Page 4 of Bro Code

“Oh – ah, no, just–”

“Then fuck off out of my ear.”

Louis didn’t have time to die cringing from embarrassment: the crowd whooshed a gasp, and he snapped his eyes to the ice. New York had taken a shot on goal and it had gone wide. He watched the players battling for the puck in the corner before he remembered he was supposed to be watching the tablet screen, not the ice.

He pulled out a stool and sat at the counter that ran under the window at the front of the press box. He set the tablet in a stand beside his open laptop. He put one hand on the laptop keyboard and poised the other ready at the tablet, and tried to shut out everything else.

The press box was not what he’d been expecting. Ten years he’d been watching hockey, wondering what it would be like to see a game from this angle, and now he was here, it was…underwhelming. He’d imagined a room upholstered in velvet and trimmed with gold. Little tables serving champagne and caviar. A comfortable work environment. Luxurious, even.

It was not. It was freezing, first of all. There was no glass between the counter Louis sat at and the arena. The five-hundred-dollar suit he’d bought for tonight was sending the cold air straight to his bones. His feet were numb in a pair of tight leather dress shoes, and the team-issued parka he’d zipped up over the suit jacket was not really helping.

Next to him, his boss Holly – a brisk, terrifying blonde in her forties who’d come up through a hockey family and took exactly zero shit from anyone – had her gloved hands shoved deep into the pockets of her parka as she glared down at the ice. Gloves would’ve been great. But Louis needed his fingers for typing and using the tablet.

“Everything streaming?” said Holly.

Louis nodded without looking up as his left hand tapped the laptop keyboard to create a timestamp. The crowd roared, and he resisted the urge to look up. He could see what had happened on the tablet, anyway: Nic had scored. The little green Arsenault dot was now taking a victory lap around the rink diagram. Automatically, Louis’ eyes flipped to Liam Harris’ dot. Sure enough, Liam’s dot was occupying the space Nic’s had left open.

Louis smiled. He loved watching them play together — ever since he went to watch Nic in the Olympics back in the spring. Louis had been the first person to spot their “special bond”. Liam trading up here wasn’t just good for Nic: he was going to make Montreal unstoppable this season. Six foot three, two-twenty-five. A monster. Six years ago, he’d broken Nic’s shoulder on the ice, and when they’d ended up sharing a room in the Olympic Village and Nic started fucking him, Louis had been so concerned he’d flown all the way to Italy to talk him out of it. Then he met Liam. And it was like, “Oh, okay. This is not a monster: this is a misunderstood teddy bear.” At least, when it came to Nic.

He watched Nic’s dot cross to a dot from the opposing team and do a circle around it. Number nineteen: Riley Webb. Louis’ stomach did a confused little tumble, and he quickly put his eyes elsewhere, tapping open another tab to watch a few rows of heart rate data dump out onto the screen. Riley Webb was not someone he needed to be thinking about right now.

The period ended tied – Riley scored with ten seconds left on the clock – and Louis breathed a sigh of relief: his first period of a professional hockey game, and nothing had caught fire. But there was no time to relax. Scrubbing his coils under the hood of his parka, he quickly stretched his aching shoulders, cracked his neck, and went right back to the laptop. He had precisely eighteen minutes.

His fingers were trembling as he ran the command that compressed the millions of rows of data from first period. He ran a script to sync the timestamps, uploaded the packet to the team’s cloud server, and was snapping the laptop closed and shoving it into his backpack when Holly said, “Why are we losing a step on the left side breakouts?”

Louis froze. Hand halfway into his backpack. He now only had ten minutes to sprint down to the coach’s video room, show the coaches anything they asked to review before next period, probably get yelled at by Coach Myers because surely he’d done something wrong, sprint back up here, and get set up for next period.

He glanced at the laptop in his hand. “Uh…”

“Our left side transition speed is completely broken,” said Holly. She indicated her own tablet. “I’m looking at the telemetry. Is this aerobic deceleration?”

This kept happening with Holly. It was like being dropped into Star Trek and asked if the warp thrusters were operating at maximum capacity. Ordinarily, he’d be psyched about that – Star Trek was probably his favorite thing after hockey. Right now, though, he was drawing a blank. Computers were one thing — hockey jargon and anatomy? They were quite another. His job was just processing the data. He didn’t know how to talk about microscopic muscle adjustments and mechanical load recovery.

He stood with his mouth ajar and hand stuck in his backpack. “Right… Uh…”

“On the dump-ins, it looks like our defensemen aren’t hitting their explosive stride thresholds, and New York’s forecheck is eating up our cushion,” she said, like that made anything clearer. “Check the biometric telemetry from the last ten minutes. Are we looking at aerobic deceleration, or is it a processing lag on the puck read?”

Captain, the warp core is facing a critical antimatter overload! I’m seeing a massive subspace particle distortion in our positronic laser beams! Shields up⁠—

“Louis!” Holly snapped.

“Sorry!” Yanking the laptop back out, he flipped it open and set it on the counter. “Right, ah…sorry, what did you need?”

“The biometric telemetry! From the last ten minutes!”

Nodding quickly, he hammered a command into the keyboard. Ten minutes’ worth of data flooded the screen and he routed it to the visualizer to make it easier to read. Touching his glasses with a knuckle, he leaned in and squinted at it, but Holly’s shoulder pushed him aside as she pulled her glasses down from the top of her head and leaned in too.

“I don’t need your analysis,” she muttered. “Just pull up the data and make it readable.”

He nodded and stood back with his lips sealed and hands clasped, looking over Holly’s shoulder until she nodded briskly and straightened up. “Their top speeds are identical, so it’s not fatigue. New York’s winger is just cheating up the wall by three feet.”

“So it’s…a positioning issue?” he ventured.

“Yes.” She dropped his gaze like he’d just become about as important as an empty yoghurt cup, and turned her attention back to the arena, pushing the glasses back up. “Make sure you let Myers know when you get down there.”

Silently thanking Star Trek for getting him through the jargon, Louis shoved his laptop into his backpack, and headed for the door.

Halfway through second period, Riley Webb took a hit. Louis watched it happen on the tablet – Riley’s dot moving toward the puck at the same time as Liam’s. As they collided, Louis winced and looked up at the ice. Nic was skating toward Riley with a hand out to help him up. Riley waved him off and skated back to the bench, looking furious.