by Eoin Colfer
The tiny scrambler was vital to Turnball because it made everything else possible. Without it he would have no link to the off-site computer; without it, the authorities here in the Deeps would be able to record every stroke of his keyboard and see exactly what he was really working on.
Turnball tapped the screen. It was split into two sections. One showed a recording from a few hours ago: an arena packed with mesmerized humans crawling all over each other. The second a real-time bot’s-eye view of a burning shuttle craft on an icy tundra.
“One tank is gone and the other is an indulgence, so I will outsource rather than waste any more time on it.”
“Good thinking,” said Vishby, who for the first time was beginning to understand that land dwellers’ phrase in over one’s head.
Turnball Root rested his chin on one hand in the fashion of an elderly actor posing for his headshot. “Yes, Mr. Vishby. Very soon now my model shall be complete. Already one of the major parts is on its way down here, and when that arrives, there won’t be a fairy left in Atlantis . . . Eh, that is, there won’t be a fairy left undazzled by my model.”
It was a feeble cover-up, he knew. Was undazzled even a word? But no need for panic, as nobody watched him anymore. They hadn’t for years. He was no longer seen as a threat. The world in general had forgotten the disgraced Captain Turnball Root. Those who knew him now found it difficult to believe that this shabby old-timer could really be as dangerous as his file said he was.
It’s Opal Koboi this, and Opal Koboi that, Turnball often thought bitterly. Well, we’ll see who breaks out of this place first.
Turnball banished the screen with a click of his fingers. “Onward and outward, Vishby. Onward and outward.”
Vishby smiled suddenly, which with sea elves was accompanied by a slurping noise as they pulled their tongue back to make way for teeth. In fact, smiling was an unnatural expression for sea elves, and they only did it to let others know how they were feeling.
“Oh, good news, Turnball. I got my pilot’s license back finally after the Mulch Diggums escape.”
“Good for you, sir.”
Vishby had been one of Mulch Diggums’s escorts when he escaped from the LEP. All sub-shuttle crew were required to hold a pilot’s qualification, in case the primary pilot became incapacitated.
“Just for emergency trips. But in a year or two I’ll be back in rotation.”
“Well, much as I know how you long to pilot a submarine again, let’s hope there are no emergency evacuations, eh?”
Vishby approximated a wink, which was difficult, as he didn’t have any eyelids and would have to give himself a spray soon to wash off the accumulated grit on his lower lid. His version of a wink was to tilt his head jauntily to one side.
“Emergency evacuations. No, we wouldn’t want that.”
Eye grit, thought Turnball. Disgusting. And: This fish boy is about as subtle as a steamroller with a siren on top. I’d better change the subject in case someone does happen to glance at the security monitors. It would be just my luck.
“So, Mr. Vishby. No mail for me today, I assume?”
“Nope. No mail for the umpteenth day in a row.”
Turnball rubbed his hands in the manner of one with urgent business. “Well, then. I must not keep you from your duties, and I myself have some modeling to do. I impose a schedule on myself, you see, and that must be adhered to.”
“Right you are, Turnball,” said Vishby, who had long since forgotten that he should be the one doing the dismissing, not the other way around. “Just wanted to let you know I had my license back. Because that was in my schedule.”
Turnball’s smile never wavered, and he kept it bright by promising himself that he would dispose of this fool the second he was no longer of any use.
“Good. Thanks for coming by.”
Vishby was almost fully through the hatch before he turned to drop another clanger.
“Here’s hoping we don’t have an emergency evacuation, eh, Captain Root?”
Turnball moaned internally.
Captain. Now he calls me Captain.
Vatnajökull; Now
The new guy, Orion Fowl, was checking his hosiery.
“No compression socks,” he declared. “I have been on several plane journeys over the past few weeks, yet Artemis never wears compression socks. And I know he is aware of deep-vein thrombosis; he simply chooses to ignore the risks.”
This was Orion’s second rant in as many minutes, the last one detailing Artemis’s use of nonhypoallergenic deodorant, and Holly was growing tired of listening.
“I could sedate you,” she said brightly, as if this were the most reasonable course of action. “We slap a pad on your neck and leave you at the restaurant for the humans. End of hosiery discussion.”
Orion smiled kindly. “You wouldn’t do that, Captain Short. I could freeze to death before help arrived. I am an innocent. Also, you have feelings for me.”
“An innocent!” spluttered Holly, and it took an especially outlandish statement to make her splutter. “You are Artemis Fowl! For years, you were public enemy number one.”
“I am not Artemis Fowl,” protested Orion. “I share his body and his knowledge of the Gnommish tongue, among other things, but I have a completely different personality. I am what is known as an alter ego.”
Holly snorted. “I don’t think that defense will stand up in front of a tribunal.”
“Oh, it does,” said Orion happily. “All the time.”
Holly wormed up the slide of wafer slop to the lip of the crater in which the small band sheltered.
“No signs of hostiles. They appear to have descended into the underground craters.”
“Appear?” said Foaly. “Can’t you be a little more specific?”
Holly shook her head. “No. I’m on eyes only. All our instruments are out. We have no link outside our own local network. I would guess that the probe is blocking communications.”
Foaly was busy grooming himself, peeling long strings of gluey nano-wafers from his flank. “It’s designed to emit a broad-spectrum jammer if it’s under attack, knocking out communications and weapons. I’m surprised Artemis’s cannon fired, and I would imagine your guns have been isolated by now, and shut down.”
Holly checked her Neutrino. Dead as a doornail. There was nothing on her helmet readout either except a slowly revolving red skull icon, which signaled catastrophic systems failure.
“D’Arvit,” she hissed. “No weapons, no communications. How are we supposed to stop this thing?”
The centaur shrugged. “It’s a probe, not a battleship. It should be easy enough to destroy once radar picks it up. If this is some mastermind’s plot to destroy the fairy world, then he’s not much of a mastermind.”
Orion raised a finger. “I feel I should point out, correct me if Artemis is misremembering, but didn’t your instruments dismally fail to pick up this probe in the first place?”
Foaly scowled. “I was just starting to like you a little better than the other one.”
Holly stood erect. “We need to follow the probe. Work out where it’s going and somehow get word through to Haven.”
Orion smiled. “You know, Miss Holly, you look very dramatic like that, backlit by the fire. Very attractive, if I may say so. I know you shared a moment passionné with Artemis, which he subsequently fouled up with his typical boorish behavior. Let me just throw something out there for you to consider while we’re chasing the probe: I share Artemis’s passion but not his boorishness. No pressure; just think about it.”
This was enough to elicit a deafening moment of silence even in the middle of a crisis, which Orion seemed to be blissfully unaffected by.
Foaly was the first to speak. “What’s that look you have on your face there, Commander Short? What’s going through your head right now? Don’t think about it, just tell me.”
Holly ignored him, but that didn’t stop the centaur talking.
“You had a moment of passio
n with Artemis Fowl?” he said. “I don’t remember reading that in your report.”
Holly may have been blushing, or it may have been the aforementioned dramatic backlighting. “It wasn’t in my report, okay? Because there was no moment of passion.”
Foaly didn’t give up so easily. “So nothing happened, Holly?”
“Nothing worth talking about. When we went back in time, my emotions got a little jumbled. It was temporary, okay? Can we please focus? We are supposed to be professionals.”
“Not me,” said Orion cheerily. “I’m just a teenager with hormones running wild. And may I say, young fairy lady, they’re running wild in your direction.”
Holly lifted her visor and looked the hormonal teen-ager in the eye. “This had better not be a game, Artemis. If you do not have some serious psychosis, you will be sorry.”
“Oh, I’m crazy, all right. I do have plenty of psychoses,” said Orion cheerily. “Multiple personality, delusional dementia, OCD. I’ve got them all, but most of all, I’m crazy about you.”
“That’s not a bad line,” muttered Foaly. “He is definitely not Artemis.”
Holly stamped the slush from her boots. “We have two objectives: first, we need to hide evidence of fairy technology, i.e. the shuttle, from curious humans until such time as we can send a LEPretrieval team to haul it below. And our second objective is to somehow stay on the tail of that probe and get a message through to Police Plaza that it’s up here.” She glanced sharply at Foaly. “Could this be a simple malfunction?”
“No,” said the centaur with absolute certainty. “And I say that with absolute certainty. That probe has been deliberately reprogrammed, the amorphobots too. They were never meant to be used as weapons.”
“Then we have an enemy. Police Plaza needs to be warned.”
Holly turned to Orion. “Well, any ideas?”
The boy’s eyebrows rose a notch. “Bivouac?”
Holly rubbed the spot on her forehead where a headache had just blossomed.
“Bivouac. Fabulous.”
From behind came a sudden wrenching noise as the shuttle sank a little lower in the ice like a defeated warrior.
“You know,” mused Foaly, “that ship is pretty heavy and the rock shelf there is not very—”
Before he could finish, the entire shuttle disappeared into the landscape, taking the restaurant with it, as though both had been swallowed by a subterranean kraken.
Seconds later, Artemis’s Ice Cube nano-wafer cannon tumbled into the newborn chasm.
“That was incredibly quiet,” said Orion. “If I hadn’t seen it, I would never have known.”
“This terrain is like dwarf cheese. Full of holes,” said Holly, then she was up and gone, racing across the ice toward the new crater.
Orion and Foaly took their time strolling across the glacier, chatting amiably.
“On the plus side,” said Foaly, “there’s our first objective achieved. The evidence is gone.”
Orion nodded, then asked, “Dwarf cheese?”
“Cheese made by dwarfs.”
“Oh,” said Orion, relieved. “They make it. It’s not actually . . .”
“No. What a horrible thought.”
“Exactly.”
The hole in the surface of the ice revealed a cavernous underworld. A subterranean river pulsed along, tearing shreds from what was left of the Great Skua restaurant. The water was deep blue and moving with such power that it almost seemed alive. Great chunks of ice, some the size of elephants, sheared away from the banks, tumbled against the current, and then submitted to its will, gathering speed until they struck the building, pulverizing what was left. The only sound was one of raging water; the building seemed to surrender without a whimper.
The shuttle had become impaled on an ice ridge below a slight bank in the underground river. An ice bank that could not survive the pounding waters for long. The craft was stripped down by the brute force of nature until only a small section remained, an obsidian arrowhead jammed point down into the ice and rock.
“The shuttle’s escape pod,” shouted Holly. “Of course.”
Objective two, staying on the probe’s tail, was now actually possible. If they could board the pod, and if the pod still had any power in it, they would be able to follow the probe and try to get a message to LEP headquarters.
Holly tried to scan the small craft with her helmet, but her beams were still blocked.
She turned to the centaur. “Foaly? What do you think?”
Foaly did not need her question explained. There was only one thing to think about: the escape pod wedged into the ice below them.
“Those things are damn near indestructible and built to hold the entire crew in a pinch. Also, the power source is a solid fuel block, so there aren’t many moving parts to go wrong. All the usual modes of communication are on board, plus a good old-fashioned radio, which our secret enemy might not have thought to block, though considering he thought to phase the probe’s shield to repulse our own sensors, I doubt there’s much he didn’t think of.”
Holly lay down and wiggled forward until her torso hung over the rim, spray from the subterranean river painting a sheen on her visor.
“So that’s our way out, if we can make it down.”
Foaly clopped his front hooves. “We don’t all have to make it down. Some of us are a tad less nimble than others, those with hooves for example. You could hop on down there, then fly the pod back up to collect the rest of us.”
“That makes perfect sense,” said Orion. “But I should be the one to go. Chivalry demands that I take the risk.”
Foaly scowled. “Come on, Holly. Please sedate this deluded idiot.”
Orion cleared his throat. “You are not being very sensitive to my illness, centaur.”
Holly seriously considered the sedation, then shook her head. “Artemis . . . Orion is right. One of us should go.”
Holly unraveled a piton cord from the reel on her belt, quickly wrapping it around one of the exposed steel rods in the restaurant’s foundations.
“What are you doing?” asked Orion.
Holly strode briskly to the hole. “What you were going to do in about five seconds’ time.”
“Haven’t you read the classics?” shouted Orion. “I should go.”
“That’s right,” she said. “You should go.” And she hopped into the underground cavern.
Orion made an animalistic noise, if the animal were a tiger having its tail tied in a knot, and he actually stamped his foot.
“Wow,” said Foaly. “Foot stamping. You are really angry.”
“It would seem so,” said Orion, peering over the edge.
“Generally, the foot stamping is on the other foot, as you are usually the one driving Holly crazy. The other you.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” said Orion, calming somewhat. “I can be insufferable.”
The youth lay flat on the ice.
“You’re on a good line, Holly,” he said, almost to himself. “You should definitely miss that big wall of ice.”
“I doubt it,” grunted Foaly, and, as it turned out, the centaur was right.
Captain Short went down faster than she would have liked, which was totally due to equipment malfunction. If the reel at her belt had not been damaged during the recent amorphobot attack, then it would have automatically slowed her descent, and Holly could have avoided the impact that was surely to come. As it was, she was more or less falling at full G with nothing to lessen her impact other than a slight tension from the piton line.
A thought flashed through Holly’s mind even faster than the ice could flash past her head.
I hope nothing breaks; I have no magic left to fix it.
Then she crashed into the ice wall with her knees and elbows. It was harder than rock and sharper than glass, cutting her uniform as though it were paper. Cold and pain jittered along her limbs, and there was a cracking noise, but it was surface ice and not bones.
The wa
ll sloped gradually to the bank of the underground glacier runoff river, and Holly Short slid down helplessly, tumbling end over end, landing feetfirst through sheer luck. The final gasp of air huffed from her lungs as the shock of impact traveled along her legs. She prayed for a spark of magic, but nothing came to take away the pain.
Get a move on, soldier, she told herself, imagining Julius Root giving the order.
She scrambled across the ice bank, seeing her own distorted reflection in the ice stare wild-eyed back at her, like a desperate swimmer trapped under a skating pond.
Look at that face. I could use a day in a sludge-immersion tank, she thought.
Usually the idea of spending time in a relaxation spa would horrify Holly, but today it seemed a most attractive prospect.
Regeneration sludge and cucumber eye pads. Lovely.
No point dreaming about it now, though. There was work to be done.
Holly scrambled to the escape pod. The river rushed past, pounding the fuselage, hammering cracks in the ice.
I hate the cold. I really hate it.
Mist rose in freezing clouds from the water, draping a spectral blue tent over the massive stalactites.
Spectral blue tent? thought Holly. Maybe I should write a poem. I wonder what rhymes with crushed?
Holly kicked at the ice clustered at the pod’s base, clearing the hatch, thankful that the doorway wasn’t completely submerged, as, without her Neutrino, she would have no way to clear it.
The captain channeled all the day’s frustrations into the next few minutes of furious kicking. Holly stamped on that ice as though it had somehow been responsible for blowing up the shuttle, as though its crystals were somehow to blame for the probe’s attack. Whatever the source of Holly’s strength, her efforts bore fruit, and soon the hatch’s outline was visible beneath a transparent sheath of mashed ice.
A voice floated down from above. “Helloooo. Holly. Are you okay?”
There was another phrase at the end. Muffled. Could this Orion person have called her fair lady again? Holly fervently hoped not.
“I . . . am . . . fine!” she grunted, each word punctuated with another blow to the shell of ice.
