The Time Paradox (Disney)

by Eoin Colfer

  “Put me on a leash? Is that what you’ve been doing all this time, Captain Short?”

  Artemis was shivering now, as though a current had passed through his limbs.

  “Artemis,” said Holly urgently. “Wouldn’t you like to sleep for a while? Just lay your head down somewhere warm and sleep?”

  The notion took hold in some corner of Artemis’s brain. “Yes. Sleep. Can you do that, Holly?”

  Holly took a slow step forward. “Of course I can. Just a little mesmer is all it takes. You’ll wake up a new man.”

  Artemis’s eyes seemed to jellify. “A new man. But what about THE PROJECT?”

  Easy now, thought Holly. Move in gently. “We can take care of it when you wake up.” She slipped the thinnest wafer of magic into her upper registers; to Artemis it would sound like the tinkling of crystal bells on every consonant.

  “Sleep,” said Artemis softly, in case volume broke the word. “ ‘To sleep, perchance to dream.’ ”

  “Quoting theater now?” said Foaly. “Do we really have the time?”

  Holly hushed him with a glare, then took another step toward Artemis.

  “Just a few hours. We can take you away from here, from whatever’s coming.”

  “Away from here,” echoed the troubled boy.

  “Then we can talk about the project.”

  The shuttle’s pilot fluffed his approach, carving a shallow trench in the surface with his rear stabilizer. The cacophonous splintering of sugar-glass-thin ice plates was enough to sharpen Artemis’s pupils.

  “No!” he shouted, his voice shrill for once. “No magic. One two three four five. Stay where you are.”

  A second craft introduced itself to the melodrama, appearing suddenly in the distant skyscape as though crashing through from an alternate dimension. Huge and sleek like a spiraling ice-cream cone, trailing tethered boosters, one errant engine detaching and spinning off into the heavy gray clouds. For such a huge ship, it made very little noise.

  Artemis was shocked by the sight.

  Aliens? was his first thought; then, Wait, not aliens. I have seen this before. A schematic at least.

  Foaly was having the same thought. “You know, that looks familiar.”

  Entire sections of the giant ship were flickering out of sight as it cooled down from its steep atmospheric entry, or re-entry, as it turned out.

  “That’s one from your space program,” said Artemis accusingly.

  “It’s possible,” Foaly admitted, a guilty tinge blossoming on his rear cheeks, another reason he lost at poker. “Difficult to tell with all the erratic movements and so forth.”

  The LEP shuttle finally touched down, popping a hatch on its port side.

  “Everyone in,” ordered Vinyáya. “We need to put a little distance between us and that ship.”

  Foaly was three or four steps ahead. “No. No, this is one of ours. It shouldn’t be here, but we can still control it.”

  Holly snorted. “Sure. You’re doing a great job of it so far.”

  This comment was one more than the centaur could bear. He finally snapped, rearing majestically on his hind legs, then bringing his front hooves smashing down on the thin ice.

  “Enough!” he roared. “There is a deep-space probe bearing down on us. And even if its nuclear generator does not explode, the impact blast wave alone will be enough to destroy everything in a fifteen-mile radius, so unless that shuttle of yours can travel to another dimension, boarding will be about as much use as you would be at a scientific convention.”

  Holly shrugged. “Fair enough. What do you suggest?”

  “I suggest you shut up and let me deal with this problem.”

  The term probe generally brings to mind a small, spare craft, with perhaps a few sample jars in its hold and maybe a rack of super-efficient solar cells clamped to its back, but this machine was the polar opposite of such an image. It was huge and violent in its movement, jarring the air as it bludgeoned through, jumping in lurching leaps, dragging tethered engines behind like captured slaves.

  “This thing,” muttered Foaly, blinking to activate his monocle, “seemed friendlier when I designed it.”

  The soldiers were ordered to hold their positions, and the entire group could only watch as the giant ship bore down on them, screaming ever louder as its soundproofing waffling was scored. Atmospheric friction tore at the probe with jagged fingers, tearing huge octagonal plates from the hull. And all the while Foaly tried to gain control of it.

  “What I’m doing is going through the shuttle’s antennae to get a good fix on the probe’s computer, see if I can find the malfunction and then maybe I can program in a nice friendly hover at thirty yards. A little more shield would be nice too.”

  “Less explaining,” said Vinyáya through gritted teeth, “and more fixing.”

  Foaly kept up his line of drivel as he worked. “Come on, Commander. I know you military types thrive on these tense situations.”

  Throughout this exchange, Artemis stood still as a statue, aware that should he release the tremors, they would engulf him perhaps forever, and he would be lost.

  What has happened? he wondered. Am I not Artemis Fowl?

  Then he noticed something.

  That ship has four engines. Four.

  Death.

  As if to confirm this thought, or indeed prompted by the thought, an orange bolt of energy appeared at the very tip of the descending craft, roiling nastily, looking very much like a bringer of death.

  “Orange energy,” noted Holly, shooting it with a finger gun. “You’re the explainer guy, Foaly, explain that.”

  “Worry not, lesser intellect,” said Foaly, fingers a blur across his keyboard. “This ship is unarmed. It’s a scientific probe, for gods’ sake. That plasma bolt is an ice cutter, no more than that.”

  Artemis could hold in the tremors no longer, and they wracked his slim frame.

  “Four engines,” he said, teeth chattering. “F-f-four is death.”

  Vinyáya paused on her way to the shuttle gangway. She turned, a sheaf of steel hair escaping her hood. “Death? What’s he talking about?”

  Before Holly could answer, the orange plasma beam bubbled merrily for a moment, then blasted directly into the shuttle’s engine.

  “No, no, no,” said Foaly, speaking as one would to an errant student. “That’s not right at all.”

  They watched horrified as the shuttle collapsed in a ball of turgid heat, rendering the metal shell transparent for just long enough to reveal the writhing marines inside.

  Holly dropped low and dived toward Vinyáya, who was searching for a pathway through the flames to her men inside.

  “Commander!”

  Holly Short was fast, actually getting a grip on Vinyáya’s glove before one of the shuttle’s engines exploded and sent Holly pinwheeling through the superheated air onto the roof of the Great Skua restaurant. She flapped on the slate like a butterfly on a pin, staring stupidly at the glove in her hand. Her visor’s recognition software had locked onto Commander Vinyáya’s face, and a warning icon flashed gently.

  Fatal injury to central nervous system, read a text on her screen. Holly knew that the computer was saying the same thing in her ear, but she couldn’t hear it. Please seal off the area and call emergency services.

  Fatal injury? This couldn’t be happening again. In that nanosecond she flashed back to her former commander Julius Root’s death.

  Reality returned in a fiery heatwave, turning the ice to steam and popping the heat sensors in her suit.

  Holly dug her fingers into the roof slush and hauled her upper body higher. The scene played around her like a silent movie, as her helmet noise filters had expanded and ruptured in the nanosecond between the flash and the bang.

  Everyone in the shuttle was gone…that much was clear.

  Don’t say gone, say dead—that’s what they are.

  “Focus!” she said aloud, pounding a fist into the roof to emphasize each syllable. There
would be time to grieve later; this crisis was not yet past.

  Who is not dead?

  She was not dead. Bleeding but alive, smoke drifting from the soles of her boots.

  Vinyáya. Oh gods.

  Forget Vinyáya for now.

  And in a snowdrift underneath the eaves, she spotted Foaly’s legs doing an inverted gallop.

  Is that funny now? Should I be laughing?

  But where was Artemis? Suddenly Holly’s heartbeat was loud in her ears, and her blood roared like the surf.

  Artemis.

  Holly’s journey to a crouch was harder than it was supposed to be, and no sooner had her knees found purchase than her elbows gave way, and she ended up almost back where she’d started.

  Artemis. Where are you?

  Then from the corner of her eye, Holly saw her friend loping across the ice. Artemis was apparently unharmed, apart from a slight drag in his left leg. He was moving slowly but determinedly away from the burning shuttle. Away from the crank and blackening of contracting metal and the mercury drip of stealth ore finally reaching its melting point.

  Where are you going?

  Not running away, that was for sure. If anything, Artemis was moving directly into the path of the still-falling space probe.

  Holly tried to scream a warning. She opened her mouth but could only cough smoke. She tasted smoke and battle.

  “Artemis,” she managed to hack after several attempts.

  Artemis glanced up at her. “I know,” he shouted, a ragged edge to his voice. “The sky appears to be falling, but it isn’t. None of this is real, the ship, those soldiers, none of it. I realize that now. I’ve been…I’ve been having delusions, you see.”

  “Get clear, Artemis,” cried Holly, her voice not her own, feeling like her brain was sending signals to someone else’s mouth. “That ship is real. It will crush you.”

  “No it won’t, you’ll see.” Artemis was actually smiling benignly. “Delusional disorder, that’s all this craft is. I simply constructed this vision from an old memory, one of Foaly’s blueprints I sneaked a look at. I need to face my dementia. Once I can prove to myself that this is all in my head, then I can keep it there.”

  Holly crawled across the roof, feeling her insides buzz as magic went to work on her organs. Strength was returning, but slowly, and her legs felt like lead pipes. “Listen to me, Artemis. Trust me.”

  “No,” Artemis barked. “I don’t trust any of you. Not Butler, not even my own mother.” Artemis hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know what to believe, or who to trust. But I do know that there cannot be a space probe crashlanding here at this precise moment. The odds against it are just too astronomical. My mind is playing tricks on me, and I have to show it who’s boss.”

  Holly registered about half of that speech, but she’d heard enough to realize that Artemis was referring to his own mind in the third person, which was a warning sign no matter which head doctor’s theories you subscribed to.

  The spaceship continued to bear down on them, unaffected by Artemis’s lack of belief in its existence, shunting shock waves before it. For a memory, it certainly seemed very real, each panel richly textured by the tribulations of space travel. Long jagged striations were etched into the nose cone like scars from lightning bolts, and buckshot dents peppered the fuselage. A ragged semicircular chunk was missing from one of the three fins, as though a deep-space creature had taken a bite from the passing craft, and strangely colored lichen was crayoned in the square patch vacated by a hull plate.

  Even Artemis had to admit it. “That doesn’t seem particularly ethereal. I must have a more vivid imagination than I had thought.”

  Two of the ship’s silencers blew out in rapid succession, and engine roar filled the bowl of gray sky.

  Artemis pointed a rigid finger at the craft. “You are not real!” he shouted, though even he did not hear the words. The ship was low enough now for Artemis to read the message written in several scripts and pictograms across the nose cone.

  “ ‘I come in peace,’ ” he mumbled, and thought: Four words. Death.

  Holly was thinking too, images of tragedy and destruction flashing past like the lights of a train carriage, but there was one other notion holding steady through the chaos.

  I can’t reach him from this rooftop. Artemis is going to die, and there’s nothing I can do but watch.

  And then a hysterical afterthought.

  Butler is going to kill me.

  COMING FROM

  EOIN COLFER IN SPRING 2020

  The first book in a new series about

  Artemis Fowl’s younger brothers,

  by internationally best-selling author Eoin Colfer

  PROLOGUE

  There are things to know about the world.

  Surely you realize that what you know is not everything there is to know. In spite of humankind’s ingenuity, there are shadows too dark for your kind to fully illuminate. The very mantle of our planet is one example; the ocean floor is another. And in these shadows we live. The Hidden Ones. The magical creatures who have removed ourselves from the destructive human orbit. Once, we fairies ruled the surface as humans do now, as bacteria will in the future, but for now, we are content for the most part to exist in our underground civilization. For ten thousand years, fairies have used our magic and technology to shield ourselves from prying eyes, and to heal the beleaguered Earth mother, Danu. We fairies have a saying that is writ large in golden tiles on the altar mosaic of the Hey Hey Temple, and the saying is this: WE DIG DEEP AND WE ENDURE.

  But there is always one maverick who does not care a fig for fairy mosaics and is hell-bent on reaching the surface. Usually this maverick is a troll. And specifically in this case, the maverick is a troll who will shortly and for a ridiculous reason be named Whistle Blower.

  For here begins the second documented cycle of Fowl adventures.

  CHAPTER 1

  MEET THE ANTAGONISTS

  The Baddie: Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye. The Duke of Scilly.

  If a person wants to murder the head of a family, then it is very important that the entire family also be done away with, or the distraught survivors might very well decide to take bloody revenge, or at least make a detailed report at the local police station. There is, in fact, an entire chapter on this exact subject in The Criminal Mastermind’s Almanac, an infamous guidebook for aspiring ruthless criminals by Professor Wulf Bane, which was turned down by every reputable publisher but is available on demand from the author. The actual chapter name is “Kill Them All. Even the Pets.” A gruesome title that would put most normal people off from reading it, but Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye, Duke of Scilly, was not a normal person, and the juiciest phrases in his copy of The Criminal Mastermind’s Almanac were marked in pink highlighter, and the book itself was dedicated as follows:

  To Teddy

  From one criminal mastermind to another

  Don’t be a stranger

  Wulfy

  Lord Bleedham-Drye had dedicated most of his one hundred and fifty years on this green earth to staying on this green earth as long as possible—as opposed to being buried beneath it. In television interviews he credited his youthful appearance to yoga and fish oil, but in actual fact, Lord Teddy had spent much of his inherited fortune traveling the globe in search of any potions and pills, legal or not, that would extend his life span. As a roving ambassador for the Crown, Lord Teddy could easily find an excuse to visit the most far-flung corners of the planet in the name of culture, when in fact he was keeping his eyes open for anything that grew, swam, waddled, or crawled that would help him stay alive for even a minute longer than his allotted four score and ten.

  So far in his quest, Lord Teddy had tried every so-called eternal youth therapy for which there was even the flimsiest of supporting evidence. He had, among other things, ingested tons of willow-bark extract, swallowed millions of antioxidant tablets, slurped gallons of therapeutic arsenic, injected the cerebrospinal fluid of the endangered Mad
agascan lemur, devoured countless helpings of Southeast Asian liver-fluke spaghetti, and spent almost a month suspended over an active volcanic rift in Iceland, funneling the restorative volcanic gas up the leg holes of his linen shorts. These and other extreme practices—never ever to be tried at home—had indeed kept Bleedham-Drye breathing and vital thus far, but there had been side effects. The lemur fluid had caused his forearms to elongate so that his hands dangled below his knees. The arsenic had paralyzed the left corner of his mouth so that it was forever curled in a sardonic-looking sneer, and the volcanic embers had scalded his bottom, forcing Teddy to walk in a slightly bowlegged manner as though trying to keep his balance in rough seas. Bleedham-Drye considered these secondary effects a small price to pay for his wrinkle-free complexion, luxuriant mane of hair, and spade of black beard, and of course the vigor that helped him endure lengthy treks and safaris in the hunt for any more rumored life-extenders.

  But Lord Teddy was all too aware that he had yet to hit the jackpot, therapeutically speaking, in regards to his quest for an unreasonably extended life. It was true that he had eked out a few extra decades, but what was that in the face of eternity? There were jellyfish that, as a matter of course, lived longer than he had. Jellyfish! They didn’t even have brains, for heaven’s sake.

  Teddy found himself frustrated, which he hated, because stress gave a fellow wrinkles.

  A new direction was called for.

  No more penny-ante half measures, cribbing a year here and a season there.

  I must find the fountain of youth, he resolved one evening while lying in his brass tub full of electric eels, which he had heard did wonders for a chap’s circulation.

  As it turned out, Lord Bleedham-Drye did find the fountain of youth, but it was not a fountain in the traditional sense of the word, as the life-giving liquid was contained in the venom of a mythological creature. And the family he would possibly have to murder to access it was none other than the Fowls of Dublin, Ireland, who were not overly fond of being murdered.