Free Taking One for the Team by Vanessa Cardui

Helmets on, vests on.
    Raven paused for half a second to tuck her good-luck piece into the back of her helmet.  A curse-marker with her face on it—they’d printed those up in Miracle, after Raven had scored twenty-one goals against their team in the Harvest Games.  Final score, 84-80 Longacre, which had won Raven’s hometown three hides of disputed land and shared use of Miracle’s white spring.  No question, against locals, Raven was damned good.
    Weren’t playing locals now, though.
    She had to jog to catch up with the rest of the team; they all walked out onto the field together, and a cheer rose up from the bleachers.  Just about the whole town had turned out to watch the game.  It wasn’t often you saw stormers in a sleepy backwater like Longacre, and the stormers’d bet fifteen gallons of whisky and an automatic pistol against two sheep and three-fifty pounds of cornmeal that they'd be able to beat the home team by thirty goals.
    Damned if they would.
    When the team took the field, the coaches had just finished walking out the boundaries and checking the goals.  They shook hands.  Coach Langdon, best coach in the world, last of the Langdons of Longacre.  And the stormer coach, a slick-looking fellow not much older than Raven, with a metal arm and a metal leg.
    Stormer team was already waiting.  The three towers stood on their stumps in front of the goal, heavy chains with prickle-catches wrapped around each arm, with the third chain coiled at their feet.  Right-side tower was a woman.  That was unusual.  Most women players were runners, light on their feet, nimble enough to duck under those swinging chains and dodge tackles from the wings, to get in close to the goal and score.
    Women playing wing—like Raven—was pretty common too.  She was fast enough to grab a loose ball when she saw it, strong enough to pull down runners who were making a try.  And when she got a chance, from just about anywhere across the center line, she'd find the goal, three times out of ten, which was near the numbers the papers gave for pros.
    Not that Longacre got papers, much—those were for the city-states and the Coast.  What they got were three months old, more, read ten times before they got there, and dragged the whole way through the mud.  But there were the scores and the names of the teams, and Raven knew them all.
    But she’d never seen anything like the stormers’ center tower.  Next to him, the massive lady tower looked petite.  Could be he was genetouched; people didn't get that big without a few rads in their blood.  Fast, too, and accurate—the stormers had done an exhibition the day before, doing tricks, and the center tower had caught three runners with three chains—pow, pow, pow—and wound them so tight that they'd've been out for the duration.  Course, a tower who committed all three chains was also out for the duration, but that'd be worth it.  More to the point, those runners were exactly where he expected them to be.
    The Longacre team took their places, towers on the stumps, runners and wings up against the center line.  Raven found herself almost nose-to-nose with the stormers’ blue wing.  She’d been watching him in the exhibition too, and he was good. He’d lined up fifteen balls on the line, then run along it, bobbing and weaving, and each time he picked one up, he tossed it at the goal.  They all hit, fifteen in a row.
    Real good, better than Raven.  But it was easier to throw when there weren't any towers between you and the goal, no wings to pull you down or runners trying for an intercept.  And their gold wing didn't show any tricks like that.  Looked strong, but little slow, and he was favoring his right leg.
    Gold wing was the point of weakness.
    Stave, center tower, Longacre team captain, came down from his stump and up to the line, shook hands with the stormer captain, one of the runners.  Then he went back, and the ball went up in the air.
    Game on.
    First