by Eoin Colfer
“Well?” demanded Artemis. “Is he alive?”
Holly didn’t answer. A strenuous healing often resulted in nausea and fatigue. Captain Short took several deep breaths, resting on the rear bumper.
“Is he alive?” repeated the youth.
Holly nodded. “Alive. Yes, he’s alive. But&”
“But what, Holly. Tell me!”
Holly tugged off her helmet. It slipped from her fingers, rolling across the yard. “I’m sorry, Artemis. I did the best I could.”
It was possibly the worst thing she could have said.
Artemis climbed into the van. The floor was slick with water and colored crystals. Smoke leaked from the fractured grille of the air-conditioning system, and the overhead neon strip flickered like lightning in a bottle.
The cryo pod lay off-kilter in one corner, its gyroscopes leaking fluid. One of Butler’s arms flopped over the unit’s edge, throwing a monster shadow on the wall.
The cryo pod’s instruments’ panel was still operating. Artemis was relieved to see the heartbeat icon blipping gently in the display. Butler was alive. Holly had done it again. But something had been worrying the fairy captain. There was a problem.
As soon as Artemis looked inside the pod, it became immediately apparent what that problem was. The newly grown hair was heavily streaked with gray. Butler had gone into the cryo chamber forty years of age. The man before him now was at least fifty. Possibly older. In the space of three hours, Butler had grown old.
Holly appeared at Artemis’s shoulder.
“He’s alive, at least,” said the fairy.
Artemis nodded. “When will he wake up?”
“A couple of days. Maybe.”
“How did this happen?” asked the boy, brushing a lock of hair from Butler’s brow.
Holly shrugged. “I’m not exactly sure. That’s Foaly’s area.”
Artemis took the spare headset from his pocket, hooking the speaker wire over his ear.
“Any theories, Foaly?”
“I can’t be sure,” the centaur replied. “But I’m guessing that Holly’s magic wasn’t enough. Some of Butler’s own life force was needed for the healing. About fifteen years’ worth, by the looks of it.”
“Can anything be done?”
“Afraid not. A healing can’t be undone. If it’s any consolation, he’ll probably live longer than he would have naturally. But there’s no reclaiming his youth, and what’s more, we can’t be sure about the state of his mind. The healing could have wiped his brain cleaner than a magnetized disk.”
Artemis sighed deeply. “What have I done to you, old friend?”
“No time for that,” said Holly briskly. “You both should get out of here. I’m sure all the commotion will have attracted attention. Do you have transport?”
“No. We flew over on a public flight. Then took a taxi from Heathrow.”
Holly shrugged. “I’d like to help, Artemis. But I’ve already given up enough time here. I’m on a mission. An extremely important mission, and I have to get back to it.”
Artemis stepped away from the cryo unit.
“Holly, about your mission&”
Captain Short turned slowly.
“Artemis&”
“You were probed, weren’t you? Something got past Foaly’s defenses?”
Holly pulled a large sheet of camouflage foil from her surveillance backpack. “We need to go somewhere to talk. Somewhere private.”
* * *
The following forty-five minutes were something of a blur to Artemis. Holly wrapped both humans in camouflage foil from her surveillance pack and clipped them onto a Moonbelt. The belt effectively reduced their weight to one sixth of Earth’s norm.
Even then it was a struggle for her mechanical wings to hoist the three of them into the night sky. Holly had to open the throttle wide just to bring them five hundred feet above sea level.
“I’m going to shield now,” she said into her mike. “Try not to thrash about too much. I don’t want to have to cut one of you loose.”
Then she was gone, and in her place hovered a slightly shimmering Holly-shaped patch of stars. The vibration rattled through the belt links, shaking Artemis’s teeth in his head.
Artemis felt like a bug in a cocoon, trussed up in foil with only his face exposed to the night air. Initially the experience was almost enjoyable; riding high above the city watching the cars flicker along the motorways. Then Holly picked up a westerly wind and threw them into the air currents over the English Channel.
Suddenly, Artemis’s universe was a maelstrom of cutting wind, buffeted passengers, and startled birds. Beside him, Butler hung limply in his makeshift foil truss. The foil absorbed the local colors, reflecting the dominant hues. It was by no means a perfect re-creation of the surroundings, but certainly good enough for a night flight across the channel to Ireland.
“Is this foil invisible to radar?” said Artemis into the headset. “I don’t want to be mistaken for a UFO by some eager Harrier jump-jet pilot.”
Holly considered it. “You’re right. Maybe I should take us down a bit, just in case.”
Two seconds later, Artemis deeply regretted breaking radio silence. Holly tilted her wing rig into a steep dive, sending the three of them hurtling toward the midnight waves below. She pulled up at the last moment, when Artemis could have sworn the skin was about to peel from his face.
“Low enough for you?” asked Holly, with the barest hint of humor in her voice.
They skimmed the wave tops, spray sparking against the camouflage foil. The ocean was rough that night, and Holly followed the water patterns, dipping and climbing to match the swell’s curve. A school of humpback whales sensed Holly’s presence and broke through the storm foam, leaping fully thirty meters across a trough before disappearing beneath the black water. There were no dolphins. The small mammals were taking shelter from the elements in the inlets and coves along the Irish coast.
Holly skirted the hull of a passenger ferry, flying close enough to feel the engine’s pulse. On deck, scores of passengers vomited over the railings, narrowly missing the invisible travelers below.
“Charming,” muttered Artemis.
“Don’t worry,” said Holly’s voice, out of thin air. “Almost there.”
They passed Rosslare’s ferry terminal, following the coastline northward, over the Wicklow Mountains. Even in his disoriented state, Artemis could not help but marvel at their speed. Those wings were a fantastic invention. Imagine the money that could be made for a patent like that. Artemis stopped himself. Selling fairy technology was what had got Butler hurt in the first place.
They slowed sufficiently for Artemis to make out individual landmarks. Dublin squatted to the east, an aura of yellow light buzzing over its highway system. Holly skirted the city, heading for the less populated north of the county. In the center of a large dark patch sat a single building, painted white by external spotlights: Artemis’s ancestral home. Fowl Manor.
Fowl Manor, Ireland
“Now, explain yourself,” said Holly, once they had floated Butler safely to bed.
She sat on the great stairway’s bottom step. Generations of Fowls glared down at her from oil portraits. The LEP captain activated her helmet mike. “Foaly, record this, would you? I have a feeling we’re going to want to hear it again.”
“This entire incident began at a business meeting this afternoon,” began Artemis.
“Go on.”
“I was meeting Jon Spiro, an American industrialist.”
Holly heard keys being tapped in her ear. Undoubtedly, Foaly was running a background check on this Spiro character.
“Jon Spiro,” said the centaur, almost immediately. “A shady character, even by human standards. Mud Man security agencies have been trying to put this guy away for thirty years. His companies are ecodisasters. And that’s only the tip of the pyramid: industrial espionage, pollution, abduction, blackmail, Mob connections. You name it, he’s gotten away with it.�
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“That’s the guy,” said Artemis. “I set up a rendezvous with Mr. Spiro.”
“What were you selling?” interrupted Foaly. “A man like Spiro doesn’t cross the Atlantic for tea and muffins.”
Artemis frowned. “I wasn’t actually selling him anything. But I did offer to suppress some revolutionary technology, for a price, of course.”
Foaly’s voice was cold in his ear. “What revolutionary technology?”
Artemis hesitated for a beat. “Do you remember those helmets Butler took from the retrieval squad?”
Holly groaned. “Oh, no.”
“I deactivated the helmets’ auto-destruct mechanisms and constructed a cube from the sensors and chips. The C Cube, a mini computer. It was a simple matter to install a fiber-optic blocker so you couldn’t take control of the Cube if you detected it.”
“You gave fairy technology to a man like Jon Spiro?”
“I quite obviously didn’t give it to him,” snapped Artemis. “He took it.”
Holly pointed a finger at the youth. “Don’t bother playing the victim, Artemis. It doesn’t suit you. What did you think? That Jon Spiro was going to walk away from technology that could make him the richest man on the face of the planet?”
“So it was your computer that pinged us?” said Foaly.
“Yes,” admitted Artemis. “Unintentionally. Spiro asked for a surveillance scan, and the Cube’s fairy circuits picked up LEP satellite beams.”
“Can’t we block any future probes?” asked the LEP captain.
“Haven’s deflectors will be useless against our own technology. Sooner or later, Spiro will find out about the People. And if that happens, I can’t see a man like him just allowing us to live in harmony.”
Holly glared pointedly at Artemis. “Remind you of anyone?”
“I am nothing like Jon Spiro,” objected the boy. “He’s a cold-blooded killer!”
“Give yourself a few years,” said Holly. “You’ll get there.”
Foaly sighed. Put Artemis Fowl and Holly Short together in a room, and sooner or later there was bound to be a fight.
“Okay, Holly,” said the centaur. “Let’s try to act like professionals. Step one is to call off the lockdown. Our next priority is to retrieve the Cube before Spiro can unlock its secrets.”
“We do have some time,” said Artemis. “The Cube is encrypted.”
“How encrypted?”
“I built an eternity code into its hard drive.”
“An eternity code,” said Foaly. “I’m impressed.”
“It wasn’t that difficult. I invented an entirely new base language, so Spiro will have no frame of reference.”
Holly was feeling a bit left out. “And how long will it take to crack this eternity code?”
Artemis couldn’t resist raising an eyebrow.
“Eternity,” he said, “in theory. But with Spiro’s resources, quite a bit less.”
Holly ignored the tone. “Okay, then, we’re safe. No need to go hunting Spiro if all he has is a box of useless circuits.”
“Far from useless,” countered Artemis. “The chip design alone will lead his research-and-development team in interesting directions. But you are right about one thing, Holly, there is no need to go hunting Spiro. Once he realizes that I am still alive, he will come looking for me. After all, I am the only one who can unlock the full potential of the C Cube.”
Holly dropped her head into her hands. “So, any moment now a team of hit men could come blasting in here, looking for the key to your eternity code. It’s at times like these, we could do with someone like Butler.”
Artemis plucked the wall phone from its cradle. “There’s more than one Butler in the family,” he said.
Sfax, Tunisia, North Africa
For her eighteenth birthday, Juliet Butler asked for, and received, a ribbed judo crash vest, two weighted throwing knives, and a World Wrestling Grudge Match video. Items that did not generally feature on the average teenage girl’s wish list. Then again, Juliet Butler was not the average teenage girl.
Juliet was extraordinary in many ways. For one thing she could hit a moving target with any weapon you cared to name, and for another she could throw most people a lot further than she trusted them.
Of course, she didn’t learn all of this by watching wrestling videos. Juliet’s training began at age four. After kindergarten each day, Domovoi Butler would escort his little sister to the Fowl Estate dojo, where he instructed her in the various forms of martial arts. By the time she was eight, Juliet was a third-dan black belt in seven disciplines. By ten years of age, she was beyond belts.
Traditionally all Butler males enrolled in Madam Ko’s Personal Protection Academy on their tenth birthday, spending six months of every year learning the bodyguard’s craft, and the other six guarding a low-risk Principal. The female Butlers generally went into service for various wealthy families around the world. Juliet decided she would combine both roles, spending half the year with Angeline Fowl, and the other half honing her martial arts skills in Madam Ko’s camp. She was the first Butler female to have enrolled in the academy, and only the fifth female ever to make it past the physical exam. The camp was never located in the same country for more than five years. Butler had done his training in Switzerland and Israel, but his younger sister received her instruction in the Utsukushigahara Highlands in Japan.
Madam Ko’s dormitory was a far cry from the luxurious accommodations in Fowl Manor. In Japan, Juliet slept on a straw mat, owned nothing apart from two rough cotton robes, and consumed only rice, fish, and protein shakes.
The day began at five-thirty when Juliet and the other acolytes ran four miles to the nearest stream, and caught fish with their bare hands. Having cooked and presented the fish to their sensei, the acolytes strapped empty twenty-gallon barrels to their backs and climbed to the snowline. When their barrels were filled with snow, the acolytes would roll them back to base camp, and then pound the snow with bare feet until it melted, and could be used by the sensei to bathe. Then the day’s training could begin.
Lessons included Cos Ta’pa, a martial art developed by Madam Ko herself, specially tailored for bodyguards, whose primary aim was not self-defense, but defense of the Principal. Acolytes also studied advanced weaponry, information technology, vehicular maintenance, and hostage negotiation techniques.
By her eighteenth birthday, Juliet could break down and reassemble ninety percent of the world’s production weapons blindfolded, operate any vehicle, do her makeup in under four minutes, and, in spite of her stunning Asian and European gene mix, blend into any crowd like a native. Her big brother was very proud.
The final step in her training was a field simulation in a foreign environment. If she passed this test, Madam Ko would have Juliet’s shoulder marked with a blue diamond tattoo. The tattoo, identical to the one on Butler’s shoulder, symbolized not only the graduate’s toughness but the multifaceted nature of his training. In personal protection circles, a bodyguard bearing the blue diamond needed no further reference.
Madam Ko had chosen the city of Sfax in Tunisia for Juliet’s final assessment. Her mission was to guide the Principal through the city’s tumultuous market, or medina. Generally, a bodyguard would advise his Principal against venturing into such a densely populated area. But Madam Ko pointed out that Principals rarely listened to advice, and it was best to be prepared for every eventuality. And as if Juliet wasn’t under enough pressure, Madam Ko herself had decided to act as surrogate Principal.
It was exceptionally hot in North Africa. Juliet squinted through her wraparound sunglasses, concentrating on following the diminutive figure bobbing through the crowd before her.
“Hurry,” snapped Madam Ko. “You will lose me.”
“In your dreams, Madam,” replied Juliet, unperturbed.
Madam Ko was simply trying to distract her with conversation. And there were already enough distractions in the local environment. Gold hung in shimmering ropes fro
m a dozen stalls, Tunisian rugs flapped from wooden frames, the perfect cover for an assassin. Locals pressed uncomfortably close, eager for a look at this attractive female, and the terrain was treacherous, one false step could lead to a twisted ankle, and failure.
Juliet processed all this information automatically, factoring it into every move. She placed a firm hand on the chest of a teenager grinning at her, skipped over an oily puddle reflecting rainbow patterns, and followed Madam Ko down yet another alley in the medina’s endless maze. Suddenly, there was a man in her face. One of the market traders.
“I have good carpets,” he said, in broken French. “You come with me. I show you!”
Madam Ko kept going. Juliet attempted to follow her, but the man blocked her path.
“No, thank you. I am so not interested. I live outdoors.”
“Very funny, mademoiselle. You make good joke. Now come and see Ahmed’s carpets.”
The crowd began to take notice. Swirling to face her, like the tendrils of a giant organism. Madam Ko was drawing further away. She was losing the Principal.
“I said no. Now back off, Mr. Carpet Man, don’t make me break a nail.”
The Tunisian man was unaccustomed to taking orders from a female, and now his friends were watching.
“I give good bargain,” he persisted, pointing at his stall. “Best rugs in Sfax.”
Juliet dodged to one side, but the crowd moved to cut her off.
It was at this point Ahmed lost all sympathy Juliet may have had for him. Up to now, he had simply been an innocent local in the wrong place at the wrong time. But now&
“Let’s go,” said the Tunisian, wrapping an arm around the blond girl’s waist. Not an idea that would make his top ten of good ideas.
“Oh, bad move, carpet man!”
Faster than the eye could blink, Ahmed was wrapped in the folds of a nearby carpet, and Juliet was gone. Nobody had a clue what had happened until they replayed the incident on the screen of Kamal the chicken man’s camcorder. In slow motion the traders saw the girl hoist Ahmed by the throat and belt, and lob him bodily into a carpet stall. It was a move that one of the gold merchants recognized as a slingshot. A maneuver made popular by the American wrestler Papa Hog. The traders laughed so much that several of them became dehydrated. It was the funniest thing to happen all year. The clip even won a prize on Tunisia’s version of the World’s Funniest Home Videos. Three weeks later, Ahmed moved to Egypt.