Despite good intentions, it was 9:15 before the Buick Century driven by Jarvis's mother coasted into the parking lot of the Photon Center. By then the asphalt was crowded with parked cars, players and their families on foot, and slowly moving cars whose drivers were jockeying for the remaining parking places.
"Just turn left here and let me out," Jarvis said, quickly sizing up the situation. "You don't want to get caught in that mess."
"What? Where?"
One hand on the door catch, he pointed out the windshield. "Just head for the exit," he said, opening the door and hopping out of the slowly moving vehicle. As his feet touched the pavement, he reached back in to snatch his gym bag off the seat, called, "See you later," then slammed the door shut.
As he turned toward the building, there was a whirring sound, and the passenger door window slid down."Christopher-good luck. I love you."
Jarvis turned back.
"Excuse me, good lady. You must have made an error," he said with mock dignity. "I am Bhodi Li, Photon Warrior." But before he dashed away, he bent down to peer inside the car and added, "But if I see this Christopher, I'll give him your message."
His mother smiled bemusedly. "Thank you-Bhodi."
Inside, Jarvis collected the other five members of his team from the couch they had commandeered in the lobby. He also collected from them some grief for being late.
"We were starting to think you weren't coming," David Reynolds said, standing as Jarvis approached. "Figured you'd be the first one here."
"My family slowed me up."
"Me, I figured maybe you hadn't gotten enough sleep during biology and were trying to catch up," piped Brian Duane from atop the back of the couch.
"Hey, that's my training program you're making fun of," Jarvis fired back with a grin. "Never stand when you can sit and never sit when you can lie down."
"I hope that's not your strategy for today," Greg Morse said worriedly. Morse was a wiry youth with jet-black hair and a premature collection of worry lines that he had come by honestly. "Can we talk about what we're going to do when we get in there?"
"We're going to win," Jarvis said pointedly. "Don't even think about any other possibility."
"I think Greg means he'd like to talk about strategy," Duane interjected.
"Strategy is very simple," Reynolds said drily. "Shoot them more often than they shoot us."
"Real funny, Dave," Morse said, his tone revealing his irritation.
"Jesus, another one with no sense of humus. Look, Greg, you tell me what good anything more complicated than that will be after thirty seconds in there."
Apparently trying to forestall the budding argument, Dennis Waverly spoke up for the first time. "I'll take the base goal. I don't mind."
"We ought to have two defenders," Morse said quickly.
"I'll stay back, too," offered Robert White, the sixth member of the team. White was also known as "Don't-Call-Me-Bob" White, for obvious reasons; he claimed that the three fender-benders he had had in his father's car were part of his long-delayed revenge on his parents.
"You can't just stand around there, though," Jarvis said warningly. "You've got to be active. If you wait for them to come to you, you're done."
"Should we go 2-2-2-two defenders, two snipers, two attackers?" asked Duane. "I'd like to go up front with Bhodi."
"I want David," Jarvis said, but the moment he got the words out Reynolds started shaking his head.
"I'll take the bunker and Greg can take the engine room," he said, ignoring Jarvis's hard looks. "If we're in this as long as we think we should be, everyone will get a turn everywhere."
Jarvis drew back wonderingly. "I hope you don't mean I ought to tend goal."
"I'd like to try it once," Reynolds said easily. "It'd probably drive the other team nuts trying to figure out where the hell you were."
"Well, we're sure as hell not going to try it today."
"I thought you'd say that," Reynolds said, and turned to Waverly. "I'm going to try to rotate back through the goal area off and on, and I think Greg ought to, too. I don't want them to be too sure of how we're deployed. If we can keep them wondering, we can slow them down."
"Come on," Jarvis said, his annoyance with Reynolds translating into impatience. "It's going to be crowded in the equipment room. We'd better get our gear. Some of us need to change, too-unless the Shrikes paid you to wear that white shirt during the match," he added, looking straight at Morse.
"Nope. It's coming off."
"Not here, please!" Reynolds said, leaping back and making a cross of his forefingers as though warding off a vampire. "There's women and children present. Spare their innocent lives-"
"Jesus," Jarvis said, rolling his eyes ceilingward. "I hope you're going to manage to take this seriously while the clock's running."
"I hope I manage not to," Reynolds said cheerily. "Let's go have some fun, boys. Shrike season opens today."
Bhodi's team called itself the Immortals, but in the first match they looked very mortal indeed. Right from the opening, they had trouble matching the energy level of the Shrikes, who came out of their end with a furious five-man attack. Shortly thereafter, Waverly and White were taken in by a diversion and surrendered a hit on their base goal-this before two minutes had gone by.
For his own part, Bhodi felt himself pressing, and neither his anticipation nor his shooting was as sharp as usual.
More than once he crossed paths with Duane at inopportune times, ruining a stalk or ambush. And not once, but four times did he suffer through the electronic raspberry that meant he'd been fried by one of the Shrikes.
Halfway through the match, the Immortals collected themselves and clawed their way back to an even footing with the Shrikes. The lead changed seven times in the last frantic minute, with the eventual winning shot coming not from Bhodi's phaser, but from Reynolds'. A moment before the lights came up, he scored against a Shrike huddled in a hidey-hole as though trying to run out the clock.
"That was fun for the people upstairs," a breathless Dennis Waverly said afterward, "but let's not have any more of them, okay?"
It didn't need saying. The close call seemed to bring them together, and in their second match they had a three-hundred point margin after three minutes and never gave the other team a chance to whittle it down. In their third match, they eliminated the tournament's only all-girl team in a low-scoring seesaw battle in which neither team reached the other's base goal.
That put them in the championship match against the Panzer Boys, a team of six men in their twenties whose progress through the tournament Jarvis and his teammates had noted with growing respect. During the long break between the semifinals and the championship, they sat together around a table in the center's snack bar and sipped at cold drinks. Most were looking ahead, but Jarvis could not stop looking back.
"I don't know what's wrong," he moped. "I haven't been over twelve hundred points all day. I just can't seem to get in the flow."
"I know. This team play is killing you," Reynolds said, and looked around the circle. "New plan, okay? Greg, Dennis, Robert, you run a three-man defense-like hockey, goalie and two defensemen. Brian, you take sniper duty." He looked back at Jarvis. "You and I will work a pair, like you talked about yesterday-remember?"
"That's what we should have been doing all day."
Reynolds smiled wisely. "And if we had, the Panzer Boys would have had a chance to study us and figure out how to handle it."
"Ah-" said White, understanding.
"So forget we're here," Reynolds continued. "Find the flow. I'll protect your back. Think about the record, if that's what it takes."
Duane threw his hands in the air. "That's all we need. Look, we've been winning, haven't we?"
"No, just a minute," White said. "I think David's got something. These guys have chewed 2-2-2's up all day."