by Rick Cook
The tiny drum major nodded, turned to the demons behind him and raised his staff. The pipers inhaled as one, the drummer struck the beat and the skirl of the pipes reverberated off the stone walls.
"Let’s see them even think through that," she said viciously.
"I hope it is as effective on the enemy as it is on us," Bal-Simba boomed over the noise.
Judith looked up and realized everyone in the command center had stopped work and was staring at the table. Several of them had clapped their hands over their ears. Judith made a gesture and the sound died to a whisper.
"Sorry Lord, I keep forgetting it’s an acquired taste."
By the time Malus’s dragon approached the castle the fat little wizard was half-seasick and thoroughly miserable. Normally a dragon could not carry two people for very long. But the wizards had added their magic to the animal’s natural flying ability so they were able to keep up with the other dragons.
Not that it was much comfort to Malus. He was strapped into a second saddle back on the dragon’s shoulders. The beast was too wide to straddle comfortably at that point and the insides of his thighs ached terribly. Although the straps holding him to the saddle were secure, the saddle itself had a tendency to shift alarmingly whenever the dragon maneuvered suddenly. For Malus’s taste there had been far too many sudden maneuvers. The blue robe of the Mighty, which was so impressive on the ground, was totally unsuited for dragon riding. The wind tugged at the hem and tended to flip it back above his knees. The cold air whipped up the robe and around his legs. Probably the only part of him that was still warm was his seat, which was protected by the saddle. But he couldn’t tell for sure because it had gone to sleep long since.
He tried to shut out the discomfort by concentrating on the back of the rider and not looking down. Above all, he didn’t want to look down.
The castle erupted in flame and smoke as every weapon fired on the attackers. Artillery and mortars of every description fired and fired again as fast as the automatic loaders could feed them. Streams of tracers fountained up into the sky as anti-aircraft batteries sought their targets. Lines of laser light swept back and forth over the plain and sky.
Between the killer bees and the messed-up control system in the southern quadrant it wasn’t nearly as effective as it should have been. What ought to have been annihilating was merely deadly. Men went down like tenpins and dragons fell from the sky under the impact, but still the others pressed on.
From ground and air the attackers returned fire. Lightning bolts and fireballs flew from the wizards’ fingers destroying emplacements and blinding sensors. Then two squadrons of dragons peeled off and let fly with heat-seeking missiles. The missiles went for the hottest things in the castle, which were the barrels of the artillery and the firing tubes of the lasers. A series of explosions blossomed on the castle walls and here and there the secondary explosion of a magazine made a section of castle wall bulge outward and slump.
Still the attackers came on.
Circling above the battle Malus groped in the sleeve of his robe and brought out a crystal sphere just large enough to fit comfortably in the palm of his hand. It was held in a net that was tied to his wrist so he would not lose it and the netting made it harder than normal to concentrate. Still the picture was clear enough.
Peering into the crystal he saw that there were a number of other things in the air, but little enough magic.
Fumbling in his other sleeve he produced a light hazel wand. It wasn’t as powerful or as impressive as his normal staff, but it was much easier to handle on dragon back. He kept his eyes fixed on the crystal as he raised his arm above his head and began to chant.
Craig’s screen started to fill with magically generated hash. He quickly applied a filter function to the image and some of the interference faded, but what was left pulsed rhythmically and seemed to beat against itself like a badly tuned instrument, creating irregular patches of dark and light on his screen.
The magical sensors were worse. The screen filled with glowing blobs of amorphous color that made it look like a neon lava light. Craig swore under his breath and started combining the output of various kinds of sensors and tinkering with filters until he got his best picture.
Vaguely Craig realized he hadn’t been smart in setting this system up. Everything flowed back to his command center, but he could only concentrate on a few facets of the battle at one time. There was too much happening for him to coordinate the defense. He would have to rely on the sensors and programming built into his warbots and other weapons. Which was fine, only there was no way for those weapons to coordinate without direct orders from his command center.
Still, he had a lot of weapons.
"What’s going on up there?" Gilligan demanded.
Karin shaded her eyes and squinted. "I cannot see. No, wait! Those are dragons. Ridden dragons and they are attacking." She looked at Gilligan. "Those are my people."
"Can we signal them?"
"They are too high and too fully engaged." She picked up her bow and started back toward the castle. "Come on. We must help them."
"How?"
She looked over her shoulder. "We will think of something, now come if you are coming." She trotted off with Stigi humping along beside her. Gilligan had to run to catch up.
Thorfin looked at his leader’s boot soles and scowled. It seemed as if they had been climbing for hours. First up the steep outer wall, then in through a gun port and finally up through the castle’s ventilation ducts. There was plenty of room, but the wind was almost strong enough to pluck a dwarf from the wall and every few hundred yards they had to unfasten a grating that blocked the duct. Twice they had narrowly avoided the whirling blades of huge ventilation fans that threatened to turn the whole expedition into dwarf tartare. And still they climbed onward. Glandurg stopped every few minutes to check his locating talisman, but it always told them the Sparrow was above them.
I never realized glory was such hard work, Thorfin thought as Glandurg missed a foothold and kicked him in the face.
* * *
"Look," said Jerry. "Do you have any idea where we are?"
The four of them were standing at the crossing of four identical corridors. There were no floor numbers, room numbers or anything else to give them a clue.
"One of the upper floors of the castle," Wiz told him.
"In other words we’re lost, right?"
"No, I know where we are. I just don’t know where the computer is."
Jerry growled. "Okay, let’s do this systematically. Lannach says the computer is in the room where you met Craig and Mikey, right?" Wiz nodded. "We know the room has an outside wall because it had a big window, right?" Again the nod.
"So let’s go to the outside wall, put our left hands against it and follow it around, checking every door as we go. Eventually we’ve got to find the right room."
"There are hundreds of rooms on this floor," Danny protested.
"All the more reason we need a system."
"Okay," Wiz said. "There’s the outside wall. Let’s do it."
All four of them put their left hands on the wall and started walking single file. The first room they came to was empty. The second held a mass of machinery that was obviously not the computer.
"This looks more like it," said Wiz as they came to the third door. It was wider than the others and almost as high as the corridor.
Wiz opened the door and looked inside. Ranked along the walls in the dark were a dozen heavily armed robots, all motionless. Suddenly the lights came on, the robots jerked erect and a dozen metal heads swiveled toward the door.
The programmers didn’t wait for the rest. Wiz threw fireballs, Danny threw lightning bolts and Jerry hit them with some kind of spell that made them crumble to powder. A couple of laser beams flashed over their heads and left burning furrows in the wall behind them. The heat activated the fire sprinklers, drenching all four of them with water.
June looked up at the rain magicall
y coming from the ceiling and laughed at the wonder of it all. Wiz choked on the smell of fried, electrocuted, powdered robot and shook his head to get the water out of his eyes.
He glared up at Jerry. "You and your system."
"There’s nothing wrong with the system. It’s just that if you follow it you are certain to find everything on this floor."
"Most of which we don’t want to find. Okay, we’ll keep following the wall, but from now on we don’t open any doors unless they look really promising."
Karin stopped so quickly Mick almost ran into her. She turned, put her finger to her lips and gestured around the corner. Cautiously Mick peeked around. There was a door there, set at the end of a narrow corridor back into the wall. There were also six things out of someone’s nightmare guarding it. They were big, ugly, armored, and armed to the teeth.
He ducked back and looked at Karin. Go the other way? he pantomimed and Karin nodded.
Just then Stigi decided to see what was so interesting. He stuck out his neck, thrust his head fully around the corner and snorted in curiosity.
With a wild yell the guards charged forward.
"Shit," Gilligan said, fumbling for his shoulder holster. Before Karin could draw her bow, he stepped around the corner, dropped to a semi-crouch and fired two-handed.
Eight shots rang out in the confined space and all six of the guards were down.
Karin’s eyes widened at the sight.
"Well done," she said. "Now, shall we use the door they were guarding?"
At that moment the door flew open and a solid mass of the manlike monsters charged out waving swords, spears and other less identifiable, more nasty, weapons.
Instinctively Gilligan dropped into his shooters’ stance, but Karin grabbed his arm and pulled him down.
With a whoosh and a roar Stigi let go with a blast of flame.
The effect on the packed mass was instant and appalling. The things shriveled, screamed, burst into flame, and died in the ranks.
Again the whoosh and another lance of dragon fire struck the remaining attackers. Black smoke boiled off charred flesh and the stink was appalling. Here and there came a series of explosions as ammunition in guards’ bandoleers ignited.
And then there were no more attackers. Gilligan looked at the blackened mass in front of him and was almost sick. He’d seen people burned to death in air crashes before, but not on this scale. Karin had gone deathly pale under the layer of reddish dust.
"Let’s get inside," he said. Carefully they picked their way through the grisly remains, trying to touch as little as possible.
"My God," Gilligan breathed, "will you look at this place?"
The room was enormous. The ceiling was at least a hundred feet above them and it stretched out proportionally in all directions. In the center of the brightly lit area were half a dozen huge robots in various stages of construction with smaller robots swarming over them like worker ants. As they watched a traveling crane maneuvered a torso section over the legs and hips of one of the robots.
"It’s a factory," he said, awed.
None of the robots paid the least heed to their unexpected visitors. They kept right on working.
Gilligan motioned and led Karin and Stigi along the wall and around the assembly area.
"There’s got to be another way out of here. No way those robots could get through the door we just came through."
They were halfway around the room when another giant robot stepped out of the shadows behind them.
Karin screamed, Stigi whirled, inhaled and spouted a gout of flame. The robot stepped forward inexorably and raised its laser arm.
Craig had designed the robot with a magic power source, a magically reinforced body and magic sensors and control links. But the design was essentially technological. He hadn’t considered what might happen if his creation stepped in front of a giant flame thrower.
The robot’s first bolt went wild into the ceiling, knocking hot rock down on the three and burning a red afterimage in Mick’s vision. Then the chips in the control circuits overheated and failed. The robot pinwheeled its arms wildly and its glittering torso twisted from right to left and back again. Then the seals in the hydraulic cylinders in its legs and hips failed from the heat and contact with the boiling hydraulic fluid. The thing lost hydraulic power in a gush of robotic incontinence, tottered and fell face-first into a puddle of smoking hydraulic fluid. The floor shook, but the robot workers paid no attention.
Stigi stalked forward and sniffed disdainfully at his kill. Then he stepped daintily around the puddle-or as daintily as you can when you’re eighty feet long and in a confined space-and continued on his way.
The main door out of the assembly area was on the same scale as the rest of the factory. Fortunately it was also open.
"Now, where do we go from here?"
"Up I would think," Karin said. "Their commanders would want to be as high as possible to see as much as they could."
Gilligan didn’t bother to point out to her that it didn’t work that way when you had radar and advanced sensors.
"Think we can get Stigi upstairs?" he asked.
"Oh yes, Stigi is not afraid of heights." She frowned. "Though this place is so tall it may take us hours to reach the top."
Remembering how high the fortress looked from the outside Gilligan thought that was a wild underestimate.
Then he caught sight of something. "Wait a minute, we may not have to walk. Look at this."
Set in the far wall was a freight elevator big enough to take a semi. "They must use this to move robots. If it will carry one of them it will sure hold Stigi."
It took a little doing to get the dragon into the elevator. If Stigi wasn’t afraid of heights, he wasn’t very fond of confined spaces and to him an elevator big enough to move the Space Shuttle was still a confined space. He started alarmingly when the elevator began to move and for a moment Gilligan was afraid he was going to crush them both. But Karin stood by his head, stroking him and telling him what a good dragon he was.
Stigi calmed down but every so often he would glare over at Gilligan in a way that said he understood perfectly well Mick was to blame for all this and some day he would get even.
The elevator lurched to a stop and the doors opened. "End of the line," Gilligan said.
He drew his pistol and peered out. They seemed to be in some sort of service area. The floors were bare concrete and the light fixtures were Spartan. Scattered about were a number of pieces of equipment Gilligan didn’t recognize and a thing like a metal octopus that was obviously a cleaning robot of some kind. At least it had a floor buffer built into its base.
As Craig studied his screen, a new symbol sprang up at the very bottom. One of his scouts had located the attacker’s main communications relay.
"Get that relay," Craig screamed into the screen. On the periphery of the battle a demi-wing of two squadrons wheeled and raced to do his bidding.
"Shield flight, you have sixteen enemy incoming. I say again, sixteen incoming."
"Understood. Sixteen incoming," Elke repeated into her communications crystal.
There were only five other dragons and riders at her back.
What was it the strange sorceress had called this? A "target-rich environment." To hell with that. She called it being plain old-fashioned outnumbered.
She signaled her command and the dragons wheeled and spread out into the attack formation they had practiced so many times at the Capital. Off in a far corner of her mind Elke realized she wasn’t frightened, just terribly, terribly busy.
The fighters came in hugging the ground to escape radar detection, but that did nothing to shield them from magic. Elke and the Watcher both saw them coming.
Almost directly beneath their quarry the flight of metal shapes arrowed upward, jets thundering as they climbed toward their target.
Far above them Elke winged her dragon over into a steep dive. Out of the corners of her eyes she saw the dragons to her left and
right fold their wings back and follow her down.
Her instructors might not have approved. The formation was loose and dragons were slowed by the objects they grasped in their talons. But it was closing with the enemy and that was all that mattered.
The targeting spell for the new weapons she carried began to sing. Before her eyes lines of glowing green merged into cross hairs and rectangle of her target sight. She kept staring intently at the specks below her, moving her head slightly to center them in the crosshairs, listening intently all the while. Then the squadron leader heard the bone-quivering hum in her ear that told her the weapon had locked on. She reached out and touched a stud on her saddle.
A trail of smoke sprang from the box in the dragon’s claw as the air-to-air missile leaped free of its launcher. Beside and behind her other trails of dirty gray smoke streaked the sky as the rest of her flight fired.
The squadron leader eased back on the reins and hauled her dragon around into a tight spiraling turn. Below her fourteen missiles raced toward their targets. In spite of their magical components, the guidance systems were essentially technological. They looked for the brightest radar returns in the sky. Dragons and the relay they were guarding returned only small echoes but the climbing fighters stood out sharply.
The fighters were hardly sitting ducks. Their radar sensors picked up the missiles as soon as they launched and the attackers broke and jinked all over the sky in an effort to break the radar locks, scattering flares and packets of chaff behind them.
For half of the fighters it was enough. Eight of their companions exploded in balls of black and orange as the missiles found them but the others continued to climb toward the relay demon.
Elke counted the explosions and nodded to herself. Well, they’d been warned that some might get through. But the survivors had lost momentum. That gave her squadron opening enough.
Again she led her dragons into a screaming dive into the midst of the attackers.
The fighters filled the air with ECM, flares dropped free with magnesium radiance that briefly outshone the sun and chaff bloomed everywhere around them.