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