[Brackets] (10 page)

“Wait, wasn’t the equinox yesterday?” Killergremlin asked.

“No, tomorrow. Although, we are having our egg-swallowing ceremony at 11:45 tonight if you want to come to that, too.”

The group looked
over
at the General, who
avoided eye contact
. He mumbled something that sounded like, “I think I can um maybe,” and then cleared his throat as he tightened his headset. He couldn’t leave reality fast enough.
He secured the mask
on his dark hair and sealed it around his ears and eyes, shutting off the world.
When he was ready, he cracked his knuckles and pressed a button on his left ear to activate the interface, cutting him off from all of the sights and sounds of reality.

Grey, dark, whirling clouds spun past his face as he free-fell through the night sky, the whooshing air getting louder in his ears. Quickly, the clouds opened to a rich, sky-top view of the vast and glistening virtual city of Kaah Mukul in all its nighttime grandeur. He had little time to appreciate the view: the streets of the city were approaching very fast. With subtle and practiced movements on the control sticks, he maneuvered himself down like a skydiver, landing lightly near a highway overpass to the east of the Montezuma Arena. His body image materialized as an impo
sing, muscular soldier in black-and-
red armored motif. As soon as he was fully in, he drew his gun and took in his surroundings.

All was normal. The streets had some nighttime pedestrians heading for the Arena, but they paid him little attention. The sounds of cars speeding, braking, and honking competed with the call of macaws—the Kaah Mukul pigeon—and the streetlights bleached out
his view of the low, gray clouds above. His landing site was within close view of the most imposing edifice in the city. The Central Temple, just west of the Arena, reflected the city’s brilliant lights from its sheer obsidian walls, it
s blood-stained sacrificial alta
r near the top
bathed in crimson spotlights. The General waved up toward the temple, just in case. Rumor was that Myung-Ki Noh had a penthouse office up there, and the General always wondered if The Great Ahau of the city was watching. He soaked in the scene around him, and, for the thousandth time, felt at home.

But a good leader was always vigilant, so the General’s contemplation was brief. Gun still drawn, he made his way to a highway overpass just on the east edge of downtown. Careful that no one was following him, he ducked behind the remnant of an oversized stone wall. Huddled there was a small group of eager Tsepesian rookies that had been recruited in the last few weeks. Their group leader, a capable warrior but notorious whiner named Ohmen, saw the General approach and rose to salute. The others joined.

“General Studblood sir,” Ohmen greeted. “
Please
tell us that you need us to shoot somebody.”

“Eventually. Any movement over here?” Ohmen brought him into view of a house on the opposite side of the overpass. Two guards were patrolling the front, each dressed in white armor with jagged red marks across their chests.

“No visitors since we’ve been here. Maybe they won’t come down tonight.”

“Maybe,” said the General, thinking.

“Should we try and take out the guards?”

After a bit more observation, he said, “No, we don’t want to blow our cover just to take care of a couple of guards. Save the surprise for the big fish.” The General turned to face his troops. “This is an important mission. If we can take out the Scarmada here, we’re in position to dominate the entire east side. Then things can get really fun.” The group conceded unenthusiastically, and the General sensed the ebb in morale.

“I do have a side mission. I need a few of you to go to Little Cuzco, to a café on the north end called the ‘Sinan’. I have a meet there on Saturday and I’d appreciate some recon.” Some hands went
up at that—Little Cuzco was always fun to visit. Ohmen still sulked in the general direction of the rival Scarmada guards.

“Good,” the General said with vigor. “Anything else? I’ve got another patrol to check in on.”

“Oh, wait,” Ohmen called him back. “Typhoon has something for you.”

The General turned to the rookie called Typhoon150. He had joined up just the past week—part of the usual la
te-winter surge in new recruits—
and
was
an overzealous kiss-up.

“Have you seen it yet?” the rookie asked, his voice nasal and slightly digitized.

“Seen what?”

“Your bracket.”

In his headset, the General rolled his eyes as he understood. The recruit was convinced that he’d found an encoded message from a confidential source in the Ahtzon through some sports thing outside of Kaah Mukul. The General had his serious doubts: why would the Ahtzon care about college basketball? But a good leader never quashed enthusiasm, so he had gone along with it. From what Typhoon had explained, the “bracket” was the General’s message back to Typhoon’s supposed source, and he’d insisted that it be posted directly onto the ESPN site using a non-Kaah Mukul e-mail account that retained the General’s call sign. Anything more subtle would make him hard to find, the rookie said.

“What about it? Did your contact write back?”

“Not yet,” Typhoon said, “I’m sure it’s coming. But that’s not the interesting thing.”

“So what is?”

“The interesting thing is that all of the team choices we used to encode your message have won their games. You have a perfect bracket, General.”

The General most definitely did
not
find this interesting, but before he could change the subject, they were startled from behind by a bright explosion. The Scarmada safe house was on fire. Sounds of gunfire blasted above the popping flames and panicked shouts. An approaching patrol of Ahtzon, dressed in green SWAT-like armor with bright stripes of paint on their helmets, was firing on the house. From behind the smoke, scattering Scarmada were haphazardly
shooting back. Ohmen looked ecstatic.

“What do we do?” he asked, his weapon already raised. “Do we fight? Do we take them all?”

The General wasn’t happy. It had taken them weeks to find this rival safe house, and now all the rumored munitions stockpiled inside were gone, thanks to a sloppy Ahtzon raid. His first instinct was to come from the rear of the Ahtzon and take them out for their stupidity. But, he remembered, a good leader couldn’t let emotion get in the way. He had to do the logical thing.

“We let the Ahtzon do our work for us. We wait for them to clear out the Scarmada, then we set up an outpost in one of the nearby buildings. With them gone, we can take over the block.”

“So we’re just going to wait?” Ohmen complained incredulously.

“We have to wait.”

“Why? How is that supposed to be fun?”

“Fun?” the General snarled. “Winning is fun. Winning means making smart decisions, like, not being insane and surprising an Ahtzon patrol that’s already on alert. Once we control the whole east side, we can go out and kill whoever we want and they can’t stop us. But right now, we’re outnumbered, and that means they will make us die if we attack them. That’s a loser move.”

Ohmen just gripped his gun tighter and paced over to Typhoon150. The General ignored them, trying instead to make out what was going on in the smoke-obscured gunfight. There were some Scarmada members giving resistance, amazingly. The General could barely see one individual at the forefront. The man was big, with bright red hair and a thick beard. His uniform was mostly white but cut diagonally down the middle with a jagged green slash of paint. The Scarmada General. Studblood recognized him both by his looks and by the brazen display of his reputed fearlessness. Was there any way that his group could sneak around and take him down?

“Ohmen, what do you think about—”

But Studblood had barely spoken when Ohmen and Typhoon hurtled themselves
toward
the firefight, guns firing erratically toward the Ahtzon officers.

“Aaaaaaarh!” Ohmen screamed, plowing bullets into the nearest officer. The Ahtzon were surprised and turned away from the
few remaining Scarmada to return fire. Typhoon, standing alone in the open, took shots to the chest and head, collapsing into a pile of virtual dead meat. Ohmen took cover behind a car as officers closed in on his position.

The General watched this all in disbelief. Ohmen had blatantly disregarded his orders. Not only that, but they had ruined any advantage they’d gained by watching things unfold in secret. Soldiers were approaching the besieged car from all sides as Ohmen called for help. But the General just stood, watching and calculating. The fire destroying the house in the background created a sudden flash so bright that
he
froze. Was it some heavy-duty explosives about to blow? Some Ahtzon distress signal calling for reinforcements? Just a glitch in the graphics display? One last squint at the scene confirmed that the house was beyond saving, as was Ohmen.

“Let’s get out of here. Follow me,” he ordered.

“What about Ohmen?” asked one of the other recruits.

“He m
ade a choice, and it was bad,” t
he General snapped back. “He disobeyed orders, and he’s going to p
ay the consequences. Let’s go.”

There was little argument, and the diminished group turned away from Ohmen, still pleading for help over his intercom. The last thing the General heard was a final, angry curse directed at him, then nothing.

The General
led the men away from the area
and sent them on their way to Little Cuzco. He wanted to be alone.

Two men down from pure recklessness, he thought, making his way past the Central Temple to a park just south of the Montezuma.
Idiots
. And Typhoon had the makings of a decent code-breaker at that. He had to find a way to keep his people better disciplined. If and when Ohmen and Typhoon came back, which they eventually could, there would have to be some reckoning. There had to be order; his officers had to stick with the plan he chose or there would be serious consequences for the whole tribe. It was times like this that he lamented the youth and immaturity of so many of his tribe. He felt sometimes that he was a great man among great brats. He was sure that he wasn’t the first general to feel that way.

As he stewed, he heard a thunderclap, then the ping of rain
on armor. Was it possible that the storm had followed him all the way in there from the parking lot outside? Of course not, he thought as he ventured out in the city. None of this was real.

[
West Division
: Second Round]

[Saturday, March 21]

Perry awoke the next morning with a headache.
His vaguely Romanian facial features—remnants of his mother’s genetic heritage—contorted in mild agony.
He kept the lights dim because it was taking a long time for his eyes to grasp the concept of morning. With some coffee and Pop Tarts, he was out the door by eight AM, becoming part of that elite neighborhood club of Saturday early risers. The drive was familiar, taking him away from the small house he’d grown up in, left, moved back to, and eventually inherited from his mother, past the turnoff to the King County office where he was a data administrator for public rec
ords, and finally to the Yesler
Way Plaza, where the Kaah Mukul Center had made the neighboring fast food joints more profitable almost overnight. For most people, the Center didn’t open until nine o’clock, but his Tribal Wars key card allowed him access ahead of the masses, a privilege he was happy to maintain through a significant part of his monthly paycheck. Although, he acknowledged hungrily, it would be nice to be the top-ranked Tribe and have the monthly fees waived. He wondered what kind of money the Scarmada leader made outside of Kaah Mukul. Once inside the Tribal
Room
, Perry tied on his bandana out of habit and respect, then sat down for his Saturday morning ritual of cleaning out his e-mail accounts and scouring the Kaah Mukul community boards.

The morning’s e-mail was mostly bland: some ads, some spam from the ESPN service where that code had been put up, and the usual chatter between the rank-and-file Tsepesian soldiers, many of them weekend warriors that he commanded from afar. Ohmen had written an angry rant using a limited and nasty vocabulary, but Perry deleted it before he read too much. Ohmen would be back once he cooled down, he reasoned.

An item of actual interest was a link to a video interview with Myung-Ki Noh and the sports editor of the
London Telegraph
. For a year, the Ullamaball Tier One league had been drawing such huge crowds of on-line spectators that it was now equaling live professional sports in popularity worldwide.

“
To be clear, is it fair to say there is no way that Ullamaball, as it is played within Kaah Mukul, could become a real sport in real life?
”
the interviewer asked. Mr. Noh shrugged aloofly, a prickly bush of hair jutting out wildly from his youngish face. The interviewer continued:

“But Mr. Noh, don’t you think it strange that a sport that isn’t even humanly possible would
draw more attention than a real-
life athletic event?”