[AF02] - The Artic Incident

by Colfer, Eoin

  No time to think about it now. Her priority was the commander. She had to get him out of there alive. If the B’wa Kell was brazen enough to mount an operation against the LEP, there was obviously something pretty big going on below ground. Whatever it was, Julius Root would be needed to spearhead the counterattack. She turned towards Artemis.

  ‘OK, Mud Boy. We’ve got one shot at this. Grab on to whatever you can.’

  Artemis couldn’t hide an apprehensive shiver.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, Artemis. You can make it.’

  Artemis bristled. ‘It’s cold, fairy. Humans shiver in the cold.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ said the LEP captain, and she began to run. The piton wire played out behind her like a harpoon cable. Though it had the approximate grade of fishing line, the cable could easily suspend two struggling elephants. Artemis raced after her as fast as his loafered feet could manage.

  They ran parallel to the tracks, feet crunching through the snow. Behind them the train grew closer, pushing a buffer of air before it.

  Artemis struggled to keep up. This was not for him. Running and sweating. Combat, for heaven’s sake. He was no soldier. He was a planner. A mastermind. The hurly-burly of actual conflict was best left to Butler and people like him. But his manservant wasn’t there to take care of the physical tasks this time. And he never would be again if they didn’t manage to board this train.

  Artemis’s breath came short, crystallizing in front of his face, blurring his vision. The train had drawn level now, steel wheels spewing ice and sparks into the air.

  ‘Second carriage,’ panted Holly. ‘There’s a runner. Mind your footing.’

  Runner? Artemis glanced behind. The second carriage was coming up fast. But the noise was blurring his vision. Was that possible? It was terrific. Unbearable. There, below the steel doors. A narrow board. Wide enough to stand on. Barely.

  Holly alighted easily, flattening herself against the carriage wall. She made it look so effortless. A simple skip and she was safe from the grab of those pulverizing wheels.

  ‘Come on, Fowl,’ shouted Holly. ‘Jump.’

  Artemis tried, he really did. But the toe of his loafer snagged on a sleeper. He stumbled forward, pin-wheeling for balance. A painful death came rushing up to meet him.

  Two left feet,’ muttered Holly, grabbing her least favourite Mud Boy by the collar. Momentum swung Artemis forward, slamming him into the door like something out of a cartoon.

  The piton cord was slapping against the carriage. Only seconds left before Holly departed from the train as quickly as she’d arrived. The LEP captain searched for a strongpoint to anchor herself. Root and Butler’s weight may have been reduced by the Moonbelt, but the jerk when it came, would be more than sufficient to drag her from the locomotive. And if that happened, it was all over.

  Holly hooked one arm through a rung on the carriage’s external ladder. She noticed magical sparks playing over a rip in her suit. They were counteracting the radiation damage. How much longer could her magic last under these conditions? Constant healing really took it out of a girl. She needed to complete the power-restoring Ritual. And the sooner the better.

  Holly was about to unclip the cable and attach it to one of the rungs when it snapped taut, pulling Holly’s legs from beneath her. She held on to the rung grimly, fingernails digging into her own skin. On reflection, this plan needed a bit of work. Time seemed to stretch, elastic as the cord and, for a moment, Holly thought her elbow would pop right out of its socket. Then the ice gave and Root and Butler were twanged out of their icy tomb like a bolt from a crossbow.

  Seconds later, they slapped against the side of the train, their reduced weight keeping them aloft, for now. But it was only a matter of time before what little gravity they had pushed them under the steel wheels.

  Artemis latched on to the rung beside her. ‘What can I do?’

  She nodded at a shoulder pocket. ‘In there. A small vial. Take it out.’

  Artemis ripped open theVelcro flap, pulling out a tiny spray bottle. ‘OK. Got it.’

  ‘Good. It’s up to you now, Fowl. Up and over.’

  Artemis’s mouth dropped open. ‘Up and . . .?’

  ‘Yes. It’s our only hope. We have to get this door open to reel in Butler and the commander.There’s a bend in the track two klicks away. If this train slows down even one revolution, they’re gone.’

  Artemis nodded. ‘The vial?’

  ‘Acid. For the lock. The mechanism’s on the inside. Cover your face and squeeze. Give it the whole tube. Don’t get any on you.’

  It was a long conversation under the circumstances. Especially since every second was vital. Artemis did not waste another one on goodbyes.

  He dragged himself to the next rung, keeping the length of his body pressed close to the carriage. The wind was whipping along the length of the train, tiny motes of ice in every gust. They stung like bees. Nevertheless, Artemis pulled off his gloves with chattering teeth. Better frostbite than being crushed beneath the wheels.

  Upwards. One rung at a time, until his head poked above the carriage. Every shred of shelter was now gone. The air pounded his forehead, forcing itself down his throat. Artemis squinted through the blizzard, along the carriage’s roof. There! In the centre. A skylight. Across a desert of steel, blasted smooth as glass by the elements. Not a handhold within five metres. The strength of a rhino would be of no use here, Artemis decided. At last an opportunity to use his brain. Kinetics and momentum. Simple enough, in theory.

  Keeping to the front rim of the carriage, Artemis inched on to the roof.The wind wormed beneath his legs, raising them five centimetres from the deck, threatening to float him off the train.

  Artemis curled his fingers around the rim. These were not gripping fingers. Artemis hadn’t gripped anything bigger than his mobile phone in several months. If you wanted someone to type Paradise Lost in under twenty minutes, then Artemis was your man. But as for hanging on to carriage roofs in a blizzard. Dead loss. Which, fortunately, was all part of the plan.

  A millisecond before his finger joints parted company, Artemis let go. The slipstream shot him straight through the skylight’s metal housing.

  Perfect, he would have grunted, had there been a cubic centimetre of air in his lungs. But even if he had said it, the wind would have snatched away any words before his own ears heard them. He had moments now before the wind dug its fingers beneath his torso, flipping him on to the icy steppes. Cannon fodder for the goblins.

  Artemis fumbled the acid vial from his pocket, snapping the top between his teeth. A fleck of the acid flew past his eye. No time to worry about that now. No time for anything.

  The skylight was secured by a thick padlock. Artemis dribbled two drops into the keyhole. All he could spare. It would have to be enough.

  The effect was immediate. The acid ate through the metal like lava through ice. Fairy technology. Best under -the world.

  The padlock pinged open, exposing the hatch to the wind’s power. It flipped upwards and Artemis tumbled through on to a pallet of barrels. Not exactly the picture of a gallant rescuer.

  The train’s motion shook him from the cargo. Artemis landed face up, gazing at the triple-triangled symbol for radiation stamped on the side of each container. At least the barrels were sealed, though rust seemed to have taken hold on quite a few.

  Artemis rolled across the slatted floor, clambering to his knees alongside the door. Was Captain Short still anchored there, or was he alone now? For the first time in his life. Truly alone.

  ‘Fowl! Open the door, you pasty-faced Mud Weasel!’

  Ah well. Not alone then.

  Covering his face with a forearm, Artemis drenched the carriage’s triple bolt with fairy acid. The steel lock melted instantly, dripping to the floor like a stream of mercury. Artemis dragged the sliding door back.

  Holly was hanging on grimly, her face steaming where radiation was eating through the gel.

  Artemis grabbed her waist
band. ‘On three?’

  Holly nodded. No more energy for speech.

  Artemis flexed his digits. Fingers, don’t fail me now. If he ever got out of this, he would buy one of those ridiculous home gymnasiums advertised on the shopping channels.

  ‘One.’

  The bend was coming. He could see it out of the corner of his eye. The train would slow down or derail itself.

  ‘Two.’

  Captain Short’s strength was almost spent. The wind rippled her frame like a windsock.

  ‘Three!’

  Artemis pulled with all the strength in his thin arms. Holly closed her eyes and let go, unable to believe she was trusting her life to this Mud Boy.

  Artemis knew a little something about physics. He timed his count to take advantage of swing, momentum and the train’s own forward motion. But nature always throws something into the mix that can’t be anticipated. In this case the something was a slight gap between two sections of the track. Not enough to derail a locomotive, but certainly enough to cause a bump.

  This bump sent the carriage door crashing into its frame like a five-tonne guillotine. But it looked like Holly had made it. Artemis couldn’t really tell because she had crashed into him, sending them both careering into the wooden siding. She seemed to be intact, from what he could see. At least her head was still attached to her neck, which was good. But she did seem to be unconscious. Probably trauma.

  Artemis knew that he was going to pass out too. He could tell by the darkness eating at the corners of his vision, like some malignant computer virus. He slipped sideways, landing on Holly’s chest.

  This had more severe repercussions than you might think. Because Holly was unconscious, her magic was on autopilot. And unsupervised magic flows like electricity. Artemis’s face made contact with the fairy’s left hand, diverting the flow of blue sparks. And while this was good for him, it was most definitely bad for her. Because although Artemis didn’t know it, Holly needed every spark of magic she could muster — not all of her had made it inside the train.

  Commander Root had just activated his piton cord winch when he received a most unexpected poke in the eye.

  The goblin D’Nall removed a small rectangular mirror from his tunic and checked his scales were smooth.

  ‘These Koboi wings are great. You think we’ll be allowed to keep ‘em?’

  Aymon scowled. Not that you’d notice. Goblin lizard ancestry meant that facial movement was pretty limited. ‘Quiet, you hot-blooded fool!’

  Hot-blooded. That was a pretty serious insult for one of the B’waKell.

  D’Nall bristled. ‘Be careful, friend, or I’ll tear that forked tongue right out of your head.’

  ‘We won’t have a tongue between us if those elves escape!’ retorted Aymon.

  It was true. The generals did not take disappointment well.

  ‘So what do we do? I got the looks in this outfit. That must make you the brains.’

  ‘We shoot at the train,’ interjected Nyle. ‘Simple.’

  D’Nall adjusted his Koboi DoubleDex, hovering across to the squad’s junior member.

  ‘Idiot,’ he snapped, administering a swift slap to the head. ‘That thing is radioactive, can’t you smell it? One stray burst and we’ll all be ash floating on the breeze.’

  ‘Good point,’ admitted Nyle. ‘You’re not as stupid as you look.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Welcome.’

  Aymon throttled down, descending to a hundred and fifty metres. It was so tempting. One tightly focused burst to take out the elf clinging to the carriage, another to dispatch the human on the roof. But he couldn’t risk it. One degree off target and he’d sucked his last stink-worm spaghetti.

  ‘OK,’ he announced into his helmet mike. ‘Here’s the plan. With all the radiation in that carriage, chances are the targets will be dead in minutes. We follow the train for a while just to make sure. Then we go back and tell the general we saw the bodies.’

  D’Nall buzzed down beside him. ‘And do we see the bodies?’

  Aymon groaned. ‘Of course not, you fool! Do you want your eyeballs to dry up and fall out?’

  ‘Duh;

  ‘Exactly. So are we clear?’

  ‘Crystal,’ said Nyle, drawing his Softnose Redboy handgun. He shot his comrades from behind. Close range, point blank. They never had a chance. He followed their bodies to Earth on full magnification. The snow would cover them in minutes. Nobody would be stumbling over those particular corpses until the polar caps melted.

  Nyle bolstered his weapon, punching in the co­ordinates for the shuttle terminal on his flight computer. If you studied his reptilian face carefully, it was just possible to make out a grin.There was a new lieutenant in town.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 9: NO SAFE HAVEN

  OPERATIONS’ BOOTH, POLICE PLAZA

  FOALY was sitting in front of the LEP mainframe waiting for the results of his latest search. Extensive laser brushing of the goblin shuttle had revealed one complete and one partial thumbprint. The complete print was his own. Easily explicable as Foaly personally inspected all retired shuttle parts. The partial print could well belong to their traitor. Not enough to identify the fairy who’d been running LEP technology to the B’wa Kell, but certainly enough to eliminate the innocent. Cross-reference the remaining names with everybody who had shuttle-part access, and the list got considerably shorter. Foaly switched his tail contentedly. Genius. No point in being humble about it.

  At the moment, the computer was crunching through personnel files with the partial print. All Foaly could do was twiddle his thumbs and wait for contact with the surface team. The magma flares were still up. Very unusual. Unusual and coincidental.

  Foaly’s suspicious train of thought was interrupted by a familiar voice.

  ‘Search complete,’ said the computer, in Foaly’s own tones. A little vanity. ‘Three hundred and forty-six eliminated. Forty possibles remaining.’

  Forty. Not bad. They could easily be interviewed. An opportunity to use the Retimager once again. But there was another way to narrow the field.

  ‘Computer. Cross-reference possibles with Level Three clearance personnel.’ Level Three clearance would include everybody with access to the recycling smelters.

  ‘Referencing.’

  Of course, the computer would only accept commands from fairies whose voice patterns it was programmed to recognize. And as a further security precaution, Foaly had coded his personal log and other important files in a computer language he’d based on the ancient tongue of the centaurs: Centaurian.

  All centaurs were a touch paranoid, and with good reason, since there were less than a hundred left. The humans had managed to kill off their cousins, the unicorns, altogether. There were probably six centaurs under the Earth who could read the language, and only one who could decipher the computer dialect.

  Centaurian was possibly the oldest form of writing, dating back over ten millennia to when humans first began hunting fairies. The opening paragraph of The Scrolls of Capalla, the only surviving illuminated Centaurian manuscript, read:

  Fairy creatures, heed this warning,

  On Earth, the human era is dawning.

  So hide, fairy, lest you be found,

  And make a home beneath the ground.

  Centaurs were known for their intellect, not their poetry. Still, Foaly felt the words were as relevant today as they had been all those centuries ago.

  Cudgeon knocked on the booth’s security glass. Now, technically, Cudgeon shouldn’t be allowed in Ops, but Foaly buzzed him through. He could never resist having a crack at the ex-commander. Cudgeon had been demoted to lieutenant following a disastrous attempt to replace Root as Recon head honcho. If it hadn’t been for his family’s considerable political clout, he would have been booted off the force altogether. All in all, he might have been better off in some other line of work. At least he wouldn’t have had to suffer Foaly’s constant teasing.

  ‘I have some
e-forms for you to initial,’ said the lieutenant, avoiding eye-contact.

  ‘No problem, Commander,’ chuckled the centaur. ‘How’s the plotting going? Any revolutions planned for this afternoon?’

  ‘Just sign the forms please,’ said Cudgeon holding out a digi-pen. His hand was shaking.

  Amazing, thought Foaly. This broken-down shell of an elf was once on the LEP fast track.

  ‘No, but seriously, Cudgeon. You’re doing a bang-up job on the form-signing thing.’

  Cudgeon’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  A grin tugged at the corner of Foaly’s mouth. ‘You’re welcome. No need to get a swelled head.’

  Cudgeon’s hand flew to his misshapen forehead. Still a touch of the old vanity left.

  ‘Oops. Sore subject. Sorry about that.’

  There was a spark in the corner of Cudgeon’s eye. A spark that should have warned Foaly. But he was distracted by a beep from the computer.

  ‘List complete.’

  ‘Excuse me for a moment, Commander. Important business. Computer stuff, you wouldn’t understand it.’

  Foaly turned to the plasma screen. The lieutenant would just have to wait for his signature. It was probably just an order for shuttle parts anyway.

  The penny dropped. A big penny with a clang louder than a dwarf’s underpants hitting a wall. Shuttle parts. An inside job. Someone with a grudge to settle. A line of sweat filled each groove on Foaly’s forehead. It was so obvious.

  He looked at the plasma screen for confirmation of what he already knew. There were only two names. The first, Bom Arbles, could be eliminated immediately. The Retrieval officer had been killed in a core-diving accident. The second name pulsed gently. Lieutenant Briar Cudgeon. Demoted to recycling crew around the time Holly retired that starboard booster. It all made sense.

  Foaly knew that if he didn’t acknowledge the message in ten seconds, the computer would read the name aloud. He casually punched the delete button.

  ‘You know, Briar,’ he croaked. ‘All those jibes about your head problem. It’s all in fun. My way of being sympathetic. Actually, I have some ointment . . .’