by Eoin Colfer
“That’s a very general order, Myles, which is quite unlike you. I don’t suppose you would like to give me a few parameters?” asked NANNI.
“Give me the works; search for physical anomalies.”
The Duke of Scilly barked with laughter. “By all means, young man, scan away. Take your time.”
While NANNI used the biometric scanners in Myles’s spectacles to check Lord Teddy’s physiognomy and indeed inner workings, Beckett was doing some scanning of his own, constructing a makeshift frame with his forefingers and thumbs and squinting through it—although, in truth, he operated on pure animal instinct. And even if Beckett had been outfitted with his own NANNI glasses, the AI’s scanners would have been useless when it came to landing a cluster punch, as even Myles had yet to develop a scan for meridian lines. Also, though Beckett could not have known it, Lord Teddy’s meddling in his own DNA had actually altered the layout of his meridian lines so they had no intersection point, which made the duke immune to Beckett’s attack.
“Long arms,” Beckett proclaimed. “Adjusting strike zone.”
“I concur,” said NANNI in Myles’s spectacles. “That guy has long arms. And his energy fields are all over the place. Do those facts help?”
“Not really,” said Myles. “And please stop using terms like guy.”
Lord Teddy had about as much of this assorted claptrap as he was prepared to endure. The Fowl Twins had thwarted his abduction plan, and now they were literally under his feet at quite a delicate moment. One was talking to himself, it seemed, and the other had actually dared to assault his royal person. A chap didn’t usually enjoy striking children, but in this particular case, Teddy thought it might not upset him unduly.
And then, of course, there was the fairy. The one who spoke. Better to shrink-wrap the creature and stuff it in a duffel bag for a leisurely examination back at Childerblaine House. It would be painful, certainly.
But not for me, thought the duke.
And crucial developments proceeded to develop in the following five seconds. A single second is a long time in a fight, as every combatant knows, and five can mean the difference between life and death. In this case, there would be no death, but there would definitely be agony.
What happened in those five seconds has to be slowed down in the telling so as to be properly appreciated.
And so, the long-winded story of a moment:
1. As soon as she realized that she was, in fact, utterly visible, Specialist Lazuli Heitz switched her martial arts from Doveli to Cos Tapa, which was akin to switching from dial-up to broadband in terms of speed. Cos Tapa translates roughly from the Gnommish as Quick-Footed or Of Blurred Feet and is an aggressive combat style developed by the diminutive pixie race from a study of animals such as hyenas, cats, and small breeds of dogs, which are often forced to take on larger foes. In these cases, the pixies discovered that victory depended on three factors: balance, dexterity, and speed. Lazuli had excellent balance, she was dexterous with her hands and feet, and she had buckets of speed. Using a maneuver often employed by cartoon squirrels, Lazuli adjusted her grip on Lord Teddy’s wrist while running her feet up along the human’s legs and torso until her boots were tucked under his armpit. This move was known as the pendulum. Lazuli hauled on Teddy’s arm and, crucially, craned her chin to the left.
2. Lord Teddy pulled the trigger on the Myishi Snub gas pistol while beginning to register a certain pressure on his shoulder joint. Even so, he could not resist a triumphant “Aha!” as the weapon fired with a phhhft rather than the more traditional bang.
3. The shrink-wrapper slug whizzed past Lazuli’s pointed ear—so close that the pixel thought she’d been hit—but she nevertheless maintained contact, reasoning that the projectile seemed viral in nature and might enclose them both.
4. Beckett Fowl decided that he should definitely join this fight, as he had already grouped all of the lemon men into the bad guy category, and since this lemon man’s shoulder was primed for a blow, he performed his trademark pogo maneuver and punched Lord Teddy’s shoulder on the way down.
5. The duke’s shoulder was instantly dislocated.
6. Myles did not involve himself in the altercation. This was not surprising, as fighting was not his area, and he would simply get in his twin’s way. Instead, he calmly collected his belongings from the metal crate.
And all of this took place in five seconds.
Having one’s shoulder dislocated is particularly excruciating; on the painful-injuries scale, it ranks at number eight, just below a broken neck. In fact, Lord Teddy was in such discomfort that he momentarily forgot everything except the white ball of agony in his shoulder.
“My word,” he groaned. “My blooming word.”
Which was as close to swearing as Lord Teddy usually came, on account of his breeding. He sank to the flagstones, careful not to jar his arm, which seemed to be electrified. Unfortunately for him, Lazuli’s boots were still jammed into his armpit, and so his wounded shoulder was further traumatized by his collapse. The duke’s eyes rolled back in his head momentarily as he attempted to cope with this new level of suffering, the likes of which he hadn’t experienced since rupturing his Achilles tendon in the 1970s playing the then-popular game of squash. Rupturing one’s Achilles tendon, incidentally, was number ten on the painful-injuries list.
Lazuli crawled out from under the crumpled heap of human and grabbed for the toy troll at the same moment that Beckett made a lunge for it, and the two ended up with one hand each on the troll.
“Mine,” said Lazuli in Gnommish.
“Mine,” echoed Beckett, also in Gnommish, which Myles might have assumed to be simple mimicry had he been listening, but he wasn’t.
Beckett and Lazuli looked to the bespectacled boy for the deciding vote, as his bearing conveyed an almost irresistible air of authority.
“I see,” Myles said to thin air. Then: “Remarkable.” Followed by: “If you say so.”
Then Myles’s attention was back on the room and his eyes narrowed to the curious tug-of-war before him.
“Beckett, release the troll,” he ordered.
Beckett disobeyed.
Usually he disobeyed orders on principle, but in this case, he had, in his fashion, developed a fierce and unreasonable attachment to something that had only recently come into his possession.
“No, Myles,” he said. “Whistle Blower is my toy.”
Lazuli opened her mouth to argue but then changed her mind. Perhaps it was better for all concerned if the humans believed the troll to be nothing more than a toy. So, instead of setting the one called Beckett straight, she played into his understanding of things.
“My toy,” she said, in the humans’ own language.
Myles must have noticed her belligerent expression, for he raised his hands, palms out.
“There is no cause for aggression. We are friends. Fowl and fairy, friends forever. There’s a lot of alliteration there, I grant you, but the sentiment is genuine nonetheless.”
Beckett was astounded. “We have fairy friends? The stories are real?”
Lazuli had many questions, but the most pressing one was: “How do you know I am a fairy?”
Myles could answer both questions with a single word: “Artemis.”
This invocation of Artemis’s name had the effect of stunning both the hyperactive boy and the specialist fairy.
“Artemis told you?” said Beckett. “From space?”
“No,” said Myles. “Nothing quite so cosmic. He left a message on my spectacles.”
“Artemis,” said Lazuli, recalling her angel’s words: If you ever meet Artemis Fowl, he is to be trusted.
She would have to heed those words now, no matter what her misgivings about the twins might be.
“Your brother Artemis,” she said to Myles, “did he leave instructions?”
“Yes,” said Myles, “but they were long-winded even by my standards.”
“Summarize,” said Lazuli, for there were fo
otsteps thudding in the hall.
“He said ‘Work together, get to a safe place.’”
This satisfied both Beckett and Lazuli. For now, at least, they were a team.
Beckett relinquished his hold on the toy troll. “Take care of Whistle Blower.”
“Just like that?” said Lazuli.
“I need my hands free,” said Beckett, looping his goldfish tie around his neck. “Myles is the smarty-pants, but I am the smarty-fists.”
Myles sighed, aggrieved. “I do apologize for my brother’s egregious mangling of the language, but he is, in essence, correct. I think, and he does.”
The rumbling thunder of footsteps grew louder.
Lazuli stuffed the troll inside her tunic and made ready for the fight.
“I am quite the smarty-fists myself,” she said, and followed Beckett into the corridor.
Myles did not immediately pursue the pair but instead spared a second to tug off Lord Teddy’s mask and take a good look at yet another enemy they had somehow picked up.
NANNI quickly ran the face through facial recognition and matched it both with the Dalkey sniper and a passport photo from her onboard databases.
“Well, la-di-da, we have ourselves royalty,” she said. “This is none other than Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye, the Duke of Scilly.”
“Ah, Your Lordship,” said Myles, bowing deeply. “How wonderful to make your acquaintance.”
Of course Myles knew the duke by reputation, and had heard the rumors vis-à-vis his extended life span, but this was the first time Bleedham-Drye had butted heads with the Fowl family.
Myles was on the point of interrogating Lord Teddy when there came the unmistakable sound of people being thumped.
“Uh-oh,” said NANNI, interpreting the sounds and assuming they had been made by Beckett.
Uh-oh, thought Myles, was a reasonable if not very scientific reaction, and he decided he’d better make sure his brother didn’t hurt anyone too badly.
There have been many famous corridor-fight scenes committed to film, most of which would be unsuitable for minors and so shall not be referenced in these pages, but suffice it to say that the Amsterdam subterranean black-site corridor fight surpassed them all in the shock-value department. The fighting moves themselves were not as dramatic as one might have seen before, but the looks on the faces of those assaulted were priceless.
There were twelve assorted male and female security types proceeding down the hallway that ran past the wet room, and it was inevitable that once they breached this area they would fan out and surround the newly formed Fowl/fairy alliance. However, in the narrow corridor, the ACRONYM operatives were hampered by their own pumped-up bulk and forced to advance two abreast, and so the FFA opted for the Thermopylae approach, which had worked so well for King Leonidas and his Spartans (for the first three days, at least). In other words, the boy and the specialist conducted fierce battle in a tight space, attacking one agent at a time.
Beckett Fowl exploded from the wet room with such speed that he actually pinballed off the opposite wall, and, with a cry of delight, bore down upon his prey.
The lead guy had time to be puzzled for a second. Their orders were to secure the building and not kill any “small humanoids.”
Who am I going to kill? These two little kids?
The second little kid, who was actually a fairy, did not pinball off the wall but instead tucked her head low, overtook the first kid, and moved with blinding speed toward the well-armed group.
The lead agent affected a friendly tone. “Hey, little guys—” he said, and extended a hand, which was a big mistake, for Lazuli grabbed that hand, ran up his body, and, with a mighty yank, pendulumed the man head over heels into the stone wall.
Beckett laughed even as he unleashed a cluster punch on the next agent, and then, using the first man’s falling body as a springboard, he moved on to the next man in line, who was a woman. She barely had time for a “There’s no need for—” before she joined her comrade in temporary paralysis.
And on they went, boy and pixel, scything through an elite fighting unit like the ACRONYM agents were sheaves of particularly dry wheat. It was a joy to watch, unless you were an ACRONYM agent, or Sister Jeronima, who was watching from the interview room on her wristwatch, which was synced with the security cameras.
The problem with the feed was that the camera only captured the top half of the corridor, cutting off the boy and fairy completely. All Jeronima could see was a succession of her own operatives being batted aside as though by invisible assailants. The camera’s microphone was omni-directional, though, and managed to pick up the following:
“Hey, little guys—”
“There’s no need for—”
“What the—?”
“Did you see—?”
“Are those monkeys?”
And probably the most embarrassing:
“Oh, dear sweet Momma…”
This last uttered by a man from Texas, who was fired the following day. And though it was never proven, it was rumored that the terminated Texan got hold of the corridor footage and revenge-released it onto the internet, where it quickly became a sensation. The video was the inspiration for both the hit movie Tiny Ghost Ninjas of Xanadu and an internationally best-selling collection of ARE THOSE MONKEYS? T-shirts.
All of which is by the by.
We are more concerned with the immediate aftermath of the conflict, which saw Beckett and Lazuli at the end of the corridor with paralyzed or unconscious bodies strewn behind them. For some reason, one of the unconscious was singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” in his sleep, and Myles would have dearly loved to wake the fellow up for a session of psychoanalysis.
One might think that Myles Fowl would be impressed with his brother’s display, but he had always agreed with Isaac Asimov, who was of the opinion that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent. But considering the enraged nun to the rear, the dislocated duke in the wet room, and the brigades of ACRONYM agents doubtless converging on the underground lair, Myles thought it was probably prudent to move along and skip the anti-violence lecture.
“Shall we proceed?” he asked, picking his way through the obstacle course of limbs and torsos and up the stone stairwell at the hallway’s end. “I have no doubt that more of Sister Jeronima’s reinforcements are nearby.”
In the interview room, Jeronima shrieked at her watch. “I can hear what you are saying, you horrible mocoso! Yo también puedo verte.”
In all fairness to Jeronima, she had good reasons to be semi-hysterical:
1. She had been outwitted by two children, and her reputation as the organization’s premium interrogator would be in tatters when this fact leaked out, as facts like these tended to do.
2. Her crack team of enforcers were strewn over the flagstones like so many bowling pins.
3. The first solid lead she’d had in years was escaping into the Amsterdam morning.
4. And she was handcuffed to a table.
But her hysteria was snuffed out by her observation of a newcomer on the stone steps. Another child?
No.
Jeronima brought her face closer to the watch screen on the wrist that was cuffed to the desk and stared.
The ears.
Its ears were pointed. It was wearing armor of a strange technology.
Sister Jeronima felt a kind of reverence as she stared without blinking at the small screen as though she were witnessing a holy apparition.
“Oh,” she whispered. “There you are, fairy.”
And the nun wept freely, for now she knew without doubt that she had been right to believe. These were not tears of sadness, but joy that she would be vindicated.
“Finalmente,” she said.
Jeronima would catch this fairy and pickle it in a tube so that ACRONYM could dissect the corpse and learn the secrets of the underground world.
“You have taken my phone, Master Myles,” she said to the little figure on-screen. “And w
here it goes, I can follow.”
Perhaps Myles Fowl isn’t as clever as he believes himself to be, thought Jeronima.
Under the circumstances and considering recent events, it seems almost incredible that an intelligent person could believe that to be true.
ONE might think that the universe would have granted the Fowl Twins a moment’s respite, considering all they had endured at the hands of ACRONYM, but no, it was not finished meddling with the brothers just yet.
The boys closed the steel door on one episode and opened the throttle on another. The throttle being connected to the dashboard of a high-powered, shallow-draft, rigid-hull inflatable boat, or RIB, which had been most conveniently docked outside the black site in a sunken dock. Beckett, with his instinctive understanding of mechanics, flooded the sunken dock as though he had worked with canal locks all his life, and soon the RIB was surging toward open water. Beckett overcame the fact that the salt-crusted windshield impeded his view by standing on the wheel and steering with his feet while he leaned his chest against the Plexiglas. This one little action was actually a very accurate snapshot of his entire personality.
For perhaps a single minute, their progress was smooth and unchallenged, and Myles used this time to open a dialogue with the fairy creature sitting opposite him.
“I haven’t introduced myself,” he said, attempting to smooth back his hair, which, he remembered too late, now lay on the floor of the wet room.
“I know who you are,” said Lazuli, and it must be said that her tone was quite sullen for someone who had just escaped almost certain experimentation on her person by creepy people with scalpels. “I don’t know why you helped me.”
Myles tapped the arm of his spectacles. “Artemis told me to. Your face unlocked a series of video messages. NANNI’s facial-recognition software is apparently programmed to recognize fairy physiognomy.” Here Myles paused and smiled to emphasize the fact that he was about to make a hilarious and ice-breaking joke. “Or perhaps I should say physio-GNOMEY.”