by Rick Cook
"We discussed this once before, Danny," Wiz said. "The logic still holds. Stealth is better than weapons."
"Shit," said Danny and scowled down at the table top.
"One thing we ought to do is to get as many people off the island as we can," Jerry said. "If we can’t defend this place we don’t need guardsmen and there is no reason to have as many support people as we have."
"We can all do our share of the cooking and laundry," Wiz agreed.
"Or do it by magic," Moira said to her husband. "Forgive me, Lord, but no one but a goat could stomach your cooking."
"Hey, I lived on it for years."
Moira leaned over and kissed him lightly. "I rest my case."
"In any event," Jerry said, "it’s getting too dangerous to keep anyone here who isn’t absolutely necessary."
He carefully avoided looking at Danny and so did everyone else in the room.
The brownies hadn’t attended the council, so as soon as the meeting broke up, Wiz went to tell them. He found Lannach in the computer room, crouched on his haunches at the rear of the console and apparently talking to someone inside the computer.
"Lannach, we’re going to have to pull your people out."
The little man stood up and dusted his knees. "Why, Lord? Are you dissatisfied with our work?"
"No, nothing like that. But Mikey and Craig are getting close to finding this place. We’re sending everyone we can spare back."
Lannach frowned. "Forgive me, Lord, but you cannot spare us if you want your computer to work."
"We can’t protect you if they find us and attack."
"Lord, we will not leave. Not just for our own safety."
"I don’t want that on my conscience."
"It is not upon your head, Lord. It is our decision."
"Thanks, Lannach." Wiz held out his hand. Gravely Lannach took his first two fingers in both his tiny hands and pumped them up and down.
"Look, you’ve got to go."
It was late and the hall lights had long since dimmed, but Danny and June were still at it.
Again June shook her head so hard her mouse-colored curls beat against her forehead. "You come," she said with undiminished firmness.
"I told you, I can’t. I’ve got to keep working."
June planted herself on the edge of the bed and crossed her arms. "You will not be rid of me," she said fiercely.
He pulled her up off the bed and held her in his arms. "Honey, I don’t want to get rid of you, I want to save your life."
Ian stirred restlessly in his crib and started to whimper again. He wasn’t used to hearing his parents argue and he had been crying off and on all evening.
June turned her back on her husband and scooped Ian out of the crib. For a moment all her attention was concentrated on soothing him while Danny tried to think of something more to say.
"Just this once," he promised. "Just this once you’ve got to leave me."
June shook her head wildly and clung to Ian.
"Dammit, you can’t stay here," Danny said desperately. "If not for you think about Ian."
June looked down at the child and her eyes filled with tears but she shook her head again.
Wiz was trying to find a way to squeeze more speed out of the algorithm when Danny came into the lab the next morning. His eyes were red, his skin was pale and blotchy, as if he’d been crying. Even his hair was a worse mess than usual. He looked like he hadn’t slept at all last night.
"I had it out with June," he said dully.
Wiz put down the sheaf of papers. "Is she going back?"
Danny snorted. "Fuck no. That silly little bitch is determined to stay here and get herself killed." He growled in frustration and slammed his fist down on the desk. "Goddamn her and her stubbornness."
"I’m really sorry, man. I could ask Moira to talk to her."
"What for? She won’t listen. She just rocks back and forth and shuts out the world."
Wiz couldn’t think of anything to say. When he had come to this World Danny had been a self-centered twerp who did what he wanted and didn’t care about anyone. Now he had others to worry about and he was having to make hard choices. Wiz could sympathize. He’d had a fair measure of twerphood in his makeup when he first met Moira. But there wasn’t anything he could do to make the choice easier.
"She’s sending Ian back with Shauna," Danny said finally. "That’s something anyway."
"But she won’t go?"
Danny bit his lip. "It’s real simple. Where I go she goes. And I’ve got to be here."
"Hey look, you could handle some of this stuff from the Capital."
"Bullshit," Danny said without heat. "The only place I can do any good is here."
"But the risk…"
"Moira’s staying here, isn’t she?" He looked up at Wiz with a ghost of a smile. "Besides, I want a World for my kid to grow up in." He looked down. "Shit. I left my notebook back in my room. I’ll be back in a minute."
Danny brushed past Jerry as he went out.
"What was that all about?" Jerry asked after Danny disappeared down the hall.
"I think," Wiz said wonderingly, "that was Danny growing up."
By the time Danny got back Wiz and Jerry were hip-deep in trying to find something to make the algorithm work faster. By noon they considered and rejected at least four approaches.
Outside the computer center the Mousehole was abuzz with activity as nearly everyone else got ready to leave. Guardsmen, servants and wizards went back and forth in the hall carrying boxes, bags and piles of clothing. They finally took a break when Moira came in to discuss details of the move.
"You know," Jerry said as he pushed back his chair, "I could think a lot better if I didn’t feel like I had a target painted on my back."
"Well, we’re stuck with it," Danny said angrily. "We gotta stay and if they find us we can’t fight. All we can do is hope we can get outta here in time."
"Wait a minute," Wiz said slowly. "Maybe there is something we can do."
"Like what?"
"Protection spells. Really heavy-duty protection spells. You know, like force fields in the science fiction movies."
Danny’s eyes lit up. "Hey, cool!"
"Do you think that would work?" Jerry asked.
"It might. At least it would be better than nothing."
"Such spells are powerful magic that stands out strongly," Moira said dubiously.
"They stand out strongly in your World," Wiz said. "But magical senses don’t work as well here. Besides, Craig and Mikey don’t use magical detectors the way your people do."
"We hope," Moira corrected. "And in any event, where do you propose to get the time to create such a spell?"
"Oh, I’ve got most of the groundwork done already," Wiz said. "I’ve been working on it off and on ever since I was rescued from the City of Night. Believe me, there is nothing like being nearly killed a dozen times over to make you think about ways to protect yourself."
"Voila!" Wiz proclaimed and placed five rings on the table like a handful of jacks.
"They look like something out of a Crackerjack box," Danny said dubiously.
"Well, as a matter of fact…" Wiz began. "Never mind. It isn’t what they look like, it is what they do."
"They are certainly charged with magic," Moira said, eyeing the pile of trinkets. "Even in this place they have powerful auras."
"They’ve got more than that," Wiz said smugly. "This is a truly tasty hack, if I do say so myself."
Danny reached out and poked one of the rings with his forefinger. "So what do they do, shoot lightning bolts?"
"Nope, they generate a stasis field. Basically the spell is an amplified variation of that spell we used to stretch out a night and get more programming time while we were working on the magic compiler. Except instead of stretching nights out two-to-one, this spell stretches time out sagans to one."
"Sagans?" asked Jerry.
"Yeah, you know. Like ’SAY-guns and SAY-guns of lig
ht years.’ "
"Oh, right," Jerry said, catching the imitation of the famous astronomer.
Moira frowned. "One moment. You say this spell slows down time enormously?"
"Yep."
"Then how can you move when the spell is active?"
"You can’t. It freezes you solid. But nothing can hurt you."
"Still, the spell can be broken, can it not?"
"It automatically shuts off when malevolent magic goes away. Kind of like the protective spell I used against those dwarves."
"So at the first sign of trouble you slip on the ring and turn into a statue?"
"Well, no. We wear the rings all the time. They activate automatically when you’re under direct attack and they stay active as long as you’re in danger. The rest of the time they’re inert."
"These things are like bullet-proof vests?" asked Jerry.
"More like an airbag in a car. Nothing happens until you need it."
Wiz passed the rings around and each of them slipped one on. Then Danny turned and held one out to June. But she hissed and shrank away as if Danny had offered her a scorpion.
"June, please." But June’s face was white and she refused to touch the ring.
"It is not like the enchantment in the elf hill," Moira said, coming over to her and laying a hand on her arm. "It will serve only to protect you." Still June shook her head and turned away.
Danny held up his hand to display the ring he was wearing. "Look, if I wear this and you don’t, we’ll be separated if something happens. But if we both wear one we’ll always be together. Please darling, wear it for me."
Hesitantly June reached out a shaking hand and clutched the ring Danny extended to her. With a sudden move she jammed the ring onto her finger and then jerked her hands back into the folds of her skirt. Danny grabbed her and hugged her to him.
"Oh yeah, I almost forgot," Wiz said a shade too brightly. "There’s another way to turn the ring on and off."
He held up his hand and mimed twisting the stone. "If you want you can activate the spell by turning the stone in the ring a quarter turn to the right. You can deactivate the spell in the presence of danger by having someone turn the stone a quarter turn to the left."
"What kind of a moron would want to turn off the spell when he’s in danger?" Danny asked.
Wiz stopped short. "You know, I never thought of that."
"Feeping creatureism," Jerry said.
"What kind of creature?" Moira asked.
"A feeping one," Danny explained. "That’s one that has too feeping many…"
"What it means is that I’ve added features just to add features," Wiz interrupted. "It’s a spoonerism on featurism."
"If you expect me to ask you about spoons, my Lord, you will be sorely disappointed. Nevertheless I understand the idea."
"Yeah," Wiz said sadly, "and that took more work than all the rest of the spell put together."
"So now we can continue to work even under the strongest magical attack?" Moira asked, eager to get the conversation back to something that halfway made sense.
"Not under actual attack, but right up to the minute it begins."
Moira looked down at the ring on her finger. "I hope it works."
"I hope we never find out," Jerry said fervently.
Forty: RAID
The drone had come so far south only by accident, cut off from its base by a line of strong thunderstorms and blown well past the point where it should have turned for home. Nevertheless it kept recording what its sensors recorded and transmitting it back to the castle.
There wasn’t much. This part of the island was mostly low hills covered with open forest. It had been hours since the drone had seen anything even as interesting as a herd of animals. Just the occasional bird, a motion in the branches that might be an animal and the mixture of trees and grassy clearings.
The sun was almost to the horizon and the shadows had lengthened and begun to blend together into the beginnings of dusk. The drone was a already headed north, back toward its home when its infrared sensor recorded a patch of anomalous heat off to the right. True to its programming, it turned away to investigate.
A quick scan found nothing in the visual band to account for the heat, no sign of sun-heated rocks or hot springs. The machine was too simple-minded to be puzzled, but it did have contingency programming for something like this. It shut down its engine, switched on its full sensor array and turned to glide over the hot spot.
Beneath the trees and magical camouflage a lone guardsman was shifting the last of his troop’s equipment into a neat pile for transport back to the Capital. He looked up as the shadow swept over him, caught a glimpse of something like a large bird and then bent again to his task.
He didn’t even consider the incident worth reporting.
It took time for the drone’s report to filter up the chain of command at Caermort. Craig had just finished a dinner of magically produced tacos and Coke when the notification popped up in a box on his screen. He glanced at it, frowned, and wiped the grease from his mouth and hands before he hit the key to get more information.
A strong source of IR and magic emissions under what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary hill at the far south of the island. Craig chewed at his lip. That wasn’t that uncommon. There were a lot of centers of magic in this world and some of them had funny effects on the non-magic sensors.
But this magic fell off fast. Right over the site it showed up strongly on the drone’s sensors. As soon as the drone moved off the spot it faded fast. A few hundred yards from the hill the magic was too weak to pick up.
Without taking his eyes off the screen, Craig balled up the taco wrappers and threw them in the direction of the wastebasket. The basket sensed the incoming object, saw that it would miss, and scuffled over to catch it. Craig was too preoccupied to notice.
That kind of fall-off was unusual. Magic usually faded out evenly, following a kind of inverse square law. Still, it was more curious than anything else and a long way away besides.
"Ah, what the shit," Craig muttered at last. He had plenty of drones and besides, there were a couple of new types of recon robots he wanted to try out.
"Well, that’s the last of them," Wiz said, looking at the spot where the guardsmen had just winked out.
"Gonna be lonely around here," Danny said from where he was lounging against the wall. June, who was standing at his side, bit her lip and nodded. Shauna had taken Ian back four or five hours ago and it was the longest June had been separated from her son since he was born.
The storeroom, which had been packed with equipment and supplies, was mostly empty now. The departing guards and staff had taken much of the material back with them. Two of the three residential wings of the complex were completely shut down and only a few rooms in the other residential section were still being used.
"Yeah, at least until tomorrow night," Wiz agreed absently. Moira had gone back earlier to reorganize the supply effort to fit the new and much smaller operation. Only Wiz, Jerry, Danny, June and the brownies were left in the complex.
And who-knows-how-many gremlins, Wiz added to himself.
"Well," said Jerry, "now that we’re alone what’s for dinner?"
"Moira left us bread, cheese and cold roast beef in the kitchen," Wiz said. "I think we’d better enjoy it while we can."
He looked sourly at the stack of waxed cardboard cartons next to him. Each one was stenciled "Meals, Ready-To-Eat" and a lot of government-sounding gobbledygook. Wiz didn’t know where Moira had gotten them, but he hoped she got back soon with some real food.
Noiselessly the metal spider crept toward the darkened buildings. At the edge of the tall grass it paused, bobbed slowly as if testing the air, and then skittered across the open space to the concealing shadows.
Carefully lifting only one leg at a time it eased its way along the wall, every sense alert for any sign of danger or alarm.
Danger there was none. The building’s spells discouraged
animals, kept away insects and were proof against dwarves. But there was nothing to keep away or warn of a robot.
There was a door halfway down the wall. Standing on its hind pair of legs and balancing itself with its left and right pairs, the robot stretched its front pair full out to try the knob. When it found the door locked, the robot retracted its legs and lowered its egg-shaped body to the ground. There it sat, listening intently for several minutes. A sliver of moon appeared through the scudding clouds, faintly illuminating the building. The robot stayed pressed to the ground, looking like a rock and a couple of sticks to the casual observer.
At last the moon disappeared into the clouds and the robot stretched up to the doorknob again. It swiveled its body and a beam of blinding red light lanced out of its underside to trace around the knob and lock.
If there had been anyone in the wing the brilliant light and the smell of burnt paint and scorched metal would have alerted them. But there wasn’t. No one heard when the spider robot wrenched the lock free and no one saw when the thing pulled open the door a crack and slipped through.
It was pitch dark in the corridor, but that didn’t matter to something equipped with image intensifiers backed by ultrasonics. Slowly, carefully the robot moved down the deserted hallways, its front pair of legs extended before it like antennae.
At the end of the third corridor, the spy droid detected a light far off to the right. It eased down the corridor, becoming more cautious as its sound sensors began to pick up voices.
"… and he used Interrupt 21h for error handling!"
There was a burst of laughter and then a second voice started to tell another joke.
Ahead was a doorway letting warm yellow light out into the hall. The robot pressed itself hard against the wall and crept ahead one tentative step at a time, moving sideways like a steel crab.
It paused again at the door and then with exquisite caution it eased a single leg around the corner so the video sensor in the "ankle" could scan the room.
Wiz was sitting in the console chair with his feet up on the console, tearing a bite out of an oversized sandwich. Danny was perched on the edge of the console drinking from a mug and Jerry was over at the table building himself another sandwich.