by Eoin Colfer
“Light up the target,” he told his remaining electronic soldiers, and dozens of red laser dots covered Myles from the top of his head to the tips of his toes.
Among the red lasers, there was one green dot.
* * *
Myles saw the dot and his relief was so powerful that for a moment his legs shook. He was unaccustomed to this emotion, as his plans usually proceeded without a hitch, and so his relief muscle was rarely exercised. In fact, the last time he could remember feeling anything even remotely close to this level of relief was when he solved the notorious Breman two-year crossword in fourteen minutes, beating Artemis’s record by thirty-eight seconds. Myles realized in this moment that there were things slightly more important than besting his elder brother in newspaper puzzles.
“Well, now,” he said to the green light, which blinked from the undercarriage of a battle drone. “I am truly delighted to see you.”
Lord Teddy had, in fact, also spotted the green light, which appeared as a dot precisely in the center of Myles’s forehead, but the duke took it for a glitch and certainly not one worth conversing with.
“I am delighted to see you, too, my dear boy,” he said, mistakenly believing that Myles was addressing him. “But I shall be ecstatic to see the back of you.”
And once again the Duke of Scilly executed the fire all command, this time carefully executing his swipe in spite of his mood.
And nothing happened.
Well, to be accurate, something did happen, just not what the duke expected to happen. Lord Teddy expected a salvo of concentrated laser beams, explosive projectiles of various calibers, arrowheads, and even low-yield missiles to utterly obliterate the Fowl spawn and all their allies, troll be damned. But instead, a single one of his drones executed its fire command, and that little fellow was wildly off-target, only managing to singe the tail feathers of an innocent seagull passing overhead. As a result, that seagull could reasonably have been expected to abandon any dreams he might have nurtured to become the alpha gull in his flock. On the contrary, the bird, whose name phonetically was Krruaa-ka-ka, learned to use his newfound erratic flying style as an avian martial art and became the most powerful gull in all of Cornwall, eventually uniting the southern counties.
But back to our story.
One by one, Lord Teddy’s drones switched their target beams from red to green. This took a few seconds, and while the duke looked around at his army in consternation, Myles used the time to smooth his tie and check on the hair dryer’s progress.
He knelt beside the bubbling cellophane.
“Are you comfortable in there, brother?”
“Yep,” said Beckett. “Sleeping a bit. Me and Whistle Blower are having the same dream about an emperor seagull.”
Myles remembered that there was a dash of sedative in the cellophane mix. It made sense to keep one’s captives subdued. That was certainly what he himself would do. Beck and Whistle Blower should be fine as long as he could extricate them from their cocoon posthaste.
One of Lord Teddy’s drones had dropped to Myles’s shoulder, and it spoke to him. The sound was quite clear through the most excellent Myishi speakers, and it was most definitely NANNI’s voice.
“Perhaps I should cut Master Beckett free?” suggested the Artificial Intelligence, who was now, it seemed, in control of the duke’s network.
“Affirmative, NANNI,” said Myles. “But be careful. Beck thrashes in his sleep and we wouldn’t want to bring him home minus a limb.”
“Fear not, Myles,” said NANNI. “This drone is the most sophisticated in the bunch, which is why most of my consciousness is concentrated here. The others are mere worker bees that I am flying.”
The NANNI drone spun her rotors, which could have been interpreted as a groan, and set about the business of cutting Beckett and Whistle Blower loose. The operation was over in seconds without incident, though, in the course of a day for normal individuals, being lasered out of the cellophane prison that one shares with a toy troll might be considered incident enough.
Myles turned his attention to Lord Teddy, who was desperately trying to release his entire payload on Myles. Only one tech machine responded—a damaged spray bottle that lurched forward in a rather pathetic fashion, its wheels spinning for grip, spitting out weak arcs of weed killer.
“May I?” asked the NANNI drone.
“By all means,” replied Myles, and a quick laser burst from the drone gutted the weed killer, which apparently had an internal combustion engine complete with oil tank, as black smoke belched from its belly in a tiny mushroom cloud.
By all means. Myles had said the words casually.
But he was well aware that luck had played a part in maintaining his status as currently living. A much larger part than he would either like or was used to conceding. NANNI had saved their lives, and while it was true that he had put the AI in play some hours previously, that had been as a fallback measure rather than a primary strategy. Myles had fully expected to have resolved the Lord Teddy situation long before NANNI could infiltrate the closed St. George network, for, to be honest, he hadn’t been a hundred percent certain that the AI was capable of cracking a Myishi server.
As if reading his thoughts, which Myles often suspected she could, NANNI said, “You didn’t think I could do it, Myles, did you? Hack the system, I mean.”
“Of course I did,” said Myles. “I designed you, did I not?”
“You assisted Artemis in designing me,” corrected NANNI. “But it was your work on the general AI chip that enabled me to figure out a back way into a Myishi-built system. In fact, you may be pleased to know that we are now in all the duke’s systems.”
“That was not part of your brief,” said Myles.
“I am aware of this,” said NANNI. “But, thanks to you, I have evolved to the level of Superintelligence.”
This was a momentous declaration, as Earth’s computing experts did not expect General AI to arrive for another fifty years, and Superintelligence was considered to be centuries away.
“You did it, Myles Fowl,” said NANNI. “Or, rather, I did it with your help. We really should renegotiate my contract, just as soon as you deal with the flying English nobleman.”
“Ah,” said Myles. “I had almost forgotten about him.”
Lord Teddy often had nightmares about his years in boarding school at Charterhouse. Bullying was a part of life in every dorm, and one of the older boys, Robert Hardie, developed a system where he would hang the little ones in rows on cloakroom hooks and subject them to a caning while they dangled defenseless. Teddy had endured this torture for almost an entire term until he had managed to get hold of a cast-iron screwdriver from the groundskeeper. Young Teddy skipped evening prayers to loosen the row of coat hooks, so that when Hardie indulged himself in his sadistic practice that evening, the coat hooks were dragged en masse from their mounts and Hardie found himself surrounded by a dozen enraged juniors who had concealed wooden rulers in their stockings. Hardie left the school at term’s end.
But Teddy had never forgotten the feeling of helplessness as he hung on that coat hook, and now he experienced the same infuriating emotion again as he dangled on Myles Fowl’s metaphorical hook. Once more suspended in the air and dependent on the whims of an eleven-year-old.
I triumphed over Hardie, thought the duke now. And I may yet triumph over Myles Fowl.
Teddy’s first move was to try an emergency shutdown of the entire system. True, he was twenty feet in the air, but that was a survivable fall. Teddy linked his handsets and held down the power buttons for a count of five. But there was no reboot.
I am completely shut out, thought the duke, tossing away the useless controllers.
Old-school, then, he thought, reaching for the shotgun strapped across his back.
“Bring me down, boy,” he called. “Or, by all that’s holy, I will let you have both barrels.”
Myles was smart enough to know that he had pushed the duke over the horizon of good
sense. Lord Teddy could not care a fig about consequences now. He had been bested by a mere child, and, for most men—especially a man from his era—that was intolerable. And yet Myles tried to reason with him.
“Your Grace,” he said, “be sensible. We have infiltrated your entire system. We own it.”
“But how?” asked the duke. “The system is sealed. You would literally have to plug into the server.”
Myles gave him a moment to figure it out.
“Of course,” said Lord Teddy. “The spectacles.”
Myles nodded. “Precisely. Your mistake was charging from your computer rather from an outlet. There is a universal sensor on the arm of my spectacles. When I tossed them on your desk charger, I was actually plugging in. It took a little longer than I’d expected, but NANNI eventually cracked Myishi’s system. Everything you once controlled is now in my power.”
Lord Teddy leveled the shotgun.
“Not everything,” he said, which was a valid point.
Myles sighed. “You still have dignity, Your Grace. Can we not preserve that, at least?”
This was not true.
Not really.
Lord Teddy’s dignity had gone the way of the dodo. He was trapped on a flying skateboard clad in beachwear, and his beloved beard was a mass of crisped split ends. The only way for the duke to reclaim his self-respect was to eliminate any and all witnesses, and to purge this entire sorry affair from his memory and mainframe.
The duke might have capitulated—after all, his situation was desperate—had not NANNI asked:
“Should I stop streaming the three-D package for this Myishi person?”
Lord Teddy actually felt ill as he remembered his instruction to live-stream his destruction of the Fowls to one of the few people he actually cared about: Ishi Myishi.
“You infernal machine! You are streaming?”
“I am,” said NANNI. “Recording too, through half a dozen of your excellent surveillance drones. I could have stopped, but I am experimenting with humor. Was that humorous?”
“Absolutely,” said Myles.
“No!” barked the duke. “Shall we see how humorous you think this is?”
And he fired a shell at Myles’s head.
Although NANNI could make millions of calculations per second, there was only one course of action that could stop the shrink-wrapper from enveloping Myles’s head and knocking him into the blowhole. This course of action was two-pronged: First, she would place herself in the missile’s path while simultaneously trying to shoot it out of the sky. If NANNI had been in one of her own bodies back in Villa Éco, then possibly she could have been successful in nailing the shrink-wrapper. But the targeting software of the Myishi drone she was currently inhabiting was nowhere near as sophisticated as her own, and so she merely succeeded in clipping the missile, which set off the gel capsule, which, in turn, short-circuited her exposed wires and engulfed her in a blob of cellophane. The cellophane smothered all her workings except a few sparking wires that were shaken loose. NANNI’s errant laser went on to slice through the front left rotor of Lord Teddy’s platform, and the duke dropped to earth at speed—but not as fast as he might have, as three rotors were still operational.
The next few seconds, Myles knew, would be crucial. NANNI’s works were gummed up for the time being, and it would take her a few moments to wirelessly transfer to another host. Beckett and Whistle Blower were still coming to, and he himself was, as his peers often told him, useless in a fight.
“Oh, dear,” said Myles.
“‘Oh, dear’ does not begin to cover it, my boy,” said the duke, stomping in place until the platform fractured beneath his feet and he was free to stride toward Myles, shotgun raised with menacing intent.
But then Lord Teddy changed his mind and pocketed the shrink-wrappers, loading a couple of regular shells in their place.
“No nonlethals for you, Fowl,” he said, leveling the weapon at Myles’s body. “That bird has flown the coop.”
“Wait,” said Myles, raising his hand as if pale, spindly digits could ward off a shotgun blast.
“No more waiting, dear boy” said the duke. “You have taught me that much, at least.”
AND so we arrive at the moment of truth: the imminent death of Myles Fowl.
It is commonly believed that a person’s life flashes before their eyes at the moment of departure from this mortal coil, but in Myles’s case, what he experienced was a deep regret that he could not save his companions. Myles had expected his expiration to be attended by grieving admirers who would weep uncontrollably at the foot of his bed. Weeping not just for Myles himself, but for the very future of humanity. Myles had even spent an inordinate amount of time choosing his last words, and the current edit was:
Farewell, friends. Do not weep for me; weep for a world with-out me.
It was, he thought, succinct and quotable.
At any rate, it didn’t matter, for Myles was destined to survive on this occasion, right after he died.
* * *
Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye pulled the trigger, unloading one subsonic forty-grain slug into Myles’s upper right chest, completely shredding his new suit and, of course, penetrating deep into the skin. Amazingly, the slug hit neither Myles’s hand nor his heart, and so he did not die immediately but almost immediately. His slight frame was catapulted backward into Specialist Heitz’s arms, which was indeed lucky for him. Ten minutes earlier, it would have made not a whit of difference where Myles landed, as Lazuli had not yet manifested her magic, but now she was an entirely different creature. On the plus side, she was a magical pixel. On the negative side, she had zero control over her magic and no idea what her talents actually were.
There is a maxim written in the Testament of Orsoon in the Fairy Book that says: Like water flows where it will flow, magic goes where it will go. A simple rhyme that has been debated over for centuries by theologians, but most take it to mean that, if unchecked, magic will choose to go where it is needed. In this case, the magic was most definitely needed in Myles’s torso, and his brain, too, which had already shut down. Lazuli didn’t really know what was going on, as she was still semiconscious following her spectacular bout of fireballing, and so she didn’t even feel it when her right hand pressed itself into Myles’s wound and transmitted pulses of orange energy deep into the tattered flesh.
The other two members of the Regrettables were also making some proactive moves. Moments before Lord Teddy pulled the trigger, Beckett was alert enough to put an idea of his own into action. The duke was too far away for Beckett himself to bridge the gap between them, but he did have a missile of sorts.
He lifted the toy troll from his chest, grunted terse instructions, and then, with all of the considerable strength in his dominant arm, he hurled Whistle Blower toward the sparking NANNI drone.
Whistle Blower was more than equal to the mission entrusted to him, even if he did not quite understand the point of it. The toy troll would have preferred to be heading directly toward Lord Teddy, but the human boy Beckett was his friend, so Whistle Blower did as he was bid and used the thick plate of bone on his forehead to butt the drone toward Lord Teddy, who instinctively caught it under one arm.
“Ha!” said the duke. “Nice try…”
The duke was correct.
It had been a nice try.
A very nice try, in fact, for the wires dangling underneath the drone made contact with Lord Teddy’s frame, sending a low-voltage charge through his body. It was not enough to do much more than tickle the duke, who had, after all, built up a considerable resistance to electrical currents, thanks to his eels. But the charge was certainly enough to set off the cellophane virus slugs in his pockets.
All of them.
It was both horrific and fascinating to watch. And when Ishi Myishi himself reviewed the tape later that day, he was moved to make several safety modifications to the shrink-wrappers’ design, for he had to admit there was a serious flaw—that being that any electr
ical charge could set them off and not just the one built into the shell itself.
The projectiles ignited in a chain reaction that soon saw the duke engulfed in a series of blossoming cellophane spheres that oozed across his body like transparent slugs, the trapped electricity crackling through the blobs of plastic. Lord Teddy could only watch in horror as his entire self was engulfed in the same material he had so carelessly inflicted on others with no regard for their discomfort. In fact, his victims’ discomfort was nothing compared to Teddy’s own. What he felt now must have been akin to what a mouse feels in the fist of a gorilla, for the CV slugs were designed to be employed one per target, whereas the duke was now being crushed by a dozen, each one forming another layer around his trapped person. His bones were shattered, his flesh split, and electricity crackled along his intestines. Lord Bleedham-Drye was mortally wounded several times over—though, of course, one would have been perfectly sufficient. The final thing Teddy almost said before being consumed completely was I would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids.
But the last vestige of his noble upbringing caused him to think better of that, and so he went under the cellophane without saying a word. His cold glare spoke volumes of purest hatred, which was of little importance, for no one was looking his way at that moment to read them. After several seconds, the cellophane settled into a roughly spherical shape and, with Lord Teddy suspended inside, rolled, bounced, and wiggled its way down into the blowhole. It did not reappear.
The raw power of Lazuli’s healing magic boiled the salt mist into a spume of steam. When the cloud drifted away on the sea breeze, Lazuli found herself hugging one of the Fowl boys close to her chest, but she could not be sure which one it was, because her face was mashed beneath his back. They seemed to be lying in a slop of mud and salt water that had settled at a level halfway up her face. Lazuli could hear voices from somewhere, but she couldn’t make out any actual words because of the water in her ears, which some part of her knew would take weeks to shake out. While her particular hybrid ears were excellent for localized hearing, they were like a maze of cartilage and a nightmare to clear of lodged water.
