“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.”
Moira nodded gravely. “This troubles you?”
“Yeah. A lot. Before when I’ve fought a campaign it’s been a game. At the
end you picked your pieces up and put them back in the box until next
time. Here there won’t be any next time and I’m sending people to their
deaths on the strength of my bright ideas.”
“They will go with or without you, Lady,” Moira told her. “The best you
can do for them is to give them the tools so they may win.”
Judith grimaced as if she was tasting something sour. “Yeah, but that
doesn’t make it easier.”
“I am told that it never is easy, Lady.”
“Lady, this is fantastic,” Bal-Simba said as he looked over the plans. “I
am astonished that you have accomplished so much in so little time.”
Judith shrugged. “Mostly it wasn’t any harder than hacking out some simple
BASIC subroutines. Besides, I had Malus, Juvian and some of the
apprentices to help me.”
“Still, I remember how long it took a dozen of you to produce what we
needed the last time you were our guest.”
“That’s why it took so long. What we did then laid the groundwork for what