Without a word, Snorri moved past Glandurg and led the party off.
What now? Craig tried desperately to think. The lower levels were already
overrun, the control center was out of commission and he didn’t even want
to think about what Mikey was up to. It couldn’t end like this. Not after
so much. But now what?
It took him a minute to separate the shrill tone in his ear from the
background noise of the battle and a minute longer to realize what it
meant. The computer room! Someone had reached the computer room already.
He touched a stud on his bracelet and the tiny screen lit up with a view
of the computer room. He gaped at what he saw.
Zumwalt and the others were with the computer! Craig slapped his palm
against his forehead and swore. A trojan horse! He’d brought them into the
castle himself and they’d turned out to be a trojan horse. No wonder half
his equipment wasn’t working. They must have been sabotaging it for days.
Craig looked at the tiny image and felt his gorge rise. Somehow those
sonsofbitches were responsible for everything that had gone wrong since he
got here. They were behind his defeat, his every loss.
Well, maybe he’d lose, but they sure as hell weren’t going to profit by
it!
He turned on his heel and ran down the corridor, away from the War Room
and toward his private workshop.
* * *
Craig met nothing in the halls. The robots and goblins were all fighting
elsewhere. Half the lights were out and the elevators didn’t work. Now and
again the sound of battle or a muffled explosion would reach him by some
trick of acoustics, but otherwise the castle was deathly silent. Even the
air tasted stale and he realized the air conditioning system had quit.
The automatic door opener wasn’t working either, so Craig had to use a
spell to burn his way into his own workshop. Once inside, he pulled the
door shut behind him and looked around.
There in the middle of the room, surrounded by scaffolding and equipment,
was his latest creation: A full suit of Legion battle armor with some
special improvements that no game master would ever have allowed.
The bottle-green armor glinted dully in the bright lights of the shop. It
was almost twelve feet tall and so broad it looked squat by comparison.
There was no neck, only a low rounded dome for a head. The arms were
enormous, with oversized forearms to accommodate the blasters and heavy
machine guns mounted in them. The hands were six-taloned metal claws,
sharp as razors and hard enough to tear through armor steel. The legs were
elephantine in proportion with all the actuators hidden behind layers of
super-strong flexible armor.
It was hunched forward until its metal claws almost touched the ground and
the upper back was opened up like a clam shell. In spite of his anger and
haste, Craig stopped to pat the massive knee joint and look up
approvingly.
Everything he knew, everything he had learned, was incorporated in this
one lethal package. It wasn’t as big as his warbots, but thanks to the
power of magic it was nearly as heavily armed. It could run at over a
hundred miles an hour and slam through walls and buildings as if they were
not there. Instead of jump jets it had anti-gravity plates that would let
it fly from the surface of the planet out into space if the wearer wished.
It could withstand a nuclear explosion and its own firepower was measured
in kilotons per second. It was the ultimate warbot, the culmination of his
dreams of power.
And now it existed for just one purpose. To destroy the people who had
caused his ruin.
Craig mounted the scaffold and chinned himself on the grab bar to ease his
legs into the suit. He wiggled the rest of his body in, fitting arms and
legs into the sensor harnesses. Finally he touched a switch and the back
sections slid noiselessly shut behind him.
He watched the screen displays for a moment as the power gauges rose
levels and the view out the front port came alive with a network of