by Eoin Colfer
Captain Holly Short fits neither of these descriptions. In fact, she would probably be the last person you would pick as a member of the LEPrecon squad. If you had to guess her occupation, the catlike stance and the sinewy muscle might suggest a gymnast, or perhaps a professional spelunker. But if you took a closer look past the pretty face, into the eyes, you would see determination so fiery it could light a candle at ten paces, and a streetwise intelligence that made her one of the Recon Squad’s most respected officers.
Of course, technically, Holly was no longer attached to Recon. Ever since the Artemis Fowl affair, when she had been captured and held for ransom, her position as Recon’s first female officer had been under review. The only reason she wasn’t at home watering her ferns right now was that Commander Root had threatened to turn in his own badge if Holly were suspended. Root knew, even if Internal Affairs wasn’t convinced, that the kidnapping had not been Holly’s fault, and only her quick thinking had prevented loss of life. But the Council members weren’t particularly interested in loss of human life, they were more concerned with loss of fairy gold. And according to them, Holly had cost them quite a chunk from the Recon ransom fund. Holly was quite prepared to fly above ground and wring Artemis Fowl’s neck until he returned the gold, but that wasn’t the way it worked. The Book, the fairy bible, stated that once a human managed to separate fairies from their gold, then that gold was his to keep.
So instead of confiscating her badge, Internal Affairs had insisted Holly handle grunt work somewhere she couldn’t do any harm. Stakeout was the obvious choice. So, Holly was farmed out to Customs and Excise, stuck in a cham pod, and suckered to the rock face overlooking a pressure-elevator chute. Dead-end duty.
Smuggling was a serious concern for the Lower Elements Police. It wasn’t the contraband itself, which was generally harmless junk: designer sunglasses, DVDs, cappuccino machines, and such. It was the method of acquiring these items.
The B’wa Kell goblin triad had cornered the smuggling market, and was becoming increasingly brazen in its aboveground excursions. It was even rumored that the goblins had constructed their own cargo shuttle to make their expeditions more economically viable.
The problem was that goblins were dim-witted creatures. All it would take would be for one of them to forget to shield, and goblin photos would be bouncing from satellites to news stations around the world. Then the Lower Elements, the last Mud People–free zone on the planet, would be discovered. When that happened, human nature being what it was, pollution, strip mining, and exploitation were sure to follow.
This meant that whatever poor souls were in the department’s bad books got to spend months at a time on surveillance duty, which is why Holly was now anchored to the rock face outside a little-used chute’s entrance.
E37 was a pressure elevator that emerged in downtown Paris, France. The European capital was red-flagged as a high-risk area, so visas were rarely approved. LEP business only. No one had been in the chute for decades, but it still merited twenty-four/seven surveillance. Which meant six officers on eight-hour shifts.
Holly was saddled with Chix Verbil for a pod mate. Like most sprites, Chix believed himself God’s green-skinned gift to females, and spent more time trying to impress Holly than doing his job.
“Lookin’ good tonight, Captain,” was Chix’s opening line that particular night. “You do something with your hair?”
Holly adjusted the screen focus, wondering what you could do with an auburn crew cut.
“Concentrate, Private. We could be up to our necks in a firefight at any second.”
“I doubt it, Captain. This place is quiet as the grave. I love assignments like this. Nice ’n’ easy. Just cruisin’.”
Holly surveyed the scene below. Verbil was right. The once thriving suburb had become a ghost town with the chute’s closure to the public. Only the occasional foraging troll stumbled past their pods. When trolls began staking out territory in an area, you knew it was deserted.
“It’s jus’ you an’ me, Cap’. And the night’s still young.”
“Stow it, Verbil. Keep your mind on the job. Or isn’t private a low enough rank for you?”
“Yes, Holly. Sorry, I mean, yes, sir.”
Sprites. They were all the same. Give a fairy a pair of wings and he thought he was irresistible.
Holly chewed her lip. They’d wasted enough taxpayers’ gold on this stakeout. The brass should just call it a day, but they wouldn’t. Surveillance duty was ideal for keeping embarrassing officers out of the public eye.
In spite of this, Holly was determined to do the job to the best of her ability. The Internal Affairs tribunal wasn’t going to have any extra ammunition to throw at her if she could help it.
Holly called up their daily pod checklist on the plasma screen. The gauges for the pneumatic clamps were in the green. Plenty of gas to keep their pod hanging there for four long boring weeks.
Next on the list was thermal imaging.
“Chix, I want you to do a flyby. We’ll run a thermal.”
Verbil grinned. Sprites loved to fly.
“Roger, Captain,” he said, strapping a thermoscan bar to his chest.
Holly opened a hole in the pod, and Verbil swooped out, climbing quickly to the shadows. The bar on his chest bathed the area below with heat-sensitive rays. Holly punched up the thermoscan program on her computer. The view screen swam with fuzzy images in various shades of gray. Any living creature would show up even behind a layer of solid rock. But there was nothing, just a few swear toads and the tail end of a troll shambling off the screen.
Verbil’s voice crackled over the speaker.
“Hey, Captain. Should I take ’er in for a closer look?”
That was the trouble with portable scanners. The further away you were, the weaker the rays became.
“Okay, Chix. One more sweep. Be careful.”
“Don’t worry, Holly. The Chix man will keep himself in one piece for you.”
Holly drew a breath to make a threatening reply, but the retort died in her throat. On the screen. Something was moving.
“Chix. You getting this?”
“Affirmative, Cap. I’m getting it, but I dunno what I’m getting.”
Holly enhanced a section of the screen. Two beings were moving around on the second level. The beings were gray.
“Chix. Hold your position. Continue scanning.”
Gray? How could gray things be moving? Gray was dead. No heat, cold as the grave. Nevertheless . . .
“On your guard, Private Verbil. We have possible hostiles.”
Holly opened a channel to Police Plaza. Foaly, the LEP’s technical wizard, would undoubtedly have their video feed running in the Operations booth.
“Foaly. You watching?”
“Yep, Holly,” answered the centaur. “Just bringing you up on the main screen.”
“What do you make of these shapes? Moving gray? I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Me neither.” There followed a brief silence, punctuated by the clicking of a keyboard. “Two possible explanations. One, equipment malfunction. These could be phantom images from another system. Like interference on a radio.”
“The other explanation?”
“It’s so ludicrous that I hardly like to mention it.”
“Yeah, well do me a favor, Foaly, mention it.”
“Well, ridiculous as it sounds, someone may have found a way to beat my system.”
Holly paled. If Foaly was even admitting the possibility, then it was almost definitely true. She cut the centaur off, switching her attention back to Private Verbil. “Chix! Get out of there. Pull up! Pull up!”
The sprite was far too busy trying to impress his pretty captain to realize the seriousness of his situation. “Relax, Holly. I’m a sprite. Nobody can hit a sprite.”
That was when a projectile erupted through a chute window, blowing a fist-sized hole in Verbil’s wing.
Holly tucked a Neutrino 2000 into its holste
r, issuing commands through her helmet’s com-set.
“Code 14, repeat code 14. Fairy down. Fairy down. We are under fire. E37. Send warlock medics and backup.”
Holly dropped through the hatch, rappelling to the tunnel floor. She ducked behind a statue of Frond, the first elfin king. Chix was lying on a mound of rubble across the avenue. It didn’t look good. The side of his helmet had been bashed in by the jagged remains of a low wall, rendering his com-set completely useless.
She needed to reach him soon, or he was a goner. Sprites only had limited healing powers. They could magic away a wart, but gaping wounds were beyond them.
“I’m patching you through to the commander,” said Foaly’s voice in her ear. “Stand by.”
Commander Root’s gravelly tones barked across the airwaves. He did not sound in the best of moods. No surprises there.
“Captain Short. I want you to hold your position until backup gets there.”
“Negative, Commander. Chix is hit. I have to reach him.”
“Holly. Captain Kelp is minutes away. Hold your position. Repeat. Hold your position.”
Behind the helmet’s visor, Holly gritted her teeth in frustration. She was one step from being booted out of the LEP, and now this. To rescue Chix, she would have to disobey a direct order.
Root sensed her indecision. “Holly, listen to me. Whatever they’re shooting at you punched straight through Verbil’s wing. Your LEP vest is no good. So sit tight and wait for Captain Kelp.”
Captain Kelp. Possibly the LEP’s most gung-ho officer, famous for choosing the name Trouble at his graduation ceremony. Still, there was no officer Holly would prefer to have at her back going through a door.
“Sorry, sir, I can’t wait. Chix took a hit in the wing. You know what that means.”
Shooting a sprite in the wing was not like shooting a bird. Wings were a sprite’s largest organ and contained seven major arteries. A hole like that would have ruptured at least three.
Commander Root sighed. Over the speakers it sounded like a rush of static.
“Okay, Holly. But stay low. I don’t want to lose any of my people today.”
Holly drew her Neutrino 2000 from its holster, flicking the setting up to three. She wasn’t taking any chances with the snipers. Presuming they were goblins from the B’wa Kell triad, on a three setting, the first shot would knock them unconscious for eight hours at the very least.
She gathered her legs beneath her, and rocketed out from behind the statue. Immediately a hail of gunfire blew chunks from the structure.
Holly raced toward her fallen comrade, projectiles buzzing around her head like supersonic bees. Generally, in a situation of this kind, the last thing you do would be to move the victim, but with gunfire raining down on them, there was no choice. Holly grabbed the private by his epaulettes, hauling him behind a rusted-out delivery shuttle.
Chix had been out there a long time. He was grinning feebly.
“You came for me, Cap’. I knew you would.”
Holly tried to keep the worry from her voice.
“Of course I came, Chix. Never leave a man behind.”
“I knew you couldn’t resist me,” he breathed. “I knew it.”
Then he closed his eyes. There was a lot of damage done here. Maybe too much. Holly concentrated on the wound. Heal, she thought, and the magic welled up inside her like a million pins and needles. It spread through her arms and ran down to her fingers. She placed her hands on Verbil’s wound. Blue sparks tingled from her fingers into the hole. The sparks played around the wound, repairing the scorched issue and replicating spilt blood. The sprite’s breathing calmed, and a healthy green tinge started to return to his cheeks.
Holly sighed. Chix would be okay. He probably wouldn’t fly any more missions on that wing, but he would live. Holly lay the unconscious sprite on his side, careful not to put pressure on the injured wing. Now for the mysterious gray shapes. Holly upped the setting on her weapon to four and ran without hesitation toward the chute entrance.
On your very first day in the LEP Academy, a big, hairy gnome with a chest the size of a bull troll’s pins each cadet to a wall and warns them never to run into an unsecured building during a firefight. He says this in a most insistent fashion. He repeats it every day, until the maxim is etched on every cadet’s brain. Nevertheless, this was exactly what Captain Holly Short of LEPrecon proceeded to do.
She blasted the terminal’s double doors, diving through to the shelter of a check-in desk. Less than four hundred years ago, this building had been a hive of activity, with tourists lining up for aboveground visas. Paris had once been a very popular tourist destination. But, inevitably it seemed, humans had claimed the European capital for themselves. The only place fairies felt safe was in Disneyland Paris, where no one looked twice at diminutive creatures, even if they were green.
Holly activated a motion-sensor filter in her helmet and scanned the building through the desk’s quartz security panel. If anything moved, the helmet’s computer would automatically flag it with an orange corona. She looked up just in time to see two figures loping along a viewing gallery toward the shuttle bay. They were goblins, all right, reverting to all fours for extra speed, trailing a hover trolley behind them. They were wearing some kind of reflective foil suits, complete with headgear, obviously to fool the thermal sensors. Very clever. Too clever for goblins.
Holly ran parallel to the goblins, one floor down. All around her, ancient advertisements sagged in their brackets. TWO-WEEK SOLSTICE TOUR. TWENTY OUNCES OF GOLD. CHILDREN UNDER TEN TRAVEL FREE.
She vaulted the turnstile gate, racing past the security zone and duty-free booths. The goblins were descending now, boots and gloves flapping on a frozen escalator. One lost his headgear in his haste. He was big for a goblin, over three feet. His lidless eyes rolled in panic, and his forked tongue flicked upward to moisten his pupils.
Captain Short squeezed off a few bursts on the run. One clipped the backside of the nearest goblin. Holly groaned. Nowhere near a nerve center. But it didn’t have to be. There was a disadvantage to those foil suits. They conducted neutrino charges. The charge spread through the suit’s material like fiery ripples across a pond. The goblin jumped a good six feet straight up, then tumbled unconscious to the foot of the escalator. The hover trolley spun out of control, crashing into a luggage carousel. Hundreds of small cylindrical objects spilled from a shattered crate.
Goblin number two fired a dozen rounds Holly’s way. He missed, partly because his arms were jittery with nerves. But also because firing from the hip only works in the movies. Holly tried to take a screen shot of his weapon with her helmet camera for the computer to run a match on, but there was too much vibration.
The chase continued down the conduits and into the departure area itself. Holly was surprised to hear the hum of docking computers. There wasn’t supposed to be any power here. LEP engineering would have dismantled the generators. Why would power be needed here?
She already knew the answer. Power would be needed to operate the shuttle monorail and mission control. Her suspicions were confirmed as she entered the hangar. The goblins had built a shuttle!
It was unbelievable. Goblins had barely enough electricity in their brains to power a ten-watt bulb. How could they possibly build a shuttle? Yet there it was, sitting in the dock like a used-craft seller’s worst nightmare. There wasn’t a bit of it less than a decade old, and the hull was a patchwork of weld spots and rivets.
Holly swallowed her amazement, concentrating on the pursuit. The goblin had paused to grab a set of wings from the cargo hold. She could have taken a shot then, but it was too risky. She wouldn’t be surprised if the shuttle’s nuclear battery was protected by nothing more than a single layer of lead.
The goblin took advantage of his reprieve to skip down the access tunnel. The monorail ran the length of the scorched rock to the massive chute. The chutes were natural vents that riddled the earth’s mantle and crust. Magma streams from the
planet’s molten core blasted toward the surface at irregular intervals. If it wasn’t for these pressure releases, the earth would have shaken itself to fragments aeons since. The LEP had harnessed this natural power for express surface shots. Recon officers rode the flares in titanium eggs in times of emergency. For a more leisurely trip, shuttles ascended to the various terminals around the world.
Holly slowed her pace. There was nowhere for the goblin to go. Not unless he was going to fly into the chute itself, and nobody was that crazy. Anything that got caught up in a magma flare got fried right down to the subatomic level.
The chute’s entrance loomed ahead. Massive and ringed by charred rock.
Holly switched on the helmet’s microphone.
“That’s far enough,” she shouted over the howl of core wind. “Give it up. You’re not going into the chute without science.”
Science was LEP-speak for technical information. In this case, science would be flare-prediction times. Accurate to within a tenth of a second. Generally.
The goblin raised a strange rifle, this time taking careful aim. The firing pin dropped, but whatever this weapon was firing, there wasn’t any left.
“That’s the problem with nonnuclear weapons, you run out of charge,” quipped Holly, fulfilling the age-old tradition of firefight banter, even though her knees were threatening to fold.
In response, the goblin heaved the rifle in Holly’s direction. It was a terrible throw, landing fifteen feet short. But it served its purpose as a distraction. The B’wa Kell triad member used the moment to fire up his wings. They were old models: rotary motor and a broken muffler. The roar of the engine filled the tunnel.
There was another roar, behind the wings. A roar that Holly knew well from a thousand logged flight hours in the chutes. There was a flare coming.
Holly’s mind raced. If the goblins had somehow managed to hook up the terminal to a power source, then all the safety features would have been activated. Including . . .
