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.