by Eoin Colfer
Trouble was tempted to poke Artemis in the chest but wisely resisted. “You’re saying that all of this is an elaborate escape plan?”
“Of course,” said Artemis. “And not all that elaborate. Opal is forcing you to release her from her cell. The alternative is the utter destruction of Atlantis and every soul in it, which is unthinkable to anyone except Opal herself.”
Foaly had already brought up the prison plans. “The reactor core is less than a hundred yards below Opal’s cell. I’m contacting the warden now.”
Holly knew that Artemis was a genius and that there was no one more qualified to second-guess kidnappers. But still, they had options.
She gazed at the figures on-screen and was chilled by how casual the gnomes seemed, in the light of what they were about to do. They slouched like adolescents, barely glancing at their captive, cocky in their abilities and not even a jot self-conscious about their cartoon-character smart-masks, which “read” their faces and displayed the appropriate emotions in exaggerated cartoon style. Smart-masks were very popular with the karaoke crowd, who could then look like their idols as well as trying to sound like them.
Perhaps they don’t know exactly what’s at stake here, Holly thought suddenly. Perhaps they are as clueless as I was ten seconds ago.
“Can they hear us?” she asked Foaly.
“They can, but we haven’t responded yet. Just press the button.”
This was just an old figure of speech; there was of course no actual button, just a sensor on the touch screen.
“Hold it, Captain!” ordered Trouble.
“I am a trained negotiator, sir,” said Holly, hoping the respect in her tone would get her what she wanted. “And I was once . . .” She glanced guiltily at Artemis, sorry that she had to play this card. “I was once a hostage myself, so I know how these things go. Let me talk to them.”
Artemis nodded encouragingly, and Holly knew that he understood her tactics.
“Captain Short is correct, Commander,” he said. “Holly is a natural communicator. She even managed to get through to me.”
“Do it,” barked Trouble. “Foaly, you keep trying to reach Atlantis. And assemble the Council; we need to begin evacuating both cities now.”
Though you could not see their real faces, the gnomes’ cartoon expressions were bored now. It was in the slant of their heads and the bend of their knees. Perhaps this whole thing was not as exciting as they hoped it would be. After all, they could not see their audience, and no one had responded to their threats. What had started out as a revolutionary action was now beginning to look like two big gnomes picking on a pixie.
Pip waggled his gun at Kip, and the meaning was clear. Why don’t we just shoot her now?
Holly activated the microphone with a wave of her hand.
“Hello, you there. This is Captain Holly Short of the LEP. Can you hear me?”
The gnomes perked up immediately, and Pip even attempted a whistle, which came through the vox-box as a raspberry.
“Hey, Captain Short. We heard of you. I’ve seen pictures. Not too shabby, Captain.”
Holly bit back a caustic retort. Never force a kidnapper to demonstrate his resolve.
“Thank you, Pip. Should I call you Pip?”
“You, Holly Short, can call me anything and any time you like,” squeaked Pip, and he extended his free hand toward his partner for a knuckle bump.
Holly was incredulous. These two were about to totally incapacitate the entire fairy world, and they were goofing about like two goblins at a fireball party.
“Okay, Pip,” she continued evenly. “What can we do for you today?”
Pip shook his head sorrowfully at Kip. “Why are the pretty ones always stupid?” He turned to the camera. “You know what you can do for us. We told you already. Release Opal Koboi, or the younger model is gonna take a long sleep. And by that I mean, get shot in the head.”
“You need to give us some time to show good faith. Come on, Pip. One more hour? For me?”
Pip scratched his head with the gun barrel, pretending to consider it. “You are cute, Holly. But not that cute. If I give you another hour, you’ll track me down somehow and drop a time-stop on my head. No thanks, Cap. You have ten minutes. If I was you, I would get that cell open or call the undertaker.”
“This kind of thing takes time, Pip,” persisted Holly, repeating the name, forging a bond. “It takes three days to pay a parking fine.”
Pip shrugged. “Not my problem, babe. And you can call me Pip all day and it won’t make us BFFs. It ain’t my real name.”
Artemis deactivated the microphone. “This one is smart, Holly. Don’t play with him, just tell the truth.”
Holly nodded and switched on the mike. “Okay, whatever your name is. Let me give it to you straight. There’s a good chance that if you shoot young Opal, then we’re going to have a series of very big explosions down here. A lot of innocent people will die.”
Pip waved his gun carelessly. “Oh yeah, the quantum laws. We know about that, don’t we, Kip?”
“Quantum laws,” said Kip. “Of course we know about that.”
“And you don’t care that good fairies, gnomes that could be related to you, will die?”
Pip raised his eyebrows so that they jutted over the top of the mask. “You like any of your family, Kip?”
“Ain’t got no family. I’m an orphan.”
“Really? Me too.”
While they bantered, Opal shivered in the dirt, trying to speak through the tape. Foaly would get voice analysis on the muffled mumbles later—if there was a later—but it didn’t take a genius to figure out she was pleading for her life.
“There must be something you need,” said Holly.
“There is one thing,” replied Pip. “Could I get your com-code? I sure would love to hook up for a sim-latte when this is all over. Might be a while, of course, what with Haven City being in ruins.”
Foaly put a text box on the screen. It read: They’re moving Opal now.
Holly fluttered her eyelids to show she understood, then continued with the negotiation. “Here’s the situation, Pip. We have nine minutes left. You can’t get someone out of Atlantis in nine minutes. It’s not possible. They need to suit up, pressurize, maybe; go through the conduits to open sea. Nine minutes is not long enough.”
Pip’s theatrical responses were getting a little hard to take. “Well then, I guess a lot of people are going swimming. Fission can put a hell of a hole in the shield.”
Holly broke. “Don’t you care about anyone? What’s the going rate for genocide?”
Pip and Kip actually laughed.
“It’s a horrible feeling, impotency, ain’t it?” said Pip. “But there are worse feelings. Drowning, for example.”
“And getting crushed by falling buildings,” added Kip.
Holly banged her tiny fists on the console.
These two are so infuriating.
Pip stepped close to the camera, so that his mask filled the screen. “If I don’t get a call from Opal Koboi in the next few minutes telling me she is in a shuttle on her way to the surface, then I will shoot this pixie. Believe it.”
Foaly rested his head in his hands. “I used to love Pip and Kip,” he said.
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
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.
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 Madagascan 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.
This is how the entire regrettable episode kicked off.
Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye reasoned that the time-honored way of doing a thing was to ask the fellows who had already done the thing how they had managed to do it, and so he set out to interview the oldest people on earth. This was not as easy as it might sound, even in the era of worldwide-webbery and marvelous miniature communication devices, for many aged folks do not advertise the fact that they have passed the century mark lest they be plagued by health-magazine journalists or telegrams from various queens. But nevertheless, over the course of five years, Lord Teddy managed to track down several of these elusive oldsters, finding them all to be either tediously virtuous, which was of little use to him, or lucky, which could neither be counted on nor stolen. And such was the way of it until he located an Irish monk who was working in an elephant sanctuary in California, of all places, having long since given up on helping humans. Brother Colman looked not a day over fifty, and was, in fact, in remarkable shape for a man who claimed to be almost five hundred years old.
Once Lord Teddy had slipped a liberal dose of sodium Pentothal into the Irishman’s tea, Brother Colman told a very interesting story of how the holy well on Dalkey Island had come by its healing waters when he was a monk there in the fifteenth century.
Teddy did not believe a word of it, but the name Dalkey did sound an alarm bell somewhere in the back of his mind. A bell he muted for the present.
The fool is raving, he thought. I gave him too much truth serum.
With the so-called monk in a chemical daze, Bleedham-Drye performed a couple of simple verification checks, not really expecting anything exciting.
First he unbuttoned the man’s shirt, and found to his surprise that Brother Colman’s chest was latticed with ugly scars, which would be consistent with the man’s story but was not exactly proof.
The idiot might have been gored by one of his own elephants, Teddy realized. But Lord Bleedham-Drye had seen many wounds in his time and never anything this dreadful on a living body.
There ain’t no fooling my second test, thought Teddy, and with a flash of his pruning shears he snipped off Brother Colman’s left pinky. After all, radiocarbon dating never lied.
It would be several weeks before the results came back from the Advanced Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Laboratory, and by that time Teddy was back in England once again, lounging dejectedly in his bath of electric eels in the family seat: Childerblaine House, on the island of St. George in the Scilly Isles. Interestingly enough, the island had been so named because in one of the various versions of the St. George legend, the beheaded dragon’s body had been dumped into Cornish waters and drifted out to the Scilly Isles, where it settled on a submerged rock and fossilized, which provided a romantic explanation for the small island’s curved spine of ridges.
When Lord Teddy came upon the envelope from AAMSL in his pile of mail, he sliced it open listlessly, fully expecting that the Brother Colman excursion had been a big waste of precious time and shrinking fortune.
But the results on that single page made Teddy sit up so quickly that several eels were slopped from the tub.
“Good heavens!” he exclaimed, his halo of dark hair curled and vibrating from the eel charge. “I’m off to Dalkey Island, begorra.”<
br />
The laboratory report was brief and cursory in the way of scientific reports:
The supplied specimen, it read, is in the four-hundred- to five-hundred-year-old age range.
Lord Teddy outfitted himself in his standard apparel of high boots, riding breeches, and a tweed hunting jacket, all topped off with his old commando beret. And he loaded up his wooden speedboat for what the police these days like to call a stakeout. It was only when he was halfway across the Irish Sea in the Juventas that Lord Teddy realized why the name Dalkey sounded so familiar. The Fowl fellow hung his hat there.
Artemis Fowl.
A force to be reckoned with. Teddy had heard a few stories about Artemis Fowl, and even more about his son Artemis II.
Rumors, he told himself. Rumors, hearsay, and balderdash.
And even if the stories were true, the Duke of Scilly’s determination never wavered.
I shall have that troll’s venom, he thought, opening the V-12 throttles wide. And I shall live forever.
The Goodies (relatively speaking)
Dalkey Island, Dublin, Ireland.
Three Weeks Later.
Behold Myles and Beckett Fowl, passing a late summer evening on the family’s private beach. If you look past the superficial differences—wardrobe, spectacles, hairstyles, and so on—you notice that the boys’ facial features are very similar but not absolutely identical. This is because they are dizygotic twins, and were, in fact, the first recorded nonidentical twins to be born conjoined, albeit only from wrist to little finger. The attending surgeon separated them with a flash of her scalpel, and neither twin suffered any ill effects, apart from matching pink scars that ran along the outside of their palms. Myles and Beckett often touched scars to comfort each other. It was their version of a high five, which they called a wrist bump. This habit was both touching and slightly gross.
Apart from their features, the fraternal twins were, as one tutor noted, “very different animals.” Myles had an IQ of 170 and was fanatically neat, while Beckett’s IQ was a mystery, because he chewed the test into pulpy blobs from which he made a sculpture of a hamster in a bad mood, which he titled Angry Hamster.