The Wizardry Cursed w-3

by Rick Cook

  Craig frowned at the glowing display. He had sent a light scout force scooting along the southern edge of the play area to try to get behind his opponent’s main body. Now something had knocked them out.

  Sending a stronger force south to engage whatever his scouts had hit was bad strategy. It would dilute his main strength. He decided to send a recon flier south to check it out. Then he turned his attention back to the battle that was shaping up between his warbot columns and his enemy’s main force. If he worked quickly enough he might be able to catch them in a pincer.

  "Mick, are you all right?"

  Gilligan put his hands on his knees and bent forward to take deep, heaving breaths. He was too winded to talk so he shook his head and made a waving off motion to Karin.

  Mechanically, Karin walked over to the third robot and pulled her arrow out of its back.

  "Stigi, release!" she commanded. With a clank and a clatter, the dragon reluctantly dropped its much-mangled new toy so Karin could retrieve her arrow.

  By this time Mick had gotten enough breath back to stand up and look around. Off in the distance he could see plumes of dust rising into the burning sky. Karin was staring intently at the flaming mass that had been the tank.

  "Come on!" Gilligan grabbed her arm.

  "But my arrow!"

  "We don’t have time," he panted. "Let’s get the hell out of here before reinforcements arrive."

  She nodded and they set off, Karin at a fast walk, Gilligan at an exhausted shamble and Stigi, prancing from pride, bringing up the rear.

  After about a half a mile, they stopped for a moment to get their bearings and let Mick catch his breath.

  "Were those more of your people’s creations?" Karin asked.

  "The only place I’ve seen stuff like that is on Saturday morning cartoons." He caught her puzzled look. "No, we don’t have anything like that."

  "The enemy then."

  "Whatever they were before it’s a safe bet they are our enemies now." He looked out at the dust clouds in the distance.

  "I’ll bet they are not alone either."

  "Probably not," Karin said in a small voice. Then she put her head up. "We must go more carefully and quietly," she added more firmly.

  "What we must do," Mick told her, "is get the hell out of here while we still have the opportunity."

  "You are free to go."

  "Look, we dodged the bullet this time, but only barely. What do we do if we meet a bigger force? And another thing. That unit is going to be missed. This place has about as much cover as a billiard table and when they start looking we’re going to stand out like bugs on a plate."

  "We must find out more," Karin said stubbornly.

  Mick threw up his hands.

  "All right, but if we’re going to commit suicide, let’s at least do it intelligently. Let’s find some cover and rest while we work out the best approach."

  Finding cover turned out to be easier said than done. Finally they discovered a deep wash that offered some protection from ground level observation. Stigi hunkered down against the bank and made like a rock and Karin and Mick sat in the shade near his head.

  "We had best move only at night from now on," Karin said as she dropped down next to Gilligan. "That way they cannot see us."

  "Don’t bet on it. There’s a real good chance at least some of that equipment has infrared sensors. At night we will stand out even better."

  "What do you suggest then? Aside from turning back?"

  "I think we’d better look for cover. The land’s been getting drier ever since we left our old campsite, so I don’t think we’re going to find any forests. But its also been rising. I’d be willing to bet that there are places not far from here that are cut up by arroyos and canyons. That’s not as good as trees but it will give us some cover."

  Karin nodded. "Since the land rises off to the east, that is the way we should go then."

  She stopped and frowned. "What is that sound?"

  Gilligan’s hearing was damaged from years around jet engines, but he heard it too, a low, hissing whine. Unlike Karin he knew what it was.

  "Get down!" he shouted.

  The black bat shape glided over the gully without stopping or turning. There was no time to hide. Mick and Karin froze where they were. Stigi opened an eye and for an awful moment Mick was afraid the dragon would stick his head up to see what was going on, but there were no interesting smells or sounds so the dragon decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

  Eventually the flier meandered off to the south and finally over the horizon. They stayed frozen a long minute more and then relaxed.

  "A scout?" Karin said shakily.

  "Probably. Trying to find those things we knocked out."

  "Then we had best move quickly. Perhaps we can reach those hills you spoke of by nightfall."

  She signalled Stigi to his feet and Gilligan shouldered his pack.

  "What the hell is that?" Mikey demanded. He had taken his time coming in answer to Craig’s urgent summons and he obviously wasn’t happy about being called to give a second opinion on a piece of metal.

  "I think it’s an arrow. We found it sticking in the hull of a burned-out tank on the edge of the wargame area," Craig told him. "I don’t know how it works yet, but it’s magic somehow."

  "And all metal, too. What have you got out there? Robot Indians?"

  "Whatever it is did a number on one of my Troll class tanks and three Springer Warbots. One of them was all messed up, like it had been run over by a bulldozer."

  "So what do you want me to do?"

  "I just figured you should know about it."

  "All right, I know. What are you going to do?"

  "I’m going to send some more patrols down that way. And mount more sensors on the stuff I’m testing." He paused. "Oh yeah, I’m going to send drones out to map and scout this whole fucking island. Maybe there’s something out there we ought to know about."

  He looked at Mikey. "I thought maybe you had some magic or technology or something that could help," he said hesitantly.

  "Shit," Mikey said informatively.

  "Huh."

  "I said shit. S-h-i-t. Shit. That’s what all this robot stuff is. It’s shit."

  "How are we going to fight without weapons?" Craig demanded.

  "And you call those weapons?" Mikey sneered. "Things that can be wiped out by arrows."

  He came around the table and moved close to Craig. "Listen to me, little man. The ones who brought us here have got power you can’t imagine. They gave us the ability to create fucking anything and what do you do? You waste your time with comic book toys."

  "They’re not toys!" Craig yelled. "They’re the most powerful weapons man has yet devised!"

  "Man has yet devised," Mikey mimicked. "That’s how limited your thinking is. This hasn’t got anything to do with man. We’re beyond man." He stepped back and grew calmer. "You were a mistake, do you know that? Instead of spending your time really learning about how to dominate worlds, you hide down here with your toys. Why don’t you come up to the real world and let the Ur-elves show you what power is?"

  "I don’t like them," Craig mumbled. "They make me uncomfortable."

  "And because you’re uncomfortable you won’t take advantage of what we’re offered. Christ Jesus! Play with your toys. You’re too fucking pathetic to do anything else!" With that he turned and stomped off.

  He stopped at the door. "Oh yeah. From now on, if you’ve got anything to say to me, you come see me."

  "Goddamn motherfucker sonofabitch!" Craig screamed at the door. That arrogant bag of shit! Just tossing it off like all the work he’d done was nothing. Just didn’t count next to his high and mighty projects.

  He grabbed the iron arrow off the table and threw it against the wall. It clanged off and the wastebasket scuttled under it to catch it as it fell.

  Goddamn that sonofabitch! Why, he could take on NATO and the Warsaw Pact and stomp them both with what he had here. There wasn’t a
n army on earth that could stand against what was here in the castle and out in the wargame area.

  With an angry gesture he turned on the scanner. The central display showed the arrays of forces in neat green and gold symbols. Around the edges were six smaller screens, each showing a view of part of the battlefield in full color. The units were poised and ready. Except for scouts nothing had moved since he found the destroyed patrol.

  Looking at the main map he saw that a platoon of green tanks was just over a small rise from a battalion of yellow armor. Perfect situation for the kind of fast-moving ambush he loved. With the mouse he turned both units on and took control of the green force. Quickly he moved them into position hull down behind the ridge and opened fire on the advancing battalion at barely 200 yards.

  Six yellow tanks died in the first salvo and four more before the yellows could return fire. Their first shots were ineffective but they were maneuvering for cover and the next green shots only destroyed two more tanks.

  Twelve to nothing. It was the time to scoot, but Craig held his ground, firing salvo after salvo into the deploying yellow forces.

  Now it wasn’t all one-sided. The yellow battalion had taken cover and was returning accurate fire. The battalion’s SP battery opened up, walking volleys of tank-killing shells toward his platoon’s position. First one and then another of his green tanks blew up and turned dark.

  "Goddamn you!" Craig yelled and ordered his remaining tanks to charge directly into the lead elements of the battalion, all guns firing. He lost two more tanks in the wild charge and then he ran the survivors head-on into the remains of the battalion’s transport section. Tanks ground over jeeps, butted trucks off the road and smashed scout cars. Then the battalion artillery began firing into its own supply train and in seconds it was all over.

  Craig screamed in frustration and scanned the board. There was a section of warbots in the next hex over, 130-ton monsters with limited flight capability. They were also on the gold side, but that didn’t matter. Taking direct command of the unit, Craig sent them hurtling toward the armored battalion even as it reorganized for the march.

  The battalion was massacred before it could even deploy again. Salvo after salvo of missiles tore through the armored column. Multi-gigawatt battle lasers raked it from end to end, blowing up tanks and simply melting smaller vehicles. Finally the warbots themselves closed, smashing tanks beneath their enormous feet and picking up vehicles and flinging them for hundreds of yards.

  "Yes!" Craig yelled and hunched over the screen. As fast as he could move the mouse he ordered a general engagement. Everything was to attack everything else.

  What had been a relatively well-planned large-scale exercise turned into a mechanical armageddon. From one end to the other the central plain of the exercise area blazed with explosions, laser blasts and burning vehicles and robots. Artillery batteries fired on the units they were supposed to be supporting or turned their guns on each other. Recklessly tanks crashed together. Warbots tore other warbots limb from mechanical limb.

  Where the battle wasn’t fierce enough or the destruction great enough, Craig took direct command of his units, overriding their carefully programmed tactics in an urge to slaughter. Blind and unheeding, robots charged forward in obedience to their master’s command. They didn’t even break stride when they reached laser range. Instead they slammed into each other, flailing with their arms and butting their heads against each others’ armored carapaces.

  Finally it was over. On all the plain there were no more units capable of movement. Every damaged unit had fired off every available round, even if it meant beating the bare earth senselessly with machine guns. The few units that had ammunition they could not fire set it off in the magazines in an orgy of self-destruction.

  Looking down on the destruction he had caused, Craig felt more relaxed. His fury at Mikey had died to a dull resentment. The guy was an asshole, but hey, it didn’t matter much. They’d go into battle soon enough and when they did, Craig would show him what this stuff was worth.

  As he rose from his command chair Craig remembered about the scouts. He still needed to scout the rest of the island. Well, he’d start making more tomorrow.

  Thirty-five: COSMIC SQUARE DANCE

  The blue thing on the screen wove and interwove. It divided, branched and rejoined in a complex, twisting pattern that hinted at an order beyond human imagining.

  "How goes the work, Sparrow?"

  Wiz jerked his attention away from the screen and saw Duke Aelric standing behind him.

  "About like you see. We’re making progress, but it’s slow going." He reached for the keyboard and called up a second program with a couple of quick commands. Now a yellow thing joined the blue one on the screen. It wove in a complex and elaborate pattern that almost matched the blue one. Wiz moved the mouse and the two shapes melded together into a single form that was mostly green. Here and there, however, patches of yellow and blue still stood out vividly.

  "The blue is what we’re producing. The yellow is the pattern you gave us," Wiz explained.

  The elf duke nodded. "Very good, Sparrow. You make excellent progress."

  They watched the shapes for a while without comment.

  "Lord, you said there was something stronger behind Craig and Mikey," Wiz said. "What?"

  Aelric took his eyes from the screen. "Does it matter, Sparrow? More to the point, do you think you would understand the explanation?"

  "Yes," Wiz said levelly. "I think it does matter. As for the explanation, try me."

  "Very well." Duke Aelric stared into the screen and stroked the line of his jaw with a long pale forefinger.

  "Perhaps it would be easiest to say that the World as it is today exists because of choices, a multitude of choices made since the first instant of primal chaos. But each of those choices meant that other things were not chosen. In that dance of choose and choose again, some became strong and flourishing while others were made weak or even nonexistent. The patterns of the dance are not to the liking of all and there are those who would alter them."

  "So they’ve set themselves up against the caller in this cosmic square dance?"

  "Cosmic… ? Ah, I see. No Sparrow, there is no caller to this dance. It is blind chance working itself out through the interaction of chaos and such forces as came out of chaos. But yes, there are-those-that would have things work another way and they seek to alter the pattern, given a lever to work through."

  "And Mikey and Craig are the lever?"

  "So it would seem."

  "And we don’t know what it is these others want?"

  "I would not wager that they could be said to ’want’ anything at all, any more than a river ’wants’ to run downhill. However I doubt very much that the World could survive in a pattern that would be more to their liking."

  They were both silent for a minute.

  "Aelric," Wiz said at last. "My Lord?"

  "Hmm?"

  "If Jerry and Danny and I can match their programmers are you strong enough to fight the ones who are behind them?"

  The elf duke looked down at him with eyes gray and cold as a winter’s sea. "No Sparrow, I am not. Not I and all my kind could stand unaided against them."

  "Oh," said Wiz in a very small voice.

  "Nor is it needful that we do so," Aelric continued. "The World as it is exists because it is stronger and more stable this way than in any other form it could easily reach. To say that a thing came about by chance is not to say that it can be altered effortlessly once it has happened."

  "You can’t unscramble an egg," Wiz agreed and then frowned. "Only here you can unscramble an egg."

  "That does not mean it is equally easy."

  "So there’s something like an energy gradient these others will have to cross before they can settle the universe into another stable state."

  The elf duke paused as if tasting Wiz’s words. "That would not be an incorrect way to put it. Perhaps it would be more nearly right to say they se
ek to create the conditions necessary to tunnel through the gradient to another state."

  "Where did you learn about solid-state physics?"

  Duke Aelric smiled. "Where did you learn about magic, Sparrow? We teach each other, I think."

  Wiz thought that Aelric knew a lot more about physics than he had ever taught Wiz about magic, but he didn’t pursue the point.

  "You know this sounds an awful lot like cosmology."

  "What is cosmology?"

  "One of our sciences. The branch of physics that deals with things like the beginning and end of the universe."

  The elf duke smiled. "Then this is cosmology."

  Wiz turned that over in his mind and then returned to the main point.

  "What you’re saying then is that we can take them."

  "What I am saying, Sparrow, is that there is a chance that we can take them. But first and above all else, you must wrest this new lever from their hands."

  "That doesn’t sound very hopeful."

  "It is not hopeless, Sparrow. Leave it at that."

  He nodded with mock gravity. "Now, are there any other matters on which I may set your mind at rest?"

  Wiz took a deep breath. "Yes. What does Lisella want?"

  Again that marrow-freezing stare. "What the Demoselle Lisella wants is none of your concern, Sparrow. She has not bothered you again, has she? No? Then dismiss her from your mind."

  "But you’ve met her here."

  "How do you know?"

  "Someone saw you."

  "Sparrow, you would do well to concentrate on matters of import, not my intrigues by moonlight. What is between the Demoselle and myself is none of yours. Now, is there aught else?"

  "Just one other thing. Are those dwarves who are trying to kill me part of the Others’ plan?"

  Aelric’s laugh was like the peal of a silver bell. "Believe me, Sparrow, they are not." He sobered. "No, that is a matter between you and others of this world, mortal or non-mortal, I think. But be wary of them, Sparrow. They can be dangerous."

  Thirty-six: A VISIT WITH MIKEY