The Last Guardian (Disney)

by Eoin Colfer

  Holly called to a sprite she recognized on the security desk.

  “Chix. Is our chute open?”

  Chix Verbil had once been Holly’s podmate on a stakeout and was only alive because she had dragged his wounded frame out of harm’s way.

  “Uh . . . yeah. Commander Kelp told us to make a hole. Are you okay, Captain?”

  Holly dismounted from Butler’s shelflike shoulder, landing with sparks from her boot heels.

  “Fine.”

  “Unusual mode of transport,” commented Chix, nervously hovering a foot from the floor, his reflection shimmering in the polished steel below like a sprite trapped in another dimension.

  “Don’t worry, Chix,” said Holly, patting Butler’s thigh. “He’s tame. Unless he smells fear.”

  Butler sniffed the air as though there were a faint scent of terror.

  Chix rose a few inches, his wings a hummingbird blur. He tapped the V-board on his wrist computer with sweating digits. “Okay. You are set to go. The ground crew checked all your life support. And we popped in a fresh plasma cube while we were in there, so you’re good for a few decades. The blast doors are dropping in less than two minutes, so I would get moving if I were you and take those two Mud Men . . . ah, humans . . . with you.”

  Butler decided that it would be quicker to keep Artemis pinioned on his shoulder until they were in the shuttle, as he would probably trip over a dwarf in his haste. He set off at a quick lope down the metal tube linking the check-in desk to their berth.

  Foaly had managed to get a remodeling order approved for the bay so that Butler could walk under the lintel with his chin tucked low. The shuttle itself was actually an off-road vehicle confiscated by the Criminal Assets Bureau from a tuna smuggler. Its middle row of seats had been removed so that the bodyguard could stretch out in the back. Riding the off-roader was Butler’s favorite part of his underworld visits.

  Off-roader! Foaly had snorted. As if there is anywhere to go in Haven that doesn’t have roads. Plasma-guzzling status symbols, that’s all these clunkers are.

  Which hadn’t stopped him from gleefully ordering a refit so that the vehicle resembled an American Humvee and could accommodate two humans in the back. And because Artemis was one of the humans, Foaly could not help but show off a little, stuffing more extras into the confined space than would be found in the average Mars probe: gel seats, thirty-two speakers, 3-D HDTV; and for Holly, oxy-boost, and a single laser cutter in the hood ornament, which was an imp blowing a long-stemmed horn. This was why the shuttle was referred to as the Silver Cupid. It was a little romantic-sounding for Artemis’s taste, and so Holly referred to it by name as often as possible.

  The off-roader detected Holly’s proximity and sent a message to her wrist computer inquiring whether it should pop the doors and start itself up. Holly confirmed without missing a step, and the batwing doors swung smoothly upward just in time for Butler to unload Artemis like a sack of kittens from his shoulder into the backseat. Holly slid into the single front seat in the nose of the blocky craft and had locked on to the supply rail before the doors had sealed.

  Artemis and Butler leaned back and allowed the safety cinches to drop over their shoulders, pulling comfortably close on tension-sensitive rollers.

  Artemis’s fingers scrunched the material of his pants at the knees. Their progress down the feeder rail seemed maddeningly slow. At the end of the metal panel–clad rock tunnel they could see the vent itself, a glowing crescent yawning like the gate to hell.

  “Holly,” he said without parting his teeth, “please, a little acceleration.”

  Holly lifted her gloved hands from the wheel. “We’re still on the feeder rail, Artemis. It’s all automatic.”

  Foaly’s face appeared in a heads-up display on the windshield. “I’m sorry, Artemis,” he said. “I really am. We’ve run out of time.”

  “No!” said Artemis, straining against his belt. “There are fifteen seconds left. Twelve at least.”

  Foaly’s eyes dropped to the controls before him. “We have to close the doors to ensure everyone inside the blast tunnels survives. I really am sorry, Artemis.”

  The off-roader jerked, then halted as the power was cut to the rail.

  “We can make it,” Artemis said, his voice close to a panicked wheeze.

  Up ahead the mouth to hell began to close as the giant dwarf-forged gears rolled the meter-thick slatted shutters down over the vent.

  Artemis grasped Holly’s shoulder. “Holly? Please.”

  Holly rolled her eyes and flicked the controls to manual.

  “D’Arvit,” she said, and pressed the accelerator to the floor.

  The off-roader leaped forward, jerking free from its guide rail, setting off revolving lights and warning sirens.

  Onscreen, Foaly rubbed his eyelids with index fingers. “Yeah, yeah. Here we go. Captain Short goes rogue once more. Hands up who’s surprised. Anyone?”

  Holly tried to ignore the centaur and concentrate on squeezing the shuttle through the shrinking gap.

  Usually I pull this sort of stunt toward the end of an adventure, she thought. Third-act climax. We’re starting early this time.

  The shuttle grated along the tunnel floor, the friction sending up twin arcs of sparks that bounced off the walls. Holly slipped control goggles over her eyes and automatically adjusted her vision to the curious double focus necessary to send blink commands to the sensors in her lenses and actually look at what was in front of her.

  “Close,” she said. “It’s going to be close.” And then, before they lost the link: “Good luck, Foaly. Stay safe.”

  The centaur tapped his screen with two fingers. “Good luck to us all.”

  Holly bought them an extra few inches by deflating the Cupid’s suspension pads, and the off-roader ducked under the descending blast doors with half a second to spare, swooping into the natural chimney. Below, the earth’s core spewed up magma columns ten miles wide, creating fiery updrafts that blasted the small shuttle’s scorched underside and set it spiraling toward the surface.

  Holly set the stabilizers and allowed the headrest to cradle her neck and skull.

  “Hold on,” she said. “There’s a rough ride ahead.”

  Pip jumped when the alarm sounded on his phone as though he had not been expecting it, as though he had not been counting the seconds. Nevertheless he seemed surprised, now that the moment had finally arrived. Shooting Kip had drained the cockiness from him, and his body language was clearly that of a reluctant assassin.

  He tried to regain some of that old cavalier spirit by waving his gun a little and leering at the camera; but it is difficult to represent the murder of a childlike pixie as anything but that.

  “I warned you,” he said to the camera. “This is on you people, not me.”

  In Police Plaza, Commander Kelp activated the mike.

  “I will find you,” he growled. “If it takes me a thousand years, I will find you and deliver you to a lifetime’s imprisonment.”

  This actually seemed to cheer Pip a little. “You? Find me? Sorry if that doesn’t worry me, cop, but I know someone who scares me a lot more than you.”

  And without further discussion he shot Opal, once, in the head.

  The pixie toppled forward as though struck from behind with a shovel. The bullet’s impact drove her into the ground with some force, but there was very little blood except a small trickle from her ear, almost as if young Opal had fallen from her bicycle in the schoolyard.

  In Police Plaza the usually riotous operations center grew quiet as the entire force waited for the repercussions of the murder they had just witnessed. Which quantum theory would prove correct? Perhaps nothing at all would happen apart from the death of a pixie.

  “Okay,” said Trouble Kelp, after a long pregnant moment. “We’re still operational. How long before we’re out of the troll’s den?”

  Foaly was about to run a few calculations on the computer when the wall screen spontaneously shattere
d, leaking green gas into the room.

  “Hold on to something,” he advised. “Chaos is coming.”

  Atlantis

  Opal Koboi felt herself die, and it was a curious sensation, like an anxious gnawing at her insides.

  So this is what trauma feels like, she thought. I’m sure I’ll get over it.

  The sour sickness was soon replaced by a fizzing excitement as she relished the notion of what she was to become.

  Finally I am transforming. Emerging from my chrysalis as the most powerful creature on the planet. Nothing will stand in my way.

  This was all very melodramatic, but Opal decided that, under the circumstances, her eventual biographer would understand.

  It never occurred to the pixie that her theory of temporal paradox could simply be dead wrong, and she could be left down a hole in a nuclear reactor having killed her only real ally.

  I feel a tingle, she thought. It’s beginning.

  The tingle became an uncomfortable burning sensation in the base of her skull that quickly spread to clamp her entire head in a fiery vise. Opal could no longer nurture thoughts of future conquests as her entire being suddenly became fear and pain.

  I have made a mistake, she thought desperately. No prize is worth another second of this.

  Opal thrashed inside her anti-rad suit, fighting the soft constraints of the foam, which blunted her movements. The pain spread through her nervous system, increasing in intensity from merely unbearable to unimaginable. Whatever slender threads of sanity Opal had left snapped like a brig’s moorings in a hurricane.

  Opal felt her magic return to conquer the pain in what remained of her nerve endings. The mad and vengeful pixie fought to contain her own energy and not be destroyed utterly by her own power, even now being released as electrons shifted orbits and nuclei spontaneously split. Her body phase-shifted to pure golden energy, vaporizing the radiation suit and burning wormhole trails through the dissolving foam, ricocheting against the walls of the neutron chamber and back into Opal’s ragged consciousness.

  Now, she thought. Now the rapture begins, as I remake myself in my own image. I am my own god.

  And, with only the power of her mind, Opal reassembled herself. Her appearance remained unchanged, for she was vain and believed herself to be perfect. But she opened and expanded her mind, allowing new powers to coat the bridges between her nerve cells, focusing on the ancient mantras of the dark arts so that her new magic could be used to bring her soldiers up from their resting place. Power like this was too much for one body, and she must excise it as soon as her escape was made, or her atoms would be shredded and swept away like windborne fireflies.

  Nails are hard to reassemble, she thought. I might have to sacrifice my fingernails and toenails.

  The ripple effects of young Opal’s murder in the corner of a field were more widespread than even Artemis could have imagined, though in truth imagine is the wrong verb, as Artemis Fowl was not in the habit of imagining anything. Even as a small boy, he had never nurtured daydreams of himself on horseback fighting dragons. What Artemis preferred to do was visualize an achievable objective and then work toward that goal.

  His mother, Angeline, had once peered over eight-year-old Artemis’s shoulder as he sketched in his journal.

  Oh, darling, that’s wonderful! she’d exclaimed, delighted that her boy had finally shown some interest in artistic creativity, even if the picture did seem a little violent. It’s a giant robot destroying a city.

  No, Mother, Artemis had sighed, ever the theatrical misunderstood genius. It’s a builder drone constructing a lunar habitat.

  Angeline had ruffled her son’s hair in revenge for the sigh and wondered if little Arty might need to talk to someone professional.

  Artemis had considered the widespread devastation that would be caused by the spontaneous energy exploding from all Opal-related material, but even he was not aware of the saturation levels Koboi products had achieved in the few years before her incarceration. Koboi Industries had many legitimate businesses, which manufactured everything from weapons parts to medical equipment; but Opal had also several shadow companies that illegally extended her influence to the human world and even into space, and the effects of these tens of thousands of components exploding ranged from inconvenient to downright catastrophic.

  In the LEP lockup, two hundred assorted weapons, which were scheduled for recycling the following week, collapsed like melting chocolate bars, then radiated a fierce golden light that fried all local closed-circuit systems before exploding with the power of a hundred bars of Semtex. Fission was not achieved, but the damage was substantial nonetheless. The warehouse was essentially vaporized, and several of the underground city’s loadbearing support pillars were toppled like children’s building blocks.

  Haven City Center collapsed inward, allowing a million tons of the earth’s crust to cave in on top of the fairy capital, breaking the pressure seal and increasing the atmosphere readings by almost a thousand percent. Anything under the falling rock was squashed instantly. There were eighty-seven fatalities, and property damage was absolute.

  Police Plaza’s basement collapsed, causing the bottom three floors to sink into the depression. Fortunately the upper floors were bolted to the cavern roof, which held firm and saved the lives of many officers who had elected to remain at their posts.

  * * *

  Sixty-three percent of fairy automobiles had Koboi pistons in their engines, which blew simultaneously, causing an incredible synchronized flipping of vehicles, part of which was captured on a parking garage camera that had somehow survived compression. It would in future years become the most viewed clip on the Underworld Web.

  Koboi shadow labs had for years been selling obsolete fairy technology to human companies, as it would seem cutting-edge to their shareholders. These little wonder chips or their descendants had wended their way into almost every computer-controlled device built within the past few years. These chips inside laptops, cell phones, televisions, and toasters popped and pinged like kinetically charged ball bearings in tin cans. Eighty percent of electronic communication on planet Earth immediately ceased. Humanity was heaved back to the paper age in half a second.

  Life-support systems spat out bolts of energy and died. Precious manuscripts were lost. Banks collapsed as all financial records for the past fifty years were completely wiped out. Planes fell from the sky, the Graum II space station drifted off into space, and defense satellites that were not supposed to exist stopped existing.

  People took to the streets, shouting into their dead cell phones as if volume could reactivate them. Looting spread across countries like a computer virus while actual computer viruses died with their hosts, and credit cards became mere rectangles of plastic. Parliaments were stormed worldwide as citizens blamed their governments for this series of inexplicable catastrophes.

  Gouts of fire and foul blurts of actual brimstone emerged from cracks in the earth. These were mostly from ruptured pipes, but people took up a cry of Armageddon. Chaos reigned, and the survivalists eagerly unwrapped the kidskin from their crossbows.

  Phase one of Opal’s plan was complete.

  LUCKILY for Captain Holly Short and the passengers in the Silver Cupid, Foaly was so paranoid where Opal was concerned and so vain about his own inventions that he insisted nothing but branded Foaly-tech parts be used in the shuttle’s refit, going so far as to strip out any Koboi or generic components that he could not trace back to a parent company. But, even with all of his paranoia, Foaly still missed a patch of filler on the rear fender that contained an adhesive Killer Filler developed by Koboi Labs. Fortunately, when the adhesive fizzled and blew, it took the path of least resistance and spun away from the ship like a fiery swarm of bees. No operating systems were affected—though there was an unsightly patch of primer left visible on the spoiler, which everyone in the shuttle would surely have agreed was preferable to their being dead.

  The shuttle soared on the thermals, borne a
loft like a dandelion seed in the Grand Canyon—if you accept that there are dandelions in the Grand Canyon in spite of the arid conditions. Holly nudged them into the center of the vast chimney, though there was little chance of their striking a wall in the absence of a full-fledged magma flare. Artemis called to her from the rear, but she could not hear over the roar of core wind.

  “Cans,” she mouthed, tapping the phones in her own helmet. “Put on your headphones.”

  He pulled a pair of bulky cans from their clip on the ceiling and adjusted them over his ears.

  “Do you have any kind of preliminary damage report from Foaly?” he asked.

  Holly checked her coms. “Nothing. Everything is down. I’m not even getting static.”

  “Very well, here is the situation as I see it. As our communications are down, I assume that young Opal’s murder has thrown the entire planet into disarray. There will be mayhem on a scale not seen since the last world war. Our Opal doubtless plans to emerge from the ashes of this global pyre as some form of pixie phoenix. How she intends to do this, I do not know; but there is some connection to my home, the Fowl Estate, so that is where we must go. How long will the journey take, Holly?”

  Holly considered what was under the hood. “I can shave fifteen minutes off the usual, but it’s still going to be a couple of hours.”

  Two hours, thought Artemis. One hundred and twenty minutes to concoct a workable strategy wherein we three tackle whatever Opal has planned.

  Butler adjusted his headphones’ microphone. “Artemis. I know this has occurred to you, because it occurred to me.”

  “I predict, old friend,” said Artemis, “that you are about to point out that we are rushing headlong to the exact place where Opal is strongest.”

  “Exactly, Artemis,” confirmed the bodyguard. “Or, as we used to say in the Delta: we are running blindfolded into the kill box.”