at least an hour of peace somewhere along the line.

  Very slowly the locker room began to clear out, and as it did, George Brickner drifted over toward Catie, glancing around him with an expression that overtly looked like satisfaction. But there was still something else going on too, that uncertain quality in his gaze that Catie had noticed before and had not been able to put a name to. Seeing it again now, it began to bother her more than ever. If there was a form of art she preferred above all others, it was portraiture, and after a lot of studying of faces, over time, she was beginning to get a sense of whether the face in question was (for lack of a better phrase) comfortable with itself. George's face was not, and Catie kept wondering why.

  "Well," he said, watching one last reporter getting into Melendez's face again, "at least that's over. Now we start getting ready to go into the lottery."

  Catie raised her eyebrows at that. "You're going to have to coach me here a little, George...I'm still new to this game. Though I think I heard some of the reporters going on about this earlier."

  "Oh. Well, at the quarterfinal level, the teams that have 'survived' that long go into a lottery to determine who plays who in what order. Originally, it was a way of avoiding accusations that one team or another was using undue influence to have first crack at the spat volume on the Space Station." He waved away one of his teammates who was coming at him and Catie with one more champagne bottle. "Pete, why don't you drink some of the stuff? Nice vintage, no calories!"

  The answer was a rude noise, after which Dalton departed to squirt someone else. "...Anyway, later they kept the same routine to make sure that time slots in the dedicated 'sealed' server were distributed fairly, since the security protocols in the single server only allow one game to be played at a time. A spat tournament isn't something you can stage over multiple venues, like a real-world sport. At least it couldn't be done so far. That may change now. With money pouring into the sport the way it has been, they'll be able to afford to set up and maintain at least one more dedicated server, maybe two. One of the good things that'll come of all this sponsorship, I hope, eventually."

  George sighed then. "At least the hardware upgrades will be good if the software is improved...the stuff we have is already getting kind of clunky. In particular, there are problems handling the larger 'crowds.' That's an increasingly thorny issue, and it's going to get worse as the virtual 'gate' gets bigger and more and more people are attracted to the sport."

  "Don't tell me that you're longing for the good old days when spat was smaller, and only a few aficionados would turn up...." This was something that Catie had heard from at least one of the commentators over the past couple of weeks.

  George laughed at her. "Are you kidding? This time, right now, is going to be looked back on in twenty years as spat's golden age. I like it the way it is." Then his face clouded. "I'd like it better still, though, if we'd won today. We should have."

  "But you didn't."

  George looked at her sharply. "You don't understand me," George said. "I wasn't saying, 'I wish we'd won.' I was saying, 'We should have won.'" He looked at Catie to see if she was getting what he was saying, and he lowered his voice. "Especially in the second half. The force we applied to the ball, the way we were handling it, should have produced a certain given result then...and it didn't. Something was wrong in there. I felt it again in the third half...which was why I was insisting on so much contact, and only shooting at goal from up close."

  Catie understood him, and what he was saying unnerved her. "You're saying that the feel of the virtual spat space, the way it was behaving, had been interfered with somehow."

  He nodded.

  Catie shook her head. "I know there are games where that happens on purpose. The way a golf greenskeeper can alter the 'lie' of the greens to make a hole harder to play...or the groomers at a bowling alley can varnish or wax the alleys to make the ball behave one way or another. It even happens in baseball...the guys who mow the lawn do the infield to favor their team's hitting tendencies."

  "That's legal, within limits, and for those games. But in spat the server is maintained by a central authority, not by the individual teams, and the spat volume's behavior is supposed to be neutral."

  "So to change the way the scoring surface was acting...it would mean that someone had to tamper with the server," Catie said, also keeping her voice low. "But that's supposed to be impossible. The servers are sealed, aren't they?"

  "They're supposed to be," said George. "But exactly what that means in operational terms, I haven't the slightest idea. Do you?"

  Catie didn't, but she resolved to find out, and she knew someone who could make the issue as clear to her as it needed to be. "No," she said. "Not at the moment."

  George nodded. Catie looked at him and got the clear sense that he knew more about what she was up to than he was letting on, but he was being cagey about it. Maybe he was wise...for there was always the possibility, in any virtual encounter, that one was being listened to. Even encryption was not always everything it was cracked up to be. For some of the more routine forms of encryption, the "soft" ones, various law enforcement organizations held back-door keys...and not even law enforcement, Catie knew, was immune to occasionally being compromised. When you came right down to it, even law enforcement officers were just people, and people, however regrettably, had weaknesses that could occasionally be exploited by those with the inclination to do so.

  "Tell me how it felt to you," Catie said after a moment.

  "Like the ball was bouncing wrong," George said. "As if the virtual 'rotation speed' of the spat space had been altered without warning. Not a whole lot. But when you work in microgravity for long enough, you get to know the feel. We've had astronauts in to check it for 'reality,' and they've always said it was right on."

  Catie nodded again. "Meanwhile," she said, "did you get my move?"

  "Just pregame." George gave her an amused look. "Conservative."

  "If you can tell that much about me from just one move," Catie said, "you're pretty good."

  "That's what they tell me," George said, and gave her a superior look, which he couldn't hold--a moment later he was laughing.

  "When's the lottery?" Catie said.

  "Tuesday evening," George said. "Usually it's not a big deal...but I hear it's going prime time this year." He was still smiling, but once again that expression of guarded concern was in his eyes.

  Catie looked across the room at Hal, who had recovered quite nicely from his late arrival at the game, and was now gazing down into Mark's jar with interest. A second later he took it from Mark and headed in Catie's direction. Time to put on her game face.... "When you send your next move along," she said, "I'll get in touch, and we can have a little chat."

  George nodded. "I'll look forward to that."

  "Cates," Hal was saying, "how can you tell it's asleep?"

  Catie smiled.

  Elsewhere, in a virtual bar far away, it was no longer afternoon, but night; and two shadowy forms sat on either side of a marble table, under the blue-tinged mood lighting, and eyed one another coolly.

  "Lucky for you they drew," Darjan said.

  Heming kept himself still, and didn't gulp...though he felt like it. Chicago's draw had been entirely too tight a thing. "I can't understand why they didn't win," he said.

  Darjan gave him a dry look. "Maybe our principals' enthusiasm is misplaced," he said. "The team was given the equivalent of nearly half an hour's worth of free goals. They weren't able to make any decent use of the time. Whatever that may suggest to us, it's suggesting other things to the people who're most interested in what they do next. We're going to have to look at more robust forms of intervention."

  "Still, they got into the play-off pool anyway," said Heming after a moment. "The draw is Tuesday. The odds of them being matched off against South Florida again are minuscule."

  "Forty-four to one is not minuscule," Darjan said quietly. "Two point six billion to one, like a respectable lottery, the same chance you have to be hit by a meteorite, now that's minuscule. Forty-four to one is too damn good. And no matter who South Florida plays, their odds are still too damn good. This has got to be sorted out, Heming. Fast. What are you doing about it?"

  Heming didn't quite squirm, though he wanted to. "Some people are going to go have a look at the South Florida team members' Net machines," he said. "'Routine maintenance.'"

  Darjan sat quiet for a moment. "That sounds like a thought," he said finally. "As long as you're not planning anything so infantile as having the machines fail in the middle of a game."

  Heming looked briefly horrified. "Uh, of course not. Little changes, though, in the programming of each. Installation of conditionals."

  Darjan was silent for a moment. "That might work," he said. "As long as deinstallation procedures are included as well. Be a shame if someone went looking at their Net machines' routines, after the fact, and found something out of the ordinary there."

  "Of course deinstalls will be put in at the same time," Heming said. "There are ways to do such things that won't alarm the usual antiviral and system-scan diagnostics. It's all taken care of."

  "Then get on with it," Darjan growled. "The first game is Thursday...and it had better go the way our principals want, if South Florida is involved...or they're going to start taking your intervention, or lack of it, personally."

  This time Heming did gulp, whether he wanted to or not.

  Monday afternoon Catie got in from school and went online again to clean up her virtmail, and to make another attempt to get in touch with Mark. It wasn't like him to be incommunicado for so long, except for his actual school time. He seemed to practically live online, and Catie thought that the only reason he didn't get in trouble over this was probably that his parents had to spend so much of their time online as well. She stood there in the Great Hall of her workspace and said, "Still nothing from him?"

  "Nothing. Should we call the media and tell them the engagement's off, boss?"

  "Fff," Catie said, a soft sound of annoyance, but it wasn't serious--she had other things on her mind. I wonder if he's had to go away suddenly with his dad or something. They do travel a lot--

  She plopped down into her beat-up comfy chair and brooded for a few moments. Well, no point in worrying about this any more until I hear from him, she thought. If I--

  "Incoming call," said her workspace manager. "Requesting entry into the space, if you're available."

  "Who is it?"

  "James Winters."

  Catie's mouth fell open, and she stood up hurriedly. Every member of the Net Force Explorers knew James Winters by sight. He was the group's liaison to Net Force as a whole, and theoretically on call to anyone in the Explorers if they had some problem. That was the theory, anyway. Every Explorer also knew perfectly well that Winters had other work in Net Force which was far more important than his liaison work, and that it would be stupid to bother him with things that weren't genuinely crucial. More than stupid: suicidal, at least to your employment prospects at Net Force, if you seriously intended ever to work there...for James Winters was unquestionably going to be one of the committee that decided whether you got hired, and if you had ever wasted his time on purpose, he would certainly remember.

  When he came looking for you, however...all bets were off. "Let him right in," Catie said.

  A doorway formed in the air, dark at first, then revealing a rather standard-looking government office with afternoon sunlight coming into it through the stripe-shadows of Venetian blinds, and through the door stepped James Winters. About six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with a Marine brush cut and a thoughtful, chiseled face, Winters stood there in conservative street clothes--cream short-sleeved shirt, dark trousers--and looked up and around him with recognition and (Catie thought) some pleasure. "Afternoon, Catie," he said.

  "Good afternoon!" she said, trying not to sound too strangled as she said it.

  He turned around to look at the frescoed ceilings of the Great Hall, and the carved marble pillars. "Nice job. Did you do this from scratch?"

  "Uh, yes," Catie said. "It's taken a while...but I see a lot of the real building."

  "Yes, your mother works there, doesn't she," Winters said, continuing to look upward.

  "That's right. Can I offer you a seat?" Catie said.

  "Thanks, yes."

  "Space?"

  "One chair coming up," said her workspace management program, and produced an executive-style swivel chair off to one side of the "giant" chessboard. Winters went to it and sat down, glancing at the game as he did so. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything."

  "Not at all."

  "Good. Let me start out by saying that this has nothing to do with the Net Force Explorers, as such."

  "Oh," Catie said. Boy, that sounded intelligent.

  Winters smiled, a dry expression. "All right," he said. "Catie, I see that you had a meeting with George Brickner the other day."

  Catie blinked at that. "Uh, yes. He was in town with his team before the Chicago game." And Net Force is watching him. How interesting...

  "Your brother set that up, I take it."

  "Yes, he's buddies with one of George's friends."

  "Do you mind if I ask you a question or two about that lunch?"

  "No," Catie said carefully. "But I hope you'll tell me why."

  Winters gave her a hard, thoughtful look. It wasn't an unfriendly one. "Before we get into detail on that," Winters said, "tell me if I'm up to speed on something. You've been working in imagery sciences, haven't you? Fine arts mostly, but a fair amount of emphasis on techniques for manipulating virtual spaces."

  "That's right," Catie said. "Staying at patina-level isn't much good if you're going to get seriously involved in sampling and analyzing virtual content. You have to go down to structure-level as well. I may not be a code wizard as yet, but I can recognize from an image what's been done to it to make it look the way it does, and what else has to be done to change that, or to restore it if there's been a change."

  Winters nodded. One part of Catie's brain was shrieking at her, Are you out of your mind, you're only seventeen, how can you possibly be making claims like this so calmly to this man? while another, perfectly at ease, was saying in response, But they're true. "False modesty," her father was always telling her, "is potentially more fatal to your career than a bullet in the brain. If you know how to do something, say so. You don't have to brag, but you do have to tell yourself the truth about what you know how to do; otherwise you can't make those talents available to others...and if you can't do that, what good are those talents to you or anybody else?"...Now, Catie thought, she would find out whether her dad was right.

 

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