by Eoin Colfer
“Gun.” [Pause for beep.] “Nonlethal. Wide-bore con-cussive.”
“Sorry, Artemis,” she muttered, then fired a good three-second blast at her human friend.
Artemis was ankle deep in slush and in full-rant mode when Holly pulled the trigger.
The beam hit him like a slap from a giant electric eel. His body was lifted and tossed through the air a moment before the probe clattered to a bone-crushing landing, obliterating the spot where he had been standing.
Artemis dropped into a crater like a sack of kindling and disappeared from Holly’s sightline.
That’s not good, thought Holly, then saw her own magical sparks hover before her eyes like inquisitive amber-tailed fireflies.
Shutdown, she realized. My magic is sending me to sleep so that I can heal.
From the corner of her eye, Holly saw a door open in the probe’s belly and a gangplank swing down on hydraulics. Something was coming out.
Hope I get to wake up, Holly thought. I hate the ice and I don’t want to die cold.
Then she closed her eyes and did not feel her limp body roll from the rooftop and thump into a snowdrift below.
Barely a minute later, Holly’s eyes fluttered open. Waking up felt jagged and unreal, like documentary footage from a war zone. Holly could not remember standing, but suddenly she was on her feet, being dragged along by Foaly, who looked extremely disheveled, possibly because his beautiful quiff had been totally singed and sat balanced on top of his head like a bird’s nest. But mostly he seemed depressed.
“Come on, Captain!” Foaly shouted, his voice seeming a little out of sync with his mouth. “We need to move.”
Holly coughed amber sparks, and her eyes watered.
Amber magic now? I’m getting old.
Foaly shook her shoulders. “Straighten up, Captain. We have work to do.”
The centaur was using trauma psychology. Holly knew this: she could remember the in-service course in Police Plaza.
In the event of battle stress, appeal to the soldiers’ professionalism. Remind them of their rank repeatedly. Insist that they perform their duty. This will not have a long-term healing effect on any psychological wounds, but it might be enough to get you back to base.
Commander Vinyáya had given that course.
Holly tried to pull herself together. Her legs felt brittle from the knees down, and her midsection buzzed from the post-healing pain known as magic burn.
“Is Artemis alive?”
“Don’t know,” said Foaly brusquely. “I built those things, you know. I designed them.”
“What things?”
Foaly dragged her to a glassy droop in the glacier, slicker than any ice rink.
“The things hunting us right now. The amorphobots. The things that came out of the probe.”
They slid to the bottom of the bank, leaning forward to keep their balance.
Holly seemed to have developed tunnel vision, though her visor was panoramic. The edges of her vision crackled with amber static.
I am still healing. I shouldn’t be moving. Gods know what damage I will do myself.
Foaly seemed to read her mind, but more likely it was fairy empathy.
“I had to get you out of there. One of my amorphobots was heading your way, sucking up everything in its path. The probe’s gone below, to gods know where. Try to lean on me.”
Holly nodded, then coughed again; the spray was instantly absorbed by her porous visor.
They hobbled across the ice toward the crater where Artemis lay. He was extremely pale and there was a speedy drip of blood running from the corner of his mouth to his hairline. Foaly dropped to his forelegs and tried to encourage Artemis back into consciousness with a stiff talking-to.
“Come on, Mud Boy,” he said, poking Artemis’s forearm. “No time for lollygagging.”
Artemis’s response to this chastising was a barely noticeable jerking of his arm. This was good—at least it told Holly that Artemis was still alive.
Holly tripped over the crater’s lip, and stumbled to the bottom.
“Lollygagging?” she gasped. “Is that even a word?”
Foaly poked Artemis one more time. “Yes. It is. And shouldn’t you be killing those robots with your pencil?”
Holly’s eyes seemed to light up. “Really? Can I do that?”
Foaly snorted. “Certainly. If your pencil has a super-duper demon magic beam inside it instead of graphite.”
Holly was still groggy, but even through a fugue of injury and battle stress, it was obvious that the situation was dire. They heard strange metallic clicks and animalistic whoops chittering through the air, softly at first, then rising in tempo and intensity to a frenzy.
The noise grated against Holly’s forehead as though her skin were being yanked.
“What is that?”
“The amorphobots are communicating,” whispered Foaly. “Transferring terabytes of information wirelessly. Updating each other. What one knows, they all know.”
Holly scanned Artemis’s vitals through her visor. The glowing readouts informed her that he had a slight heart murmur and there was some unusual brain activity in the parietal lobe. Other than that, the best thing her helmet computer could conclude about Artemis was that he was basically not dead. If she could survive this latest misadventure, maybe Artemis would too.
“What are they looking for, Foaly?”
“What are they looking for?” repeated the centaur, smiling that particular hysterical smile that exposed too much gum.
Holly suddenly felt her senses snap into focus and knew that the magic had finished its overhaul of her injuries. Her pelvis still throbbed and probably would for a few months, but she was operational again, so maybe she could lead them back to fairy civilization.
“Foaly, pull yourself together. We need to know what those things can do.”
The centaur seemed put out that someone would choose this particular moment to ask him questions when he had so many vital issues to consider.
“Holly, really! Do we have time for explanations now?”
“Snap out of it, Foaly! Information, hand it over.”
Foaly sighed, lips flapping. “They are biospheres. Amorphobots. Dumb plasma-based machines. They collect samples of plant life and analyze them in their plasma. Simple as that. Harmless.”
“Harmless,” blurted Holly. “I think someone has reprogrammed your amorphobots, centaur.”
The blood disappeared from Foaly’s cheeks and his fingers twitched. “No. Not possible. That probe is supposed to be on its way to Mars to search for microorganisms.”
“I think we can be pretty sure that your probe has been hijacked.”
“There is another possibility,” suggested Foaly. “I could be dreaming all of this.”
Holly pressed on with her questions. “How do we stop them, Foaly?”
It was impossible to miss the fear that flickered across Foaly’s face, like a sun flash across a lake. “Stop them? The amorphobots are built to withstand prolonged exposure to open space. You could drop one of these onto the surface of a star and it would survive for long enough to transmit some information back to its mother probe. Obviously I have a kill code, but I suspect that has been overridden.”
“There must be a way. Can’t we shoot them?”
“Absolutely not. They love energy. It feeds their cells. If you shoot them, they’ll just get bigger and more powerful.”
Holly laid a palm on Artemis’s forehead, checking his temperature.
I wish you would wake up, she thought. We could really use one of your brilliant schemes right now.
“Foaly,” she said urgently. “What are the amorphobots doing right now? What are they looking for?”
“Life,” replied Foaly simply. “They’re doing a grid search now, starting at the drop site and moving out. Any life forms they encounter will be absorbed into the sac, analyzed, then released.”
Holly peeped over the lip of the crater. “What are their scan c
riteria?”
“Thermal is the default. But they can use anything.”
Thermal, thought Holly. Heat signatures. That’s why they are spending so much time by the flaming shuttle.
The amorphobots were arranged on corners of invisible grid squares, slowly working their way outward from the shuttle’s smoking carcass. They seemed innocuous enough, rolling balls of gel with twin glowing red sensors at their cores. Like slime balloons from a children’s party. Maybe the size of a crunchball.
They can’t be all that dangerous surely. Dozy little blebers.
Her opinion altered sharply when one of the amorphobots changed color from translucent green to angry electric blue and the color spread to the others. Their eerie chittering became a constant shrill whine.
They have found something, Holly realized.
The entire squad of twenty or so bots converged on a single spot, some merging so that they formed larger blobs, which flowed across the ice with a speed and grace heretofore concealed. The bot that had flashed the message to the others allowed a charge to crackle across its skin, which it then discharged into a hillock of snow. An unfortunate snow fox leaped from the steam, tail smoking like a fuse, and made a dart for freedom.
It’s almost comical. Almost.
The amorphobots jiggled as though laughing and sent a few bolts of crackling blue energy after the doomed fox, carving black rents in the ground, steering the terror-stricken mammal away from the shelter of the Great Skua. In spite of the fox’s natural speed and agility, the bots anticipated its movements with incredible accuracy, sending the animal running in circles, its eyes rolling, tongue dangling.
There was only one possible conclusion to this game of cat and mouse. The largest amorphobot droned an impatient bass command through the almost invisible gel speakers in its body and turned abruptly to continue its search. The others followed, leaving only the original bot to hunt the fox. It quickly tired of the sport and nailed the fox in mid-jump with a bolt of power, cast like a spear from its midsection.
Murderer, thought Holly, more angry than horrified. Foaly didn’t design this.
Foaly suddenly moved in front of her. “You’ve got that look in your eyes, Captain.”
“What look?”
“The one Julius Root always talked about. The I’m-about-to-do-something-incredibly-stupid look.”
There was no time for debate. “I need to get to Artemis’s project.”
“You can’t go. What does the LEP manual suggest in these kinds of situations?”
Holly ground her teeth. Her two geniuses were useless; she would have to do this herself.
“The manual, which you helped to write, would advise me to retreat to a safe distance and construct a bivouac, but, with respect, those guidelines are a pile of troll weevils.”
“Wow. Nice respect. Do you know what the word respect actually means? I’m no book professor, but I’m pretty sure comparing my manual to a steaming pile of troll weevils does not constitute respect.”
“I never said steaming,” said Holly, then decided that time was short and she could apologize later. “Listen, Foaly. I don’t have a downlink to Police Plaza. There are murdering blobby robots on our trail, and the only people who might be able to come up with a solution are either fast asleep dreaming or, in your case, wide awake dreaming. So I need you to cover me while I make a run for Artemis’s crate. Do you think you can do that?”
Holly handed the centaur her backup weapon. Foaly held the gun gingerly, as though it were radioactive, which to a certain degree it was.
“Okay. I know how this thing works, in theory.”
“Good,” said Holly, and slithered on her belly up and onto the ice field before she could change her mind.
Holly felt her torso numb and stiffen as she slid across the glacier. The ice stretched in front of her, carved by the prevailing wind into elegant swoops and whorls, a wind that was to her rear, making progress relatively easy considering she had until recently been suffering from several broken bones.
Saved by magic once more.
But now she had not a spark left in her.
The fox’s carcass lay smoking on a bed of snow, melting a grave for itself.
Holly tore her gaze from the pathetic mammal’s eyes, still rolled back in its blackened head, and looked instead at Artemis’s crate, which stood disregarded by the bots, but past their search line.
I need to breach the line unnoticed. Their default sensor is heat. I’ll give them a little heat to think about.
Holly switched on the air-conditioning in her suit, which had about five minutes left in it according to her visor readout, then selected the flare package on her Neutrino handgun. She also accidentally activated the tunes player in her helmet with a series of shivery winks. Luckily, the volume was muted and she managed to switch off Grazen McTortoor’s metal epic “Troll Sundown” before the amorphobots detected the vibration.
Grazen McTortoor’s music never killed anyone before. He’d probably be thrilled.
Holly flipped onto her back, looking up at a sky of pitch and granite, the bowed cloud bellies licked by flame.
Heat.
Holly steadied her hand and removed the detachable trigger finger section of her glove. She pointed her weapon skyward and sent a wide-arced spray of flares into the air.
Flares. If only someone could see them and come to help.
The amorphobots’ relaxed chittering amped up to a whine, and Holly realized that it was time to move.
She was up on her feet and running before her good sense had time to kick in. She raced full pelt for Artemis’s crate, taking as straight a tack as possible, weapon held along her sightline.
I don’t care what Foaly says. If one of those red-eyed monsters comes anywhere near me, I’m going to find out what a plasma grenade does to its innards.
The bots had without exception pointed their sensors toward the descending flares, which fizzled like the sputterings of an oxyacetylene torch cutting through the clouds. The amorphobots’ malleable bodies sprouted gel periscopes and they stood, following the flares’ progress like ill-defined meerkats. They may have noticed an inconsistent heat source jiggling across the glacier, but they were programmed to prioritize.
Not so smart after all.
Holly ran as fast as her brittle bones would carry her.
The terrain was flat but treacherous. The light September snow had dusted the grooves, and Holly almost lost her footing in a tractor trail. Her ankle grated but did not crack. Lucky.
Lucky little elf
Sat on the shelf
And the silly human boy
Mistook her for a toy
A nursery rhyme used to teach children to sit still if they saw a human.
Think like a little tree and that’s what the Mud Men will see.
I’m a tree, thought Holly, without much conviction. A little tree.
So far, so good: the bots were glued to the flares and were showing no interest in her heat signature. She skirted the wreckage of the shuttle, trying not to hear the groan of the chassis or notice the front panel of a flight suit melded with the windscreen. Beyond the shuttle lay Artemis’s great experiment. An oversized refrigerator cannon.
Great. More ice.
Holly knelt at the base of what Artemis had called his Ice Cube and quickly located the control panel, which luckily had an omnisensor, so it was a simple matter to sync it with her own helmet. Now the refrigerator cannon would fire when she wanted, and at whatever target she chose. She set a timer running and set herself running seconds afterward, straight back the way she had come.
It occurred to her that the flares were lasting well, and she really should congratulate Foaly on the new models, at which point they inevitably began to wink out.
With no more pretty lights in the sky, the amorphobots returned to their methodical searching of the site for signs of life. One was dispatched to check the erratic blob of heat crossing their grid. It rolled across the surfa
ce, scanning the ground as it went, sending out gel tendrils to scoop up debris and even whipping out a tongue like a bullfrog’s to snag a low-flying black-headed gull. If there had been a sound track to its movements it would have been tum-ti-tum-ti-tum. Business as usual, no worries. Then its vector crossed Holly’s, and they virtually collided. The bot’s scanner eyes flashed, and lightning bolts jittered inside its globulous body.
All I need is a few seconds, thought Holly, and blasted the bot with a narrow beam right in its gut.
The beam sliced through the center of the blobby body, but was diffused before reaching the hardware nerve center at the core. The bot bounced backward like a kicked ball, whining as it did so, updating its friends.
Holly did not slow down to see what the response might be; she did not need to—her keen elfin hearing gave her all the information she needed: they were coming for her. They were all coming. Their semisolid forms pummeled the ice as they moved like quick bongo rolls, along with that dreadful chittering.
A bot in her path skittered to one side, a temporary Neutrino hole drilled in its top quadrant. Apparently Foaly was taking his job as cover provider seriously, even though he knew his weapon could not kill these things.
Thanks, Mr. Consultant.
The bots were converging on her now, trundling from all sides, burping and squeaking as they came.
Like kiddie-cartoon characters.
Which did not stop Holly from blasting as many of the cute critters as she could. She vaguely heard Foaly shouting at her to kindly only shoot when necessary, or to quote him verbatim:
Holly. In the name of all the gods, stop shooting energy into all-energy beings. Just how stupid are you?
The bots quivered and meshed, growing larger and more aggressive.
“D’Arvit,” huffed Holly, her breath coming hard now. Her helmet informed her cheerily that her heart rate was over 240 bpm, which would be fine for a sprite but not for an elf. Normally a flat-out sprint would not inconvenience Holly, nor indeed any fairy who had passed the LEP physical, but this was a desperate dash immediately after a major healing. She should be in a hospital sipping rejuvenation sludge through a straw.