into a tight spiraling turn. Below her fourteen missiles raced toward
their targets. In spite of their magical components, the guidance systems
were essentially technological. They looked for the brightest radar
returns in the sky. Dragons and the relay they were guarding returned only
small echoes but the climbing fighters stood out sharply.
The fighters were hardly sitting ducks. Their radar sensors picked up the
missiles as soon as they launched and the attackers broke and jinked all
over the sky in an effort to break the radar locks, scattering flares and
packets of chaff behind them.
For half of the fighters it was enough. Eight of their companions exploded
in balls of black and orange as the missiles found them but the others
continued to climb toward the relay demon.
Elke counted the explosions and nodded to herself. Well, they’d been
warned that some might get through. But the survivors had lost momentum.
That gave her squadron opening enough.
Again she led her dragons into a screaming dive into the midst of the
attackers.
The fighters filled the air with ECM, flares dropped free with magnesium
radiance that briefly outshone the sun and chaff bloomed everywhere around
them.
None of which mattered in the slightest. Dragons, even missile-armed
dragons, don’t carry radar and the forces were too close for missiles. Now
the defenders relied on the traditional weapons of the dragon cavalry.
Bursts of dragon fire ripped at the metal shapes. Then the great bows sang
and iron arrows leaped toward their targets. Planes cartwheeled across the
sky or dropped like stones as flames and death arrows found their marks.
One lone fighter pulled away from the melee, climbing toward the relay
station. Elke lined her dragon up on the metal enemy and touched the
second stud on her saddle. Again smoke streaked from the dragon’s claws as
a second missile sprang free. But there was no pulse of radar energy to
warn the aircraft. Instead Elke held the missile on course by manipulating
the stud with her thumb, always keeping it centered in the glowing orange
rectangle. The missile traveled up the plane’s tailpipe and blew it out of
the sky before the aircraft or its controllers even knew it was there.
In his castle, Craig cursed and pounded his fist on the table. But he had
other things to command his attention.
Well, it wasn’t the first time he had lost heavily in the early moves and
gone on to win the campaign. The enemy couldn’t do jack shit unless they
could penetrate his fortress. They hadn’t hit his outworks yet. When they
did things would be different.
Vaguely he wondered where the hell Mikey was and what he was doing.
The wind whistled and whipped like knives of ice around the high, dark
spire where Mikey stood. He could sense rather than see the formless
shapes that pulsated and moved in the freezing distance beneath his feet.
A single wan pool of yellow light illuminated his workbench. For the last
time he checked the spell before him.
It was a complex shape about the size of his head and so dark as to be
beyond black.
Mikey caressed the thing, oblivious to its piercing chill. At last it was
ready.
We are prepared. The voice pulsed in his ears like his own blood. We wait.
With a gesture Mikey killed the light on the workbench. Then he clasped
the sphere to him and started down from his high place.
The guardsmen and wizards advanced in loose order over the barren ground.
Actually, Donal thought, “loose order” was a misnomer. A “swarm of
gaggles” was more like it.
But this was the formation they had been advised to use. Having seen
pictures of their likely opponents Donal was all for it. Absently he
reached back and touched the tube slung across his back. He hoped it was
as good as advertised.
So far they had met no real opposition on the ground. The shelling had
died down to a background rumble. Once a cluster of gray metal things
swooped down on them with fire and explosions. But between their wizards’
lightning bolts and the timely intervention of a wing of dragons there had