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| Fanthomas, (Wiki.) |
Louis Shalako
Breathing easily, taking long deep
breaths, Svetlana Beliveau blinked sweat out of her eyes, unable to brush away
a few fine strands of blonde hair under the visor, and waited for the puck to
drop. With total clarity she saw that the team hairdresser had missed three or
four vital strands and left them long on her right temple. They tickled and
annoyed her, falling into her right eye.
She spat and wished for a hydration
bottle, glaring at Borge Sninka, looming in his white jersey. All these Finns
and Swedes in the game. Coming over here and taking our jobs.
“Grrr.” She growled into his eyes
as he stared back calmly, jaws working back and forth.
The hovering android waited until
all the players were in position. The face-off was to the left of Howling
Monkees goaltender Dave Bletchie and the score was one-nothing in favour of the
Witches Brew in the red jerseys, which were her favourite.
With its characteristic twang the
hatch popped open, the puck came down and her opponent Mark Sninka’s stick
swept through the bulls-eye as she reacted with lightning speed, holding his
stick back and knocking the puck to her own winger, number eleven Marcia Feeney.
Sninka had anticipated the drop and it was whistled dead on the play. So now
she would have to do it again.
“Asshole!”
“Thank you.”
Her heart always warmed to Sninka
after a few shifts, he really was a nice guy, a proper gentleman. How they hell
they achieved that was a mystery known only to his trainer. She refocused.
She skated out of the circle and
arced around back in again. She put her stick on the ice in impatience as
Sninka did his own circuit, mouth going, ordering last minute instructions to
his winger and defensemen. She hunched. She banged her stick, so did he, and
then they froze.
The puck dropped.
This time Sninka was caught on the
wrong foot, and she managed to backhand it out of his reach then pass it to
centre ice. Paula LeBlanc took a blinding slap-shot that gave up a dangerous
rebound. Her forwards raced in and the defense waited for a pass back. She was
right there at the right-hand hash-marks, pushing and shoving with Solomon. The
Witches were playing their offensive zone well tonight, a good sign. There was
a brief scrum in front of the net before Howlers goalie Dave Bletchie dropped
and smothered it.
Androids hovered as horns and whistles
blew, and players shoved and pushed and mouthed foul words at each other in the
goal crease.
The game had a lot riding on it. The
Witches were leading the series but the Howlers were only two places out and
there was a mathematical chance of taking the number one spot before the first
round of the playoffs.
This would pay off big in the overall TV money
apportioning at season’s end.
With two minutes left in the first
period and thirty-seven seconds left in the Witches’ power play, they lined up
for another faceoff and waited for the puck to drop again.
Svetlana was ready but Sninka was
antsy and couldn’t get a grip on his emotions. He kept going too soon.
Visibly
upset, he was waved out of the circle by the robot’s signal arm and his place
was taken by Howler right-winger Dale Skaggs.
Skaggs was blindingly fast lately,
and he pulled the puck aside before she could even react, and his left defenseman
Ed Smithers smacked it the length of the ice. Nine players raced after it, with
the Howlers defense holding back and letting Sninka and Skaggs fore-check deep
in the zone.
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| Maxim, (Wiki.) |
Witches goalie Red Lincoln came out
and dropped on the puck and the play was whistled dead. The arcs and edges of
strong players on sharp blades knifed up a flurry of snowy rooster-tails.
A
Howler got a little too close and there were precautionary whistles as Solomon
and the Witches’ number nine May Belmont pushed and shoved.
With a one-goal
lead to protect and another two full periods to play, it was vital to take
advantage of the player advantage, but the Witches just couldn’t make anything
out of it.
Play went back and forth with Howler Randy Booth coming out of the
penalty box at full burst. With both sides equal and another set of face-offs
in each end, the seconds ran down and then the horn blew.
Players filed off and down to the
dressing rooms, Coach Linda Borzekowski’s mouth going non-stop all the way and
the assistant coaches filling in the blanks with individual players.
Sports pundits and colour
commentators ratcheted up for a twenty-minute stint as the stands began to
clear a bit for bathroom breaks and to fetch more plastic cups foaming with the
icy beverage of the Gods.
#
The dressing room was bedlam, with
players streaming in, dropping into their trainer’s chairs, people rushing to
and fro and everyone talking and shouting at once. The air was blue with ozone
and condensation. It smelled like a dentist’s cabinet in there, she thought, or
a recently-washed and waxed hospital hallway, or maybe an apothecary’s dumpster
just before inventory-time.
Svetlana sat down and swung her
legs up into the troughs and laid her arms in the prescribed positions,
carefully blanking her mind of such extraneous thoughts. She was just
vibrating. She hacked at sticky phlegm in the esophagus, wishing she could get
it out. The taste in her mouth was the worst, it never left you. They kept
poo-poohing it and never did anything about it.
Bennie and Amerigo dropped down on
each side and began taking her skates off as legendary Doctor Cornelius Amiri
put the view-mask on and plugged into her head. Women could take more pain and
physical abuse over a longer term than their male counterparts, and he was
privileged to work with one of the league’s premier stars. With their lower
centre of gravity and the strong, wide-spaced hips to build on, they had a
competitive advantage over the taller, narrow-hipped males.
Their pit routine well rehearsed, tugs
and pushing at her ankles and wrists kept her aware of the outside world as
they plugged in the transfusion and ion-swapping array tubes.
“Okay, Svetlana, how do you feel?”
Her emotions were ruled by the
chemical performance enhancements and her feedback was crucial in monitoring
the levels of gonane, phytosterols and brassinoids in her bloodstream. She must
be objective. On the plus side, they were a goal up and Crabbe had thrown a
massive check on Solomon early in the period that had set the whole tone from
there.
She felt better already as the
rejuvenating oxygenated blood flowed into her, banked in the early part of
summer, after they had dropped out of the second round of the playoffs, and she
had been allowed to binge on junk carbs for a three-week period to combat the
resulting anemia.
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| Jsmeds, (Wiki.) |
“I want to kill him.”
Amiri didn’t ask who. It didn’t
matter, actually. What mattered was just the right combination, each chemical component
had to be at their proper levels.
“Argh.”
“What?”
“It’s just that I feel kind of slow
in the legs and hips today. I feel fat, if you want to really know.”
“Ah.” He had suspected as much, as
her performance in the first period, the slow take-offs, the hesitation on her
one and only scoring chance bore out.
One flick of the wrist and it
should have gone in.
“Good girl. Don’t worry, we’ll fix
that right up…”
Amerigo tugged at his sleeve.
“We got a problem.”
“What?”
“Pump failure or software glitch.
Groin pump.”
“Shit.” He thought furiously,
faster than any other sports doctor alive today as far as he knew.
His own brain’s performance
enhancements, all chemical, were among his most dearly guarded secrets. A
clicking at his pelvic area, near the right hip bone, confirmed it had just
gone into overdrive.
“Okay, grab the other pump. And
we’ll analyze the program for you, honey, before you go out.” He jacked into
the laptop and selected a battery of bug sweeps. It might be hackers, one never
knew these days.
Her wave-forms were all over the
place, and the lactic acid suppression took time. The pump had to be changed
immediately for it to have any chance at all in the next sixteen minutes. The
reaction was exothermic, and you could only turn up the heat-exchange so much. It was
optimal to go for core cooling of the body between the second and third period,
but he had hoped to get some in now as well. More than anything, they had to
find the problem. He gave her hand one last squeeze of reassurance and began to
unbuckle the miniature unit from her pelvis, now exposed by Bennie in
preparation for the pump-change. Amerigo was unwrapping the plastic from their
new unit.
“How much more plasma do we have?”
Bennie shrugged.
“I don’t know, ten or eleven
litres.”
Doctor Amiri did a very quick
assessment. They only had so much in the bank.
“Okay, grab another litre and
that’s it.”
His assistant stepped up and over
and pulled open the fridge door with smooth alacrity. It was a polished
routine. There was only so much time between periods and the coach wanted to
talk to them as well. Benny poked the needle in. The blood doping bag hung
inverted. He gave it a squeeze to get it started, looking down at the exit
point on her ankle to verify the flow.
So Svetlana was doing good then, it
was just that their own metering was off on the minute quantities of HGH-type steroids
and pain inhibitors necessary for today’s professional athletes to get the best
out of the musculature and skeletal framing they had been born with. There was
the long history of repetitious injuries to consider as well. His mind raced,
her spreadsheet and flow charts, graphs and wave-forms always in the forefront
of his mind.
Over the working life of the
athlete, optimal performance and high statistical averages in terms of games
played, points earned, awards and championships, and the totals in the
win-loss-tie columns had to be maximized for their full remuneration potential
to be realized. Their initial physical conditioning could only take them as far
as humanly possible. Men and women like him did the rest. As for some of the
trainers and business agents around him, especially on the Howlers
dressing-room floor, he didn’t exactly have the highest opinion.
Svetlana was the best because he
was the best. She knew she wouldn’t be around forever, and they must make hay
while the sun shone.
END
