"You say you have pictures of some of these robots Craig and Mikey have been producing?" she asked, polishing off another hunk of bread. "Can I see them?"
In response Arianne gestured at the tabletop and a miniature tableau sprang into existence among the bread crusts and fruit rinds. On a barren landscape of red hills and sand perhaps a dozen metal creations were locked in mortal combat.
"Well, what do you know?" Judith said wonderingly. "Warbots."
"You recognize them?" Bal-Simba asked.
"I’ll say. That’s a Murderer. That one’s a Red Terror. That thing over there is a Fer de Lance tank. And a couple of King Cobras. I don’t know what that one is, but it looks like a Preying Mantis with a couple of laser pods added."
She looked up from the display. "They’re game pieces. Imaginary fighting machines. Only it looks like the little shit’s made them real here."
"They are real enough, Lady," Arianne said.
Judith examined the display again. "I wish I had my rule books; then I could tell you exactly what they’re capable of. But I can remember enough to do pretty good without them."
"They look powerful," Juvian said dubiously.
Judith twisted her mouth to the side and rubbed her chin. "Well, yes and no. They’re sure nothing to mess with, but they have a lot of weaknesses."
Absently, she picked up a pear and bit into it.
"Look, I don’t know this Mikey, but I know Craig. I know how he thinks and I know how he fights." She wiped a dribble of juice off her chin and took another big bite.
"When you do a long campaign with someone you get to know them pretty well. Craig is not very original. That’s why we didn’t let him DM. He was too predictable."
"DM?" Juvian asked.
"Dungeon Master. The person who sets up the game. Anyway, Craig’s strictly a by-the-book player and he expects everyone else to be the same way." She stopped talking, demolished the remaining pear in three bites and wiped her chin before she went on.
"So maybe we can surprise them." She grinned nastily. "In fact, I know we can surprise them. And I have a few ideas on how."
"How long will it take you to-ah-arrange your surprises?" Bal-Simba asked.
"The longer the better, but I can have some stuff ready in a few days."
The black giant turned his attention to Moira. "And you said that Wiz believed we had at least two weeks?"
"So he said, Lord."
"Then we had best postpone our plans for an immediate attack. A few days will make us much stronger without appreciably strengthening our opponents, I think." He turned to Judith. "When can you begin?"
Judith took an apple out of the fruit bowl. "How does right now sound?"
In the event, it took a few hours longer than that to clear off her old desk in the Bull Pen and get started. It was after midnight when Malus and Juvian reported to her there.
"Moira tells me you’re pretty good with the spell compiler."
"We are hardly what you might call skilled, Lady," Juvian said. Malus stifled a yawn. He hadn’t been up this late in years.
"Okay, I want you to pick out the best of the apprentices and journeyman wizards. No, let that wait until morning. There are a couple of things I want you two to start on right away."
"You mean tonight?" Malus asked.
Judith smiled. "Get used to it. The time-expansion spell only works from sundown to dawn and we’re going to need all the time we can get."
The morning sun was streaming into the Bull Pen when Moira came calling. Juvian and Malus had dragged themselves off to bed some time before, but Judith was still hard at work.
"My Lady, Bal-Simba sent me to see if you are in need of anything."
"Just fine, thanks. But if you could have the kitchen send over some more food, I’d appreciate it."
"And a quantity of blackmoss tea. It is already being prepared."
Judith leaned back away from her desk and put her arms behind her head. "Bronwyn told me the healing spell would make me hungry, but I didn’t have any idea it would be like this."
"The healing process takes energy, Lady. The body must replenish itself."
"Anyway, I’m not tired and that’s useful. Look what we whipped up last night."
Over on the center table sat a vaguely familiar object. Except instead of being made of coiled straw basketwork it was made of shiny metal. The shape was different, too. As if two of them had been placed bottom to bottom. The result was something like a football, if a football had been two feet long and made of steel finished to look like coiled straw.
"Malus did the critical part of the spell," Judith explained as she reached down to the object and detached a tinier thing. This she held up for Moira’s inspection.
It was a shiny piece of metal no bigger than the first joint of Moira’s finger. She looked closely and realized it was a perfectly formed metal insect, a bee to be precise. She became aware of a muted buzzing coming from inside the larger thing, as if it was full of thousands of steel bees.
"They’ll ignore you unless you’re moving fast," Judith explained. "But they home in on anything going faster than about 800 feet per second and destroy it."
Moira handed the robot bee back to Judith. "That is clever, but I am not sure I see the purpose."
"That’s because you don’t know our weapons. The most common ones are guns that shoot pieces of metal at very high speeds."
"Wiz told me about those. He said they were very destructive."
"They are. And they’re going to be one of Craig’s prime weapons. But our little killer bees can destroy bullets and shells before they can hit anything. So when we attack, we saturate the area with a bunch of these beehive rounds."
"But that thing is not round," Moira said. Then she looked narrowly at Judith. "Or does it approach roundness for sufficiently large values?"
Judith looked blank. "I don’t understand."
"Neither do I," Moira sighed. "It was something Jerry said."
She stopped and for an instant Judith thought she was going to cry. But instead she said, "If there is nothing more you need I will leave you to your work."
Judith leaned forward to her desk again. "You know," she said absently, "I’ve worked on mission-critical software before. But this is the first time I’ve had the whole world on my shoulders."
"How does it feel?"
Judith gave her a tight little smile. "I don’t like it." She sighed and turned back to Moira. "People are going to get killed in this, aren’t they? Probably a lot of people."