Rick Cook - The Wizardry Cursed

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.

None of which mattered in the slightest. Dragons, even missile-armed dragons, don’t carry radar and the forces were too close for missiles. Now the defenders relied on the traditional weapons of the dragon cavalry. Bursts of dragon fire ripped at the metal shapes. Then the great bows sang and iron arrows leaped toward their targets. Planes cartwheeled across the sky or dropped like stones as flames and death arrows found their marks.

One lone fighter pulled away from the melee, climbing toward the relay station. Elke lined her dragon up on the metal enemy and touched the second stud on her saddle. Again smoke streaked from the dragon’s claws as a second missile sprang free. But there was no pulse of radar energy to warn the aircraft. Instead Elke held the missile on course by manipulating the stud with her thumb, always keeping it centered in the glowing orange rectangle. The missile traveled up the plane’s tailpipe and blew it out of the sky before the aircraft or its controllers even knew it was there.

In his castle, Craig cursed and pounded his fist on the table. But he had other things to command his attention.

Well, it wasn’t the first time he had lost heavily in the early moves and gone on to win the campaign. The enemy couldn’t do jack shit unless they could penetrate his fortress. They hadn’t hit his outworks yet. When they did things would be different.

Vaguely he wondered where the hell Mikey was and what he was doing.

The wind whistled and whipped like knives of ice around the high, dark spire where Mikey stood. He could sense rather than see the formless shapes that pulsated and moved in the freezing distance beneath his feet.

A single wan pool of yellow light illuminated his workbench. For the last time he checked the spell before him.

It was a complex shape about the size of his head and so dark as to be beyond black.

Mikey caressed the thing, oblivious to its piercing chill. At last it was ready.

We are prepared. The voice pulsed in his ears like his own blood. We wait.

With a gesture Mikey killed the light on the workbench. Then he clasped the sphere to him and started down from his high place.

The guardsmen and wizards advanced in loose order over the barren ground.

Actually, Donal thought, "loose order" was a misnomer. A "swarm of gaggles" was more like it.

But this was the formation they had been advised to use. Having seen pictures of their likely opponents Donal was all for it. Absently he reached back and touched the tube slung across his back. He hoped it was as good as advertised.

So far they had met no real opposition on the ground. The shelling had died down to a background rumble. Once a cluster of gray metal things swooped down on them with fire and explosions. But between their wizards’ lightning bolts and the timely intervention of a wing of dragons there had been very little damage done.

Up ahead a door opened in the castle wall and several things shaped like men stepped out.

Either we’re a hundred paces from the castle, Donal thought, or those things are giants. He signaled his squad to spread out and take cover. Seemingly oblivious to the oncoming metal giants, the guardsmen responded as they had been drilled.

A lance of fire slashed into the earth so close to him he could smell the ozone stink. Behind him bullets beat a tattoo into the dirt. Donal jammed the point of his sword into the ground and brought the dull green tube slung across his back around and over his shoulder. As methodically as he had been taught he flipped up the sights and lined them up on the giant robot.

The tube bobbed up and down as he followed his target and then he squeezed the trigger. The tube bucked slightly and Donal dropped and rolled just before another blast of laser energy rent the place where he had been standing.