Thieves of Light

CHAPTER ONE

The doodle in the margin of Christopher Jarvis's notepad was quickly growing to epic proportions.

It had started out as a caricature of the President, then mutated into a creature that would have done a special-effects magician proud. Finally it dissolved into a mass of whorls and curlicues that climbed up the side margin and spilled out like an ink tsunami onto the white space at the top of the page.

The whole business had occupied him for the better part of ten minutes. By any standard, it was a success. That was ten minutes less he had to listen to Mrs. Martini drone on about the phylum Bryophyta, ten minutes closer to the end of the period and Friday's final bell.

"Christopher-"

It took Jarvis several heartbeats to realize that he had been caught. His pen stopped moving. His greenish-blue eyes flicked upward from the paper. At last he raised his head and looked toward the front of the classroom. The look on Mrs. Martini's face said that she'd been waiting for some time for him to respond. An amused titter, female-variety, confirmed it.

Though his gaze never wandered from Mrs. Martini's face, Jarvis knew the titter came from Denise Barrows, two rows to the right and one seat forward. It was not just that he knew her voice. He was aware of everything she did and everything about her-the way her long black hair fell across one eye as she worked at her desk, the way she carried her books on one hip as she moved past him in the corridor, the half smile that always preceded her easy laugh.

Jarvis liked her laugh-except when it was at his expense. Which it stood a good chance of being before Mrs. Martini was done with him.

"Yes, Mrs. Martini?" he said with studied innocence.

"I had asked you a question."

"I know," he said. "I didn't understand it."

Raising an eyebrow questioningly, the petite biology teacher repeated, "I had asked you to explain what hornworts are?"

Conscious of Denise, Jarvis did not want to admit he didn't know. But there were other options.

"Hornworts?" Jarvis said lightly. "I think that's something you get from handling tuba players."

Laughter filled the room, uniting the class with him and against Mrs. Martini. But it was a costly escape, for his teacher's face frosted over.

"See me after class," she said, and turned to a student in the front row for the answer.

Denise glanced his way, hair falling over one eye, and laughed amusedly.

At him.

Slumping back in his seat, Jarvis tried to look like he was listening. But his mind was begging, Get me out of here -

When the bell finally rang, Jarvis waited until most of the other students had noisily filed out before gathering himself together and approaching Mrs. Martini. She ignored him as she collected her teaching notes and placed them in a soft-sided briefcase.

"I have to catch the bus," he said finally, prodding her into taking note of him.

"Since when do seniors ride the bus?" she asked without looking up. "Don't you ride with-David Reynolds, isn't it? He'll wait for you."

Not long, Jarvis thought. Not with a Friday four o'clock reservation at the Photon Center and a tournament tomorrow. "Not long."

"Then he's not much of a friend, is he?" Mrs. Martini asked, retreating behind her desk. "In any case, you only live about eight blocks from here. Staying a while won't be any hardship."

Jarvis crossed his arms over his chest in an unconscious defensive gesture. "You seem to know a lot about me."

For the first time she looked at him. "For better or for worse, Christopher, you're the kind of student that teachers are aware of."

"I guess you're going to tell me that this time it's for worse," Jarvis said. "Look, I'm sorry I made fun of you. I didn't mean anything personal by it."

"You didn't make fun of me," she said, sitting in her chair. "You had a chance for a cheap joke and you took it. Probably because the truth was a little too uncomfortable."

"The truth?"

"That you weren't listening. That you weren't prepared. How many chapters behind are you in your reading?"

"Just a couple."

"Just a couple," she repeated. "When are you planning to catch up?"

"I'll be ready for the test."

"Just ready enough to just barely get by," the woman said pointedly. "I don't understand you, Christopher, and I don't mind admitting it. I looked at your file, your aptitude scores. You can handle this material with ease. But you don't seem to care enough to make the effort for excellence. What's going on?"

Jarvis bristled. "If you're trying to ask me if I'm having a problem with drugs, the answer is no."

Shaking her head, Mrs. Martini answered, "I'm trying to ask how I can help you get more out of your ability."

Jarvis dropped his arms to his side and slipped his hands into the pockets of his jeans. "Look, I only took Botany Survey because I needed a senior science course and it was the only one without a lab. That makes me no different than half the class."

"And that's enough excuse for you? That there's others who don't care either?"

Christopher sighed. "Mrs. Martini, I know you mean well and all that. It's just that I don't see any sense to memorizing things that I can dig out of a database in a thirty-second dial up with my dad's PC. There's a lot more facts out there than I've got brain cells."

"Even if you're right, there's something to be said for learning to think."

"I do all right in that department. Isn't that what those tests said?"

She stared at him. "You think you have the world pretty well figured out, don't you?"

"The part of it I know, anyway."

"It's such a shame. I'd love to see you go all-out sometimes," she said with a shake of her head.

He smiled and ran his fingers back through his blond hair. "Come down to the Center sometime."

"The what?"

"The Photon Center." He flexed his muscles and struck a combat pose, knees flexed, hand gripping an imaginary phaser pistol. "Meet Bhodi Li, champion of justice."

Her look was one of disdain. "It's a game, Christopher. It's not life."

"Not life," he corrected. "Life and death. Is there anything else you wanted to talk to me about, Mrs. Martini?"

She threw her hands in the air resignedly. "No."

David Reynolds was waiting for him at the curb outside the school's main entrance, the engine of his 1970 Skylark convertible rumbling impatiently, his slightly shaggy black hair blowing in the breeze.

"Almost gave up on you," Reynolds said, slipping back behind the wheel as Jarvis climbed in from the other side. "Figured she was using you as mulch for her hornworts."

"Nothing so serious."

The car lurched as Reynolds coaxed the shift lever into drive. "Which speech was it?"

"The worried-about-my-future speech," Jarvis said. "Didn't have much zip to it, though. It seemed like she felt like she ought to be pissed at me, but couldn't quite muster the energy."

"Well, it's Friday afternoon for her, too," Reynolds said, gunning the engine as he guided the car through the mostly empty parking lot.

"True," Jarvis said. "It's probably just as tiring to be boring as it is to be bored."

The lot outside the Photon Center was more than half full, which meant a crowd inside. Though they were in time for the first match of the hour, they were late enough that they ended up on opposing teams for the first time in months, Jarvis with the Red, Reynolds with the Green.

As he strapped on his chest pod, which bore the infrared sensor, and the battery belt which powered it, Jarvis sized up the opposition. All but one was familiar, and the newcomer was a nervous-looking thirteen-year-old who would almost certainly end the match with a negative score.

Beside David, who used the name Kuda Lambda, there were four other strong players on the Green team. Though he knew what to expect from them in the arena, he did not even know their real names. He knew only their Photon names-Gor, Black Eagle, Oz, and Mordred. Together with Kuda Lambda, they would provide a stronger than usual challenge.

So much the better, Jarvis thought, pulling the helmet down over his head and adjusting the visor. There aren't any twinkies on a tournament team.

Jarvis showed considerably less interest in the members of his own team. The six-and-a-half-minute matches were fast-paced enough that, in a pickup match like this, most of what passed for strategy developed spontaneously on the run. Besides, most of his success at the game had come as a loner.

That didn't mean that there was no benefit to having someone watching your back, but successful team play was more a product of practice than planning. Warriors that fought together often developed an almost instinctive synergy that made them more effective together than separately. But strangers who tried to duplicate that interaction usually ended up worse off than if they had all fought solo.

The warning alarm sounded, and the combatants filed in to take their places in the arena. While the referee ran through his familiar list of admonishments, Jarvis caught Reynolds's eye and nodded, as though offering a salute. Reynolds grinned back and touched his gloved finger to the side of his helmet.

"Welcome, Photon Warriors. Commence strategic maneuvers at audible command," boomed the canned voice of the Master Computer. "Signal: five: four: three: two: one:"

Colored lights began to flash and the pulsing beat of rock music filled the arena as the players dashed for their chosen objectives. Bhodi Li sprinted up a ramp toward the sniper's nest on the forward deck, then flung himself flat on his stomach as two Green players came storming up another ramp from the opposite direction.

Before his opponents had even seen him, Bhodi had tagged each of them with the beam from his pistol. Twenty points off the top, Bhodi thought, scrambling to the left for the shelter of a low wall.

Another Red team player charged up the ramp, intent on the still-empty sniper's nest. But before he could reach it, Mordred appeared at the mouth of a side tunnel and raised his phaser.

The sucker ambush — that's your style, Bhodi thought. As Mordred tried to zero in on the running Red, Bhodi Li raised up from behind the wall and zapped him. Then, before Mordred could even look up to see who had made the speakers in his helmet buzz angrily, before his intended victim could see to whom he owed thanks, Bhodi Li was gone, on the move again.

Already he was attuned to the flow of the match and moved through the arena almost without thinking. Prowling the tunnels and ramps, pouncing from unexpected vantages, he ran up his score as he ran through the ranks of the Green team. Oz, Gor, even Black Eagle joined Mordred among his victims.

But at no point did he pause to gloat or savor his success. In Bhodi Li's concept of the game, his real opponent was time, the real objective to run up the score being credited to his name by the microcomputers monitoring the game. It was why he fought almost exclusively as a loner, even to sacrificing teammates for a few more hits, a few more tens of points. His entire defense was his relentless offense.

For Bhodi had a mountain to climb: the arena record of 2500 points. The record had been set by his friend Evan Kyley, a rangy teen a year older than Bhodi. Bhodi had been there when it happened, waiting for his own match and watching from the visitors gallery high above the arena. It had been an astonishing performance. It had also been Kyley's last match; a week later he left on a crosscountry backpacking trip, and Bhodi had not heard from him since.

In perhaps a hundred matches since, Bhodi had scored more than 2000 points just five times, all in the last six weeks. The record was in reach, and that knowledge made him drive himself even harder. Almost as though there were tumblers spinning inside his head, he knew a good run from an average one. They had a feel all their own, his gambles paying off, his anticipations proving true.

This was a good run. But there was no way to crack the record without at least one successful assault on the Red goal and the two hundred points that came with it. Busy preying on the Red warriors, he had neglected that objective far too long. The final minute of the match was slipping away.

But there might still be enough time, though not enough for stealth. More directly than was his habit, Bhodi closed on the far end of the arena: down a ramp, along a narrow corridor past the bunker, left through a tunnel, then a dash across an open area to hide in a foxhole just twenty feet from the goal.

There were three Greens protecting the goal, Oz among them. He would have to take out all three to have a chance to deliver the required three consecutive shots into the heart of the goal. There was no more cover. He would simply have to shoot faster and more accurately than his opponents.

But just as he was about to make his charge, the speakers in his helmet buzzed angrily in his ears, signifying that he himself had been hit. His phaser momentarily disabled by the hit, he crouched and turned quickly to see who had gotten him.

It was David, standing not ten feet away and wearing a self-satisfied smile. Touching the barrel of his phaser to his temple, David returned the salute Bhodi had given him at the start. Then he slipped away before Bhodi's phaser returned to life.

Irritated at having been thwarted, Bhodi took one step to pursue David, then stopped and looked up as the overhead lights went to full white and the endgame signal sounded.

Not today, Bhodi Li thought resignedly, pushing his visor up. Not today -

"Thanks a lot, pal," Bhodi said, falling in step beside David as they left the arena for the changing area. "That's the first time I've been zapped in three weeks."

"I know. Took a little extra pleasure in it for that."

"Where were you the whole time, anyway? I don't think I saw you the whole match."

"Stalking you," David said brightly. "I knew you almost never look back. I wanted to see if I could pick you off without you ever getting me."

"Well, you did, damn your eyes."

"I didn't think I was ever going to catch up to you," David confessed. "You spent an awful long time standing in the foxhole. A long time for you, that is."

"The best cover is the kind you don't depend on for long."

"It's a shame you forgot that there at the end," David jibed.

Inside the changing area, they stopped in front of the wide-screen television suspended from the ceiling on which the match and individual player's scores were displayed. The Red team had won a slight victory, with most of the points beside the name BHODI LI. The more balanced Green team had five warriors over six hundred. Beside the name KUDA LAMBDA was the number 110.

"That's pathetic," Jarvis said, elbowing his friend as they turned away from the screen. "A hundred and ten?"

"Hey, I already told you, I did what I set out to. I wouldn't have cared if it was minus ten, as long as I didn't lose the ten points at your hands."

"Gee, thanks. What a buddy."

"Take it as a compliment."

"I'm trying."

"Your problem is you're too single-minded. There's more to this game than racking up high scores."

"No, there isn't," Bhodi said, unbuckling his battery belt and surrendering it to the attendant. "And you'll be glad of my two thousand points tomorrow in the tournament."

"You won't get two thousand points tomorrow," Reynolds said pointedly. "Not against the Shrike's team."

"Sure I will," Jarvis said cheerfully. "You can do what you did today, only turn around and protect my back instead of shooting me in it."

"I don't know," Reynolds said, rubbing his chin in an exaggerated caricature of indecision. "You'd do the same for me, right?"

"Sure. As soon as you're as good as I am."

"Today I was better."

"Is that what this is all about? Bragging rights?"

"Damn straight. And I've got 'em."

"But who knows it, except me and you?" Jarvis gestured toward the scoring screen. "They look at that and see something else."

Reynolds grinned crookedly. "You'll never understand, but nobody else has to know. You and me is enough."

"You're right," Jarvis said soberly. "I don't understand." He jerked his head toward the door. "Come on. Denise will be at the drive-in by now. Let's swing by for a shake."

"She's a lost cause," Reynolds warned, idly spinning the car keys on his forefinger.

Jarvis shook his head. "There's no such thing."