by Rick Cook
The protection spell! Of course. They were still in danger in this place so the protection spell still held them fast.
The brownie danced up and down in frustration. He and his companions had spent days searching for their friends and now they could do nothing for them. The castle was constantly patrolled by warbots and other strange creatures and Lannach knew it would only be a matter of minutes before he was discovered. Danger of discovery aside, any one of the four was far too large for even all of the brownies together to move.
Then he remembered the rings and what Wiz had said when he gave them out. Lannach had been busy with the gremlins then and hadn’t paid much attention, but he did remember that the spell could be turned off.
If he could get to the rings.
Lannach stepped back and considered. Both Danny and Jerry had their arms raised and away from their bodies. June had both her fists jammed in her mouth. Wiz’s arms were out, slightly away from his body. Clearly it would be easier to reach his ring.
But even with his hands down, Wiz’s ring was still easily at three times Lannach’s height. The brownie looked around frantically, but there was nothing he could use as a ladder anywhere in the room.
Lannach reached above Wiz’s boot and touched his leg. The fabric of his pants moved easily under his tiny hand. Not ideal, but it would have to do. Carefully he stretched up and grabbed Wiz’s pant leg, pulling himself up to stand on the top of Wiz’s boot.
He had just reached belt level when a shadow in the hall told him someone was coming. It was too far to jump to the floor and there was no obvious place to hide. But Wiz’s jerkin was the kind that laced all the way down the front. Quickly he wiggled his way beneath the jerkin, clinging to the shirt for dear life.
The guard’s little red eyes shifted back and forth as it scanned the room. Lannach pressed himself close and dared not to breathe. He knew he must make an unsightly bump on Wiz’s stomach. He just hoped the guard didn’t notice it.
Finally the creature gave a piglike grunt and shambled out the door, trailing his halberd behind him. Lannach closed his eyes and sighed in relief. He lost his grip and squeaked in terror as he almost slipped out of the jerkin. Then he resumed his ascent of Mt. Wiz.
A quick reach and grab gave Lannach a double handful of Wiz’s shirt sleeve. Resolutely ignoring the drop below, the brownie swung his body out until he could wrap his legs around Wiz’s forearm. Then he shinnied down the arm feet-first, locked his legs around Wiz’s wrist and reached out with both hands for the ring.
It was an awkward position and the stone was stiff. It took all of Lannach’s strength to turn it.
Suddenly Wiz relaxed and dropped his arms, nearly dashing Lannach to the floor.
Wiz shook his head, felt the weight on his right arm and looked down to see Lannach clinging to his shirt sleeve for dear life. He put his left hand out to support the brownie’s feet.
"Thanks, Lannach," Wiz said.
"We pay our debts, Lord."
Quickly he set the brownie down on the floor and moved to free his companions.
"Where are we?" Wiz asked the brownie.
"In your enemies’ castle, Lord. They attacked the Mousehole, stole the computer and then destroyed the place."
"Damn!" Wiz breathed. "What about the rest of your people?"
"All here, Lord. Save only Breachean. We think he got away."
"Thank God for that."
"There is more, Lord," Lannach squeaked. "The Council is preparing to attack this place with everything they have."
"They’ll be slaughtered!"
"Perhaps, but with you and the others dead, they saw it as their only chance."
"Can you get word to them that we’re still alive?"
"Alas, Lord, their magic blocks us here."
"Damn!"
"Doesn’t make much difference," Jerry said grimly. "If we don’t stop Mikey and Craig right now we’re cooked anyway."
"Damn!" Wiz said for the third time. He thought hard. "Okay, I guess our best chance is to do all the damage we can in here. The first thing we’ve got to do is take out that computer."
"That will not be easy," Lannach said dubiously. "It is heavily guarded. Besides, your enemies get little enough use of their prize. When they brought the computer they brought the gremlins with it. Now the whole castle is infested."
"The gremlins are here?"
"In greater numbers than ever, I fear."
"Hey Lannach," Danny said. "Do you think you could, like, stir those gremlins up a little?"
The little man grinned. "You mean encourage them to cause trouble? Easily, my Lord."
"Then do it," Wiz commanded. "Let’s turn this place into a gremlin jamboree."
"With pleasure. But what will you do?"
"We," said Wiz, "are going to stage our own jamboree."
With Wiz in the lead the group made its way down the hall. Lannach had told them the computer was in the central tower and that meant they had to go to the center of the castle to reach it. That wouldn’t be easy, Wiz knew. Not only was the place enormous, Lannach said there were guards everywhere.
Don’t think of it as a problem, Wiz told himself. Consider it a challenge.
Their first challenges were just around the corner. Three of them, all nearly seven feet tall. Their faces were piglike with tusked snouts and red eyes that looked mean even as they laughed uproariously at something one of them said. They were wearing armor of fantastic designs and carrying an assortment of wicked-looking polearms. Curved swords and daggers hung from their studded metal belts, and nickel-plated machine guns were slung over their backs.
Wiz peered around cautiously and then jerked his head back before they could see him. Danny, Jerry and June also peeked around.
June laid a hand on Danny’s arm and looked at him quizzically.
"We’re going to sneak up on them and knife all three of them when they’re not looking," Danny whispered sarcastically.
Wiz signaled his companions into a huddle twenty feet or so back from the corner.
"We’ve got to go this way," he whispered to them. "Lannach says this is a blind corridor and there’s only this one way out."
"Can we distract them?" Jerry asked.
"Without them raising the alarm? How?"
When they looked back, June was halfway down the corridor. All three motioned frantically for her to come back but June ignored them. Then she whipped around the corner.
"Oh shit! Come on." Danny set off at a dead run with Wiz and Jerry pounding after him.
As they came around the corner June was walking back toward them, wiping her knife on her skirt. Behind her were three large steel-clad forms lying in a heap.
"Now what?" she whispered to Danny.
"Uh, now we keep going," Danny whispered hoarsely. Wiz and Jerry just goggled.
Just past the guards was an open door leading to a room with masses of wires running down the walls.
"What do you suppose all this is anyway?" Danny asked, looking around the room.
"Hard to say, but if I was to guess I’d say it was a wiring closet for their phone exchange."
Wiz looked over the mass of wiring speculatively.
"I’d say it was a good place to start sabotage then." He raised his hands. "Let’s see how long it takes this stuff to melt."
"I got a better idea," Danny said. "We’ve got a couple of minutes, don’t we?"
Wiz looked down at the bodies of the three guards. "Uh, yeah."
Danny grinned. "Good. Let’s see what happens when they get their wires crossed."
Wiz looked at the wall of hair-fine wires dubiously. "I said a couple of minutes, not a few hours."
"Oh, I’m gonna have help. Emac!"
Instantly one of the little demons stood before him.
"backslash," Danny commanded.
"?" the Emac responded.
"list spaghetti exe"
As Wiz and Jerry watched the demon scribbled furiously, filling the air wi
th glowing symbols. Danny knelt down and began giving the creature commands in a low voice.
"You know," Jerry observed, "it’s kind of handy carrying your own software development environment with you wherever you go. Kind of like having the world’s niftiest laptop-except you don’t get tired lugging it through airports."
Wiz eyed his friend. "I think you’ve been here too long."
With a final whispered exe!, Danny stood up. There was a quick swirl of air and another little demon stood next to the Emac. This one wore a blue denim work shirt, jeans and construction boots-much like the one Danny had produced to connect up the computer. However this demon bore a striking resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman.
Danny pointed at the wiring panel. "Kill!" he commanded.
The demon grinned and swarmed up the panel, clinging with its feet while it swapped wires with both hands.
"That was fast work," Wiz said as the quartet left the wiring room. Behind them the demon was still furiously switching connections.
"It’s something I’ve been kinda working on for a while," Danny admitted.
Wiz shook his head. "I don’t think it’s ever going to be safe to let you go back to California."
A line of dwarves came out of the desert. They were footsore, dusty, travel-worn and thirsty. Glandurg was in the lead, limping slightly, and the rest were strung out behind him.
"Let us rest before the final assault," Glandurg commanded. His followers needed no second order. They threw themselves down in the shade of a red earth hillock.
While they rested, Glandurg and Thorfin crawled to the top and looked out at their target.
"Big enough," said Thorfin, craning his neck to try to see the top of the central tower.
"Our magic will let us locate our target no matter how big it is."
Thorfin looked ahead dubiously. The desert had been singularly unappealing and the castle before them looked less appealing than that.
"Not what I was thinking of," he muttered.
Glandurg started to say something but he was interrupted by one of the other dwarves.
"Hsst! Someone’s coming."
Quickly the party concealed themselves as only dwarves can.
What this time? Glandurg thought. More of those big metal walking things? Or the ones that roll over the ground?
Then he heard the crunch of walking feet. The walkers again; two small ones from the sound of them.
But it wasn’t the walkers. Instead it was two mortals and a dragon, looking as tired, dusty and footsore as the dwarves. While the dragon rested behind the hillock the humans climbed to the spot Glandurg and Thorfin had vacated just moments before to spy out the castle.
"Now," said Major Mick Gilligan, "we can see the whole place from here. Is this close enough for you?"
Karin frowned. The trickles of sweat down her face left clean tracks through the reddish dust. "But we cannot see clearly. We must move closer."
Gilligan licked his lips and tasted grit. "From here on the land’s flat as a pancake. We get any closer and we’re going to stick out like three sore thumbs."
Karin smiled. "You only have two thumbs, silly."
Mick leaned over and kissed her on her dusty, sweaty cheek. "Two sore thumbs and a sore big toe, then. Anyway, we’re not going to have any cover."
"I think we must risk it," Karin said seriously. "We won’t learn much watching from here." She shaded her eyes and scanned the plain before them. "Besides, there is some cover out there. Enough to hide a person if you are careful."
Gilligan glanced back at Stigi and didn’t say anything.
Karin scanned the plain. "At least there do not seem to be any robots out there."
Fine, Gilligan thought, so it’s a killing zone.
"Okay, but remember what I told you. We keep spread out, drop at the least sign of trouble and be on the lookout for mines."
Karin nodded. They slithered down the hill, collected Stigi and started out onto the plain.
Now what was that all about? Glandurg thought as he watched the humans and the dragon go. He signaled his own group to assemble and they too started out on the plain.
* * *
The plain before them was not only flat, it was wired. There were pressure sensors in the soil, motion sensors concealed in rocks, capacitance sensors masquerading as bushes and an invisible network of radar, laser and ultrasonic beams lacing back and forth so tightly not even a field mouse could move without being detected.
Neither group was more than a hundred yards onto the flat ground before they were picked up, marked as hostile and targeted.
In pillboxes disguised as hillocks of red earth, shutters slid off firing ports and machine guns poked out their ugly black snouts. Artillery buried in the base of the castle swung around as automatic loaders delivered shells and powder charges to their gaping breeches. Firing impulses raced at the speed of light along buried wires to fields of mines.
Suddenly the earth erupted in flame and smoke and flying pieces of metal.
"What was that?" Karin asked.
"Barrage," Gilligan told her shortly. "About a mile to our right. Come on. Let’s move!"
"What was that?" Glandurg demanded as the explosions and gunfire rang out over the plain.
"Dunno," Snorri said. "But it’s about half a league over yonder." He pointed to the column of smoke and dirt boiling up well to the dwarves’ left.
"Well, let’s not wait around to find out, shall we?"
The wiring closet had been heavily guarded because it was the concentration point for the sensors and fire control systems for the outer defenses of the entire southern quadrant of the castle.
The wiring was automatically monitored, but the computer doing the monitoring could only detect breaks and bad connections. It wasn’t bright enough to realize that connections were being switched at the rate of hundreds per minute. So it didn’t go to the backup.
Not that it would have mattered. The gremlins had been at the backup all morning.
* * *
"What the hell?" Craig muttered as the alert box popped up on his screen. Quickly he called up the display for the outer sensor array. The map showed possibly hostile contacts at half a dozen shifting points in the southern quadrant. They were being fired on but as fast as one winked out another appeared somewhere else.
Not another herd of those damn grazing things, he thought and called up the security camera displays. The cameras in the area showed a wild jumble of confused flickering images, but the ones mounted on the castle walls showed several tiny figures out on the plain. But they weren’t any place close to the target zones.
"Shit!" The damn system was messed up again. He switched over to manual control and ordered a battery to fire on one of the groups of dots.
The guns fired, but the shells landed a couple of miles from where they were supposed to be. He tried to correct his aim and a different battery fired at a point well behind the targets. In rapid succession the same command fired other batteries.
Craig growled in frustration. He switched to his backup control system, only to get a message on the screen saying it was inoperative. He gritted his teeth and tried to sort out the mess by experimenting with the controls. But the demon in the wiring closet was changing connections at random much faster than Craig could fire ranging shots. At that point coincidence could be defined as the same command firing the same weapon twice in succession at the same target.
"Shit!" Craig yelled. Then he reached over and sounded the general alarm. The lights flickered and one wall of the room slid back to reveal a wall-sized map of the castle and its approaches. "Guards to the perimeter," he barked into a microphone. "We have intruders approaching from the south."
Then he threw himself back in his chair, crossed his arms and watched the screens. "All right, suckers. Let’s see you evade that!"
Slowly and cautiously Wiz and his friends made their way toward the center of the castle. They saw no more of the live guards, but several times the
y had to hide from heavily armed robot sentries. Fortunately they were so noisy the quartet could hear them coming and June was particularly adept at finding hiding places.
Finally they found the elevator.
Wiz eyed the number painted on the wall across from the elevator doors. "From the looks of this, we’re pretty low in the castle. I’ll bet what we want is further toward the top."
Off down the corridor there was a distinct clank clank clank.
"Robot coming. Everyone in quick." They piled in and Wiz pressed the button. "Okay, going up."
The elevator doors jerked towards each other, slammed back and then jerked together. The car twitched spasmodically, almost throwing its occupants into a heap.
"Maybe," Wiz amended. But the car began to rise, slowly and jerkily at first and then faster and jerkily. All four of them braced themselves against the sides of the car and tried their best to stay upright.
"Hey," Danny said after a few minutes, "isn’t there something about being trapped in an elevator?"
"Huh?"
"In the spy movies. Aren’t people always getting trapped in elevators?"
"Don’t be morbid."
"I’m not being morbid, I’m being practical."
"If you’re so damn practical why didn’t you think of that before we got on the frigging elevator?"
Danny just shrugged.
"Wait a minute," Wiz said, looking up, "there is something we can do. Jerry, see if you can reach the ceiling of the car."
Jerry extended his hand experimentally. "Sure. Now what?"
"See if you can find the service hatch."
Jerry prodded at the ceiling as the car continued its jerky climb. Finally one of the ceiling sections flipped back to reveal an opening perhaps two feet square.
"Okay," Wiz said, "we climb up on top of the car."
"Is that safe?" Jerry asked dubiously.
"Safer than meeting a reception committee. Now hoist Danny up, will you?"
With Jerry’s help Danny easily wriggled through the hatch. June followed lithely with a slight assist from Danny. Wiz followed June with an easy leap and a quick chin up. That left Wiz, Danny and June on top of the elevator and Jerry in the car.