The Wiz Biz II: Cursed & Consulted (42 page)

He didn't know how far they had climbed; a league or more, perhaps. But at last the arrow in the talisman had stopped pointing upward and was pointing off to the side.

As he started down the horizontal shaft, Glandurg reached back to touch the hilt of Blind Fury. Soon enough they'd be done with this climbing and sneaking into honest battle.

He wondered if battle was as exciting as the skald's tales made it out to be.

It took nearly fifteen precious minutes for the maintenance robots to fix the display on Craig's workstation. By the time he was back in control the situation had deteriorated even more. The last of his air force had been swept from the skies, and with it all of his recon drones. Now he was reduced to viewing the battle through the cameras and sensors mounted on the castle itself. Two critical outposts had fallen and even as he attempted to assert control a third one went.

In the southern quadrant the attackers were almost up to the last line of defenses at the base of the castle walls. Craig turned his attention there. Quickly he switched to one of the cameras on a forward emplacement to try to find a weak spot. He still had a couple of squadrons of warbots he could throw into the battle here, but he would have to command them directly if they were going to be any good.

As he scanned the line of approaching men, a shadow fell over the camera. He swiveled up in time to see a dragon diving straight at him. He flinched and tried to bring a weapon to bear but it was too late. The last view Craig had was of gaping jaws and an enormous golden eye as the dragon crashed head-on into the emplacement.

Cursing, he switched to an alternate view only to get a jerky low-resolution picture that barely resolved itself into blobs of light and dark. Two more switches and he found a camera high up on the walls that was working.

What he saw wasn't good. Lines of dotlike figures, rendered tiny by the distance, were converging on the gates of the castle. Many of them were too close for the artillery, and the machine guns were strangely ineffective.

Some of the figures went down to energy beams or mines, but many more did not. They swarmed over the smoking ruins of his defenses and began to disappear down the tunnels.

Frantically, Craig ordered all his remaining robots to the lower levels to try to stem the attackers.

And then it was all too much. Craig turned and bolted from his war room, leaving the defenses entirely on automatic. He just couldn't face any more fighting and losing.

Mikey! Mikey was working on something. Maybe Panda, the master hacker, could pull this out of the fire for them yet.

Mikey was sitting on a bench cradling something in his lap. As Craig came closer he saw it looked a lot like the figure that had been growing on the computer screen.

"We've got trouble, man."

"No we don't," Mikey said softly. "We've won."

"Goddamn it, they're all over the fucking castle!"

Mikey looked up at him and smiled. For the first time Craig saw the mad, red glint in his eyes. "It doesn't matter," he said almost gently. "It's all working according to plan.

"I was wrong about you, Craig," he went on in the same gentle, hair-raising tone. "You and your robots were important. You were a wonderful diversion. The robots got them to grab the computer. All we had to do was bring them here. Now we'll crush them. We'll just fucking annihilate them."

He caressed the black sphere in his lap. "We own the world. We own both worlds. And we're going to prove it."

Craig drew back in horror.

"You're fucking crazy!"

"No man, I'm sane. Crazy is letting these fucking maggots walk all over you."

He reached out and patted Craig's forearm in a way that made Craig's flesh creep.

"You did good, you know. You kept them so goddamn busy chasing around after your toys they never had a chance to focus on the serious stuff." He caressed the thing in his lap.

"They couldn't get at it. Did you know that? For all their power they couldn't make what they needed without us. They needed the computer. And they needed us."

Craig stared in horrified fascination.

"You see what that means, don't you?" Mikey was talking to himself now, looking down at the black thing in his lap, crooning to it. "It means they're not all-powerful. We can do things they can't and that means we're more powerful than they are.

"When I get done I'm gonna be master of all I survey." He chuckled and his eyes glinted even redder, like live coals. "I'm gonna rule the whole goddamn world."

Craig backed away from his former friend and then turned and ran.

There were problems, Glandurg admitted, even with an infallible magic direction finder.

It was undoubtedly pointing at the Sparrow, but it didn't show the way to go to get to him. That was a problem when you were in a maze of ductwork that ran only in straight lines and right angles. A half-dozen times now they had followed the arrow directly only to be balked by a dead end. Glandurg suspected the Sparrow was moving around also. But so far they hadn't gotten close enough to be sure.

They didn't want to leave the vents. The roars, screams, explosions and gunfire echoing through the vents—not to mention the smell of burnt flesh—made it clear there was a battle going on out there.

"He is over this way," Glandurg told his weary followers. "Forward."

"We can't go that way," Thorfin protested.

"And why not?"

"Because it's a blind tunnel, that's why."

"He's right you know," Snorri put in. "We've been there twice already."

"I'm the leader and I say we bloody go this way!"

"You may be the leader, but you've got the sense of direction of a blind pig," Thorfin said without heat.

" 'S'truth," young Gimli added. "Remember the sewage tunnel back home."

Glandurg reddened and puffed up like a toad. Then he got control of himself and exhaled slowly.

"Very well," he bit out. "For this job I will appoint a scout. Snorri, you go first to find the way. But I'm still the leader, mind!"

Without a word, Snorri moved past Glandurg and led the party off.

What now?
Craig tried desperately to think. The lower levels were already overrun, the control center was out of commission and he didn't even want to think about what Mikey was up to. It couldn't end like this. Not after so much. But now what?

It took him a minute to separate the shrill tone in his ear from the background noise of the battle and a minute longer to realize what it meant. The computer room! Someone had reached the computer room already. He touched a stud on his bracelet and the tiny screen lit up with a view of the computer room. He gaped at what he saw.

Zumwalt and the others were with the computer! Craig slapped his palm against his forehead and swore. A trojan horse! He'd brought them into the castle himself and they'd turned out to be a trojan horse. No wonder half his equipment wasn't working. They must have been sabotaging it for days.

Craig looked at the tiny image and felt his gorge rise. Somehow those sonsofbitches were responsible for everything that had gone wrong since he got here. They were behind his defeat, his every loss.

Well, maybe he'd lose, but they sure as hell weren't going to profit by it!

He turned on his heel and ran down the corridor, away from the War Room and toward his private workshop.

Craig met nothing in the halls. The robots and goblins were all fighting elsewhere. Half the lights were out and the elevators didn't work. Now and again the sound of battle or a muffled explosion would reach him by some trick of acoustics, but otherwise the castle was deathly silent. Even the air tasted stale and he realized the air conditioning system had quit.

The automatic door opener wasn't working either, so Craig had to use a spell to burn his way into his own workshop. Once inside, he pulled the door shut behind him and looked around.

There in the middle of the room, surrounded by scaffolding and equipment, was his latest creation: A full suit of Legion battle armor with some special improvements that no game master would ever have allowed.

The bottle-green armor glinted dully in the bright lights of the shop. It was almost twelve feet tall and so broad it looked squat by comparison. There was no neck, only a low rounded dome for a head. The arms were enormous, with oversized forearms to accommodate the blasters and heavy machine guns mounted in them. The hands were six-taloned metal claws, sharp as razors and hard enough to tear through armor steel. The legs were elephantine in proportion with all the actuators hidden behind layers of super-strong flexible armor.

It was hunched forward until its metal claws almost touched the ground and the upper back was opened up like a clam shell. In spite of his anger and haste, Craig stopped to pat the massive knee joint and look up approvingly.

Everything he knew, everything he had learned, was incorporated in this one lethal package. It wasn't as big as his warbots, but thanks to the power of magic it was nearly as heavily armed. It could run at over a hundred miles an hour and slam through walls and buildings as if they were not there. Instead of jump jets it had anti-gravity plates that would let it fly from the surface of the planet out into space if the wearer wished. It could withstand a nuclear explosion and its own firepower was measured in kilotons per second. It was the ultimate warbot, the culmination of his dreams of power.

And now it existed for just one purpose. To destroy the people who had caused his ruin.

Craig mounted the scaffold and chinned himself on the grab bar to ease his legs into the suit. He wiggled the rest of his body in, fitting arms and legs into the sensor harnesses. Finally he touched a switch and the back sections slid noiselessly shut behind him.

He watched the screen displays for a moment as the power gauges rose levels and the view out the front port came alive with a network of glowing lines and cryptic inscriptions. A breath of cool air washed over him as the climate control system activated. This was one design that could stand up to dragon fire and not even feel it.

Once he was sure everything was operational, he stood erect and stepped away from the scaffolding, brushing it aside with a casual gesture that sent pieces ricocheting off the workshop walls. He turned and stepped lithely toward the door. As he passed the workbench he reached down and scooped up the thermonuclear hand grenades lying there. Maybe they would be good for something after all, he thought as he dropped them into a pouch on the armor.

Stigi couldn't use his tail, but that didn't matter much. He very nearly blocked the passage physically. The attackers' only approach was through a mass of fire and straight into the dragon's fangs and claws.

Even if the castle guards had been equipped with dragon-slaying arrows it would have been hard to take Stigi out. As it happened that wasn't part of their equipment and so the problem was very nearly impossible. Warbots might have been able to handle Stigi, but they had all been sent to the lower levels to confront the League forces battling their way up through the castle.

Not that the guards stopped trying. They came on until their charred bodies reached nearly to the ceiling and then they climbed over the smoking corpses to keep coming. By the sheer mass of their onslaught they managed to force Stigi back a pace or two with every attack. But it was a long, straight corridor and Stigi had lots of room to back up.

The door at the end of the corridor was locked, but that didn't stop Wiz. He wasn't fancy about it, he just used a fireball to blow the lock off. Almost without breaking stride he kicked the door open and stepped through. Jerry and Mick were hard on his heels.

The computer was sitting in the middle of the floor, almost exactly where Wiz's double had been standing when Mikey hit him with the fireball. It was up and running quietly away with the image of the key rotating slowly on the screen.

"Is it my imagination," Jerry asked, "or is that thing a lot more detailed than the last time we saw it?"

"Your imagination's not that good. Let's smash the computer and go get Craig and Mikey." Wiz raised his arms to throw another fireball, but Jerry put his hand on his shoulder.

"You're not thinking. Without the key how are we going to close the gate?"

Wiz turned his head and looked at him. "What's your plan?"

"Make a copy of the file first. Binary representation should be as good as any other for the purposes of spell casting."

Wiz dropped his arms and nodded. From down the corridor came roars and yells as Stigi held the entrance. "We've got the time. Let's do it."

Craig heard the fight in the corridor as soon as he stepped off the stairs. The din echoed and re-echoed through the entire level of the castle. His sensors reported combustion byproducts in the air, including some that came from burning flesh. Finally he saw the carpet of bodies in the corridor leading to the computer room. Cautiously he stuck his massively armored head around the corner.

The smoke was so thick he had to resort to his sensors to see what was happening. Up ahead was a packed mass of warriors, some living, some dead and some wounded and down. Every one who could move was pressing ahead. As he watched the scene was backlit by an enormous gout of flame that turned the figures to black silhouettes against a fiery background.

With his battle armor he could undoubtedly charge through the mass and handle whatever was blocking his guards. But that would take time. What he wanted was to get his hands on Zumwalt as fast as possible.

He turned and ran back the way he came. Plenty of time to finish this bunch later.

Several hundred yards and a number of turnings later he was in the corridor leading to the side entrance to the computer room. He had only gone a few yards when he heard a rhythmic banging coming from an alcove ahead of him.

In the alcove two light warbots were beating their heads against the wall, literally. They would step forward, run into the wall, bounce back and then step forward again. From the looks of the wall they had been doing it for some time.