pointed to the column of smoke and dirt boiling up well to the dwarves’
left.
“Well, let’s not wait around to find out, shall we?”
The wiring closet had been heavily guarded because it was the
concentration point for the sensors and fire control systems for the outer
defenses of the entire southern quadrant of the castle.
The wiring was automatically monitored, but the computer doing the
monitoring could only detect breaks and bad connections. It wasn’t bright
enough to realize that connections were being switched at the rate of
hundreds per minute. So it didn’t go to the backup.
Not that it would have mattered. The gremlins had been at the backup all
morning.
* * *
“What the hell?” Craig muttered as the alert box popped up on his screen.
Quickly he called up the display for the outer sensor array. The map
showed possibly hostile contacts at half a dozen shifting points in the
southern quadrant. They were being fired on but as fast as one winked out
another appeared somewhere else.
Not another herd of those damn grazing things, he thought and called up
the security camera displays. The cameras in the area showed a wild jumble
of confused flickering images, but the ones mounted on the castle walls
showed several tiny figures out on the plain. But they weren’t any place
close to the target zones.
“Shit!” The damn system was messed up again. He switched over to manual
control and ordered a battery to fire on one of the groups of dots.
The guns fired, but the shells landed a couple of miles from where they
were supposed to be. He tried to correct his aim and a different battery
fired at a point well behind the targets. In rapid succession the same
command fired other batteries.
Craig growled in frustration. He switched to his backup control system,
only to get a message on the screen saying it was inoperative. He gritted
his teeth and tried to sort out the mess by experimenting with the
controls. But the demon in the wiring closet was changing connections at
random much faster than Craig could fire ranging shots. At that point
coincidence could be defined as the same command firing the same weapon
twice in succession at the same target.
“Shit!” Craig yelled. Then he reached over and sounded the general alarm.
The lights flickered and one wall of the room slid back to reveal a
wall-sized map of the castle and its approaches. “Guards to the
perimeter,” he barked into a microphone. “We have intruders approaching
from the south.”
Then he threw himself back in his chair, crossed his arms and watched the
screens. “All right, suckers. Let’s see you evade that!”
Slowly and cautiously Wiz and his friends made their way toward the center
of the castle. They saw no more of the live guards, but several times they
had to hide from heavily armed robot sentries. Fortunately they were so
noisy the quartet could hear them coming and June was particularly adept
at finding hiding places.
Finally they found the elevator.
Wiz eyed the number painted on the wall across from the elevator doors.
“From the looks of this, we’re pretty low in the castle. I’ll bet what we
want is further toward the top.”
Off down the corridor there was a distinct clank clank clank.
“Robot coming. Everyone in quick.” They piled in and Wiz pressed the
button. “Okay, going up.”
The elevator doors jerked towards each other, slammed back and then jerked
together. The car twitched spasmodically, almost throwing its occupants
into a heap.
“Maybe,” Wiz amended. But the car began to rise, slowly and jerkily at
first and then faster and jerkily. All four of them braced themselves
against the sides of the car and tried their best to stay upright.
“Hey,” Danny said after a few minutes, “isn’t there something about being
trapped in an elevator?”
“Huh?”
“In the spy movies. Aren’t people always getting trapped in elevators?”
“Don’t be morbid.”
“I’m not being morbid, I’m being practical.”
“If you’re so damn practical why didn’t you think of that before we got on
the frigging elevator?”
Danny just shrugged.
“Wait a minute,” Wiz said, looking up, “there is something we can do.