The MVP

The MVP By Scott Sigler

(The Galactic Football League Series, Book IV)


To my dog, Emma.

For fourteen years you delighted,

inspired and annoyed me.

To the Junkies.

As always, this is for you.



BOOK ONE


The Off-Season


1





Incident on the Bridge


AS A KID, QUENTIN BARNES HAD DREAMED of seeing the galaxy.

He’d spent the first fifteen years of his life on a tiny, backwater colony called Micovi. He’d been an orphan and a miner, which were nicer terms to describe his real role in life: he’d been a slave. A slave earning subsistence wages that didn’t fully cover his company-provided food and housing, wages that would never be enough to pay off the criminal debt incurred by his brother for the horrid crime of stealing bread. Quentin had been trapped, destined to live a life of dangerous labor, fighting every day just to survive long enough to hear the mine whistle that signaled the end of his shift.

Then he’d found football. Or, rather, football had found him.

Football threw the universe wide open. At fifteen years old, he’d signed with the Micovi Raiders of the Purist Nation Football League. He’d moved out of the miner’s shantytown and into a dorm owned by the team. The next season, when he took over the starting quarterback position at just sixteen years old, he’d earned enough money to get his own apartment — it was the first time in his life he’d had any privacy, any room that was just his.

Then there was the travel, actually getting off of Micovi to visit the four planets, six colonies and the orbital station that made up the Purist Nation. He had traded slavery for the stars. He had seen more of the Nation than an orphan miner could have ever hoped for.

And that was just the beginning.

His natural talent, his work ethic and his intensity carried him even beyond the borders of his homeland and into the Galactic Football League, where only the best of the best played. He became the starting quarterback of the Ionath Krakens. He saw not only the planets of the Nation, but stars and worlds and stadiums all over the galaxy.

Playing in the GFL brought so many changes, the biggest of which was dealing with non-Human species for the first time in his life. He’d grown up in a system based on hatred of anything that was not like him. His grade-school education included training on how to kill all of the “lower races.”

In the GFL, however, he had to play against and alongside those races. He’d entered the league as an uneducated bigot but quickly learned that his attitude would not bring him the thing he wanted most in life — victory on the football field. Quentin learned to let go of his preconceived notions, learned how to evaluate each sentient as an individual. Those once-hated aliens became his teammates, then became his friends and, soon after, became his family.

Discovering the universe. Meeting new races.

These two things had seemed like a dream.

Now, that dream had become a nightmare.

Quentin Barnes stood on the small bridge of the Touchback, the ship that carried him and his Krakens from system to system, from game to game. His body throbbed with pain, remnants of being smashed around like a toy when enemy rounds had ripped open his gun cabin. He’d been in an actual starship battle, he’d taken out a pirate fighter craft — in doing so, had he taken the life of a sentient? Quentin had damn near died himself as the cabin depressurized, had almost been ripped into space through a hole far too small for his 7-foot-tall, 380-pound body. His friends — Crazy George Starcher and Mum-O-Killowe — had saved him, risked their own lives to pull him out.

Quentin looked to the bridge’s sealed bulkhead doors, where George and Mum-O stood. His two teammates stared out the bridge’s floor-to-ceiling viewport windows. George looked shocked and mesmerized. Mum-O had no expression, at least not one Quentin could read on the Ki’s black-eyed face. Stoic as ever, Mum-O patiently waited for what might come next.

Quentin turned to look at the four-man bridge crew dressed in their neat orange and black uniforms. They sat motionless at workstations that faced a holographic image of the Touchback. Portions of the holographic ship glowed red, others yellow, indicating the damage suffered during the pirate attack. So much damage … how long would it take to bring the Touchback’s engines back online?

Too long. There seemed to be no chance for escape.

Captain Kate Cheevers had steered the Touchback away from the pursuing pirates, had fled in the only direction that gave the ship a chance. In doing so, the Touchback had crossed the Sklorno Dynasty border into Prawatt Jihad sovereign territory — out of the frying pan and into the fire. She sat slumped in her captain’s chair, staring out the viewport like everyone else. She held a clear bottle by its narrow neck, slowly turning it, making the brown liquid inside slosh and wave. Her body language told the story: she had lost all hope.

Quentin stood in the middle of the bridge with Messal the Efficient, a three-foot-tall Quyth Worker, and the hulking, long-armed, eight-foot HeavyG monster known as Michael Kimberlin. Like George, Mum-O, the bridge crew and Captain Kate, they stared, stared out the viewport window at a gnarled, black ship so big that it blocked out the endless expanse of space itself.

It was hard to process the scale. In fact, Quentin wasn’t even sure he could process it, just like he couldn’t really process the size of a planet.

Can something artificial really be that big? Is that even possible?

Kimberlin, Quentin’s tutor and the Krakens’ starting right offensive guard, had just told everyone the monstrosity outside was a Prawatt capital-class warship, the largest known vessels in the entire galaxy. Kimberlin had said something else as well, something that Quentin hoped to High One he hadn’t heard correctly.

“Mike,” Quentin said, “you want to repeat that?”

“Which part?”

“The part where I thought you said something like, I’m afraid we’re all going to die.”

Kimberlin nodded. “No need to repeat it, my friend, you have it word for word. It has been an honor to know you.”

Quentin shook his head. There was a way out of this. There was always a way out.

He turned to Captain Kate. “Can we fight them?”

She shook her head and laughed, a dark sound that matched her defeated posture. “Not gonna happen. What little firepower we have left probably wouldn’t do anything other than make them mad. Our engines are offline, so we can’t maneuver. The punch drive hasn’t recharged, so we’re stuck here. I hope you’ve made peace with your imaginary sky daddy because you’re about to find out if he’s real.”

“We can’t give up,” Quentin said. “There has to be a way out of this.”

Captain Kate called down to her bridge crew. “Maurice, kindly adjust the display so pretty-boy quarterback can understand what’s really happening.”

One of the orange- and black-uniformed men sitting at the holodisplay turned to face Kate. “Yes, Captain,” he said, then turned back to his controls.

In his three years with the Krakens, Quentin hadn’t spent much time on the bridge. He never noticed Maurice before — if he had, he would have remembered the crewman’s yellow skin. Not a tinge of yellow, or a yellow-pink, but yellow, like he’d been covered in paint. Quentin had never seen yellow-skinned people before. If he lived through this, he could ask Kimberlin where they came from.

Maurice worked the holographic controls floating above his workstation. The glowing image of the Touchback took up about half of the bridge. It was as long as two of the crew lined up head to feet and as tall as one of them from the waist up. The holographic ship started to shrink, slowly at first, then rapidly, reducing to the size of one man, then just an arm, then just a hand. As it shrank, Quentin saw another glowing image fuzz into view — an irregular thing that looked like a chipped, pitted boulder and was clearly far bigger than the display area allowed.


The Touchback image shrank to the size of one of Quentin’s fingers. Only then did the boulder have enough room to be shown in its entirety, a ball some twelve feet in diameter.

“High One,” Quentin said.

Kimberlin nodded. “Yes, it is quite spectacular.”

Quentin again looked out the viewport to the approaching Prawatt vessel. The ship didn’t look that different from space itself: it was black, with lots of little lights. But the ship’s blackness had a gnarled, corrugated texture, like bunched-up tree roots that had punched through the dirt and been exposed to decades of rain and snow.

Crazy George Starcher walked toward the floor-to-ceiling viewport. He reached a hand out halfway, as if he wanted to touch the object out there but knew he could not.

“The Old Ones,” he said. “They have come for us.”

Quentin shook his head. “They’re not that old. They’ve only been around about four centuries.”

Kimberlin’s big chest shook in a silent laugh. He thought it was funny, and Quentin knew why; Quentin had just shared historical information learned through many hours of Kimberlin’s tutoring — Quentin had worked hard to leave his prejudiced upbringing behind and become a more educated person, a better person, and yet he and his teammates might die right here at the hands of an alien race.

Die before they could win a GFL title.

Like a silent dream, the giant, black, gnarled ship suddenly reached, a chunk of it flowing like colorless molten metal or a glob of rigid pudding, extending out toward the Touchback. Quentin had a brief thought of one of the educational holos Kimberlin had showed him, of an amoeba extending a gooey arm to engulf some microscopic prey, then a vibration rolled through the Touchback.

Maurice checked a readout. He turned to face Captain Kate.

“Let me guess,” she said. “We’ve been enclosed?”

“Yes, Captain.”

She nodded, took a swig, then somehow managed to slouch even deeper in her chair. “I’m a genius like that. Are they coming in?”

Maurice turned back to his controls. “Looks like they’re creating a seal over the landing bay. They’re pressurizing.”

“Dammit,” Kate said. “Just open the shuttle bay doors before they blow them open. If we do manage to get out of this alive, that’s one less thing we have to fix.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Quentin looked around the bridge, waiting for Kate or one of the four bridge crewmembers to do something.

“We can’t just wait for death,” he said. “Shouldn’t we send out a distress signal? Go to the lifeboats and eject?”

Captain Cheevers spun a slow circle in her chair. She stopped when she faced Quentin. “You want to do something, pretty boy?”

Quentin nodded.

She smiled that smile that made him so uncomfortable. “Maurice,” she said, “are they onboard yet?”

Maurice had to clear his throat to speak. The sense of hopelessness was giving way to one of fear.

“Yes, Captain,” he said. “It looks like they are spreading out, either running bypasses on internal doors or cutting through them. At least four … no, five appear to be moving toward the bridge.”

Kate pointed at Quentin with her left pointer finger, her left thumb up high. “Bang-bang, Barnes. Our visitors are on their way here. If you think you can do something, something other than crap your pants, be my guest. Maurice, do we have atmospheric integrity?”

“Yes, Captain,” he said. “The Touchback is completely engulfed, we have full pressure everywhere.”

“Then open all internal doors,” Kate said. “We don’t want to make the crawlies any more angry than they’ll already be.”

? ? ?



QUENTIN WATCHED as the bridge’s thick bulkhead doors slid open, revealing the corridor beyond. He looked around the bridge, staring at each person in disbelief. “You’re all just going to let them walk in here?”

Kate nodded. She took another drink. She pressed a button in the armrest of her chair.

“Attention, all personnel,” she said. Quentin heard her speaking but also heard her words amplified by the speakerfilm out in the corridor. He knew that the rest of the ship was hearing the same words.

“This is Captain Kate. We have been boarded. Stay where you are. Do not try to reach the lifeboats. If you want to live, do not make threatening gestures, fight or in any way resist the boarders. Just take a seat, stay calm and await further instructions.”

She clicked the button again, then slouched back in her chair and took a long drink from the bottle.

Moments later, they heard sounds coming from out in the corridor. Quentin and the others turned to face the open door.

They waited.