"Damn," Ski said wistfully, "wish I was a pilot. I thought about it, too, one of my uncles is in a flying club back home, the club has a single engine, uh, Piper, something like that. My uncle flew me and my father to Minneapolis once for a Bears game, that was great. Never had the money for flying lessons, though."

"That would be so cool." I agreed.

"Yeah, cool enough. He still died in the game." Cornpone pointed out.

"Uh huh, yeah." Ski said. "So did we, and we didn't do shit before we died. I'd rather die up in the sky doing something, than get vaporized in a railgun strike I didn't see coming."

Inspired by watching the basketball game, Ski, Cornpone and I went to another court and found a pickup game we could join. Ski had a really good outside shot, I concentrated on feeding the ball to him and crashing the boards on defense. It felt good to play hard, to sweat out frustration. All of us were pissed that we'd died and accomplished nothing during Valiant Shield. Sure, us getting blown up from orbit was a realistic scenario, our question was what we were supposed to learn from it? And how were the Kristang supposed to evaluate our combat capabilities if all we did was get an unlucky roll of the dice by some Kristang computer in orbit? If those imaginary dice had rolled another way, some other unlucky bastards would have 'died' instead of us.

My zPhone on my belt vibrated during the game, I didn't check it until we took a break for water. It was a message from Shauna, she wanted to know if I was busy, and if not, did I want to get together?

Did I?

Did the sun rise in the east? On Earth, I mean.

Hell yes!

Here's a simple test to tell whether a guy wants to get together with a girl:

Step One- does he have a pulse?

Step Two- is he conscious?

There is no need for a step three.

Like the idiot that I am, I typed in <Is this a booty call? smiley face with wink>

Fortunately, my survival instinct caused me to erase that message before hitting send. Instead, I typed, as casually as I could <Sure! Playing hoops, we're winning. Be done soon>

And then caught hell from Cornpone and Ski because my head was clearly no longer in the game, I kept feeling phantom incoming text vibrations from my zPhone. We won the game anyway, not that anyone was serious about keeping score.

Damn. The game was over and no reply from Shauna. Had I been too eager? Too casual about it? Crap. My grandmother told stories about how she had sat by the phone at her house, this is before cellphones, sat by the phone, waiting for a guy to call. It sounded pathetic to me, back then. Sitting by the phone, instead of being out having fun, in case some loser guy decided to call?