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.
"… so, anyway," Wiz said around the half-chewed sandwich, "the physicist says, ’First assume a spherical chicken of uniform density.’ "
Jerry roared and Danny broke up in a coughing fit when some of his drink went down wrong.
Very funny, Craig thought as he looked at the image his scout was sending back. Laugh while you can.
Come on, damn you! Wiz stared hard at the computer screen. We’re running out of time! But the twisting, convoluted blue shape looked no different today than it had before.
"I hate asymptotically converging algorithms," he growled. "The closer you get to the solution the longer they take."
"If you’ve got a better algorithm it’s not too late," Jerry said mildly.
Wiz just snorted. "I’m just on edge. It’s a combination of being a little kid waiting for Christmas and the fact that the longer we’re here the riskier it gets."
"Plus, Moira’s not here," Danny said from the table where he and June were sitting. "When’s she due back anyway?"
"She said probably late this afternoon." Wiz swiveled back to the monitor, but the shape still looked the same. Irritably he started flipping through the views, each of which showed three of the shape’s dimensions at a time. But the effect started to give him a headache.
June stiffened and grabbed Danny’s arm.
"Noise," she said.
"I don’t hear anything," Jerry told her.
Danny was frowning and listening hard. "I do. Kind of a whine."