"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.