by Eoin Colfer
“Captain Short. The crazed human is your contact— put him on a leash until we get out of here.”
It was an unfortunate phrase to use.
“Put me on a leash? Is that what you’ve been doing all this time, Captain Short?”
Artemis was shivering now, as though a current had passed through his limbs.
“Artemis,” said Holly urgently. “Wouldn’t you like to sleep for a while? Just lay your head down somewhere warm and sleep?”
The notion took hold in some corner of Artemis’s brain. “Yes. Sleep. Can you do that, Holly?”
Holly took a slow step forward. “Of course I can. Just a little mesmer is all it takes. You’ll wake up a new man.”
Artemis’s eyes seemed to jellify. “A new man. But what about THE PROJECT?”
Easy now, thought Holly. Move in gently. “We can take care of it when you wake up.” She slipped the thinnest wafer of magic into her upper registers; to Artemis it would sound like the tinkling of crystal bells on every consonant.
“Sleep,” said Artemis softly, in case volume broke the word. “‘To sleep, perchance to dream.’”
“Quoting theater now?” said Foaly. “Do we really have the time?”
Holly hushed him with a glare, then took another step toward Artemis.
“Just a few hours. We can take you away from here, from whatever’s coming.”
“Away from here,” echoed the troubled boy.
“Then we can talk about the project.”
The shuttle’s pilot fluffed his approach, carving a shallow trench in the surface with his rear stabilizer. The cacophonous splintering of sugar-glass-thin ice plates was enough to sharpen Artemis’s pupils.
“No!” he shouted, his voice shrill for once. “No magic. One two three four five. Stay where you are.”
A second craft introduced itself to the melodrama, appearing suddenly in the distant skyscape as though crashing through from an alternate dimension. Huge and sleek like a spiraling ice-cream cone, trailing tethered boosters, one errant engine detaching and spinning off into the heavy gray clouds. For such a huge ship, it made very little noise.
Artemis was shocked by the sight. Aliens? was his first thought; then, Wait, not aliens. I have seen this before. A schematic at least.
Foaly was having the same thought. “You know, that looks familiar.”
Entire sections of the giant ship were flickering out of sight as it cooled down from its steep atmospheric entry, or re-entry, as it turned out.
“That’s one from your space program,” said Artemis accusingly.
“It’s possible,” Foaly admitted, a guilty tinge blossoming on his rear cheeks, another reason he lost at poker. “Difficult to tell with all the erratic movements and so forth.”
The LEP shuttle finally touched down, popping a hatch on its port side.
“Everyone in,” ordered Vinyáya. “We need to put a little distance between us and that ship.”
Foaly was three or four steps ahead. “No. No, this is one of ours. It shouldn’t be here, but we can still control it.”
Holly snorted. “Sure. You’re doing a great job of it so far.”
This comment was one more than the centaur could bear. He finally snapped, rearing majestically on his hind legs, then bringing his front hooves smashing down on the thin ice.
“Enough!” he roared. “There is a deep-space probe bearing down on us. And even if its nuclear generator does not explode, the impact blast wave alone will be enough to destroy everything in a fifteen-mile radius, so unless that shuttle of yours can travel to another dimension, boarding will be about as much use as you would be at a scientific convention.”
Holly shrugged. “Fair enough. What do you suggest?”
“I suggest you shut up and let me deal with this problem.”
The term probe generally brings to mind a small, spare craft, with perhaps a few sample jars in its hold and maybe a rack of super-efficient solar cells clamped to its back, but this machine was the polar opposite of such an image. It was huge and violent in its movement, jarring the air as it bludgeoned through, jumping in lurching leaps, dragging tethered engines behind like captured slaves.
“This thing,” muttered Foaly, blinking to activate his monocle, “seemed friendlier when I designed it.”
The soldiers were ordered to hold their positions, and the entire group could only watch as the giant ship bore down on them, screaming ever louder as its soundproofing waffling was scored. Atmospheric friction tore at the probe with jagged fingers, tearing huge octagonal plates from the hull. And all the while Foaly tried to gain control of it.
“What I’m doing is going through the shuttle’s antennae to get a good fix on the probe’s computer, see if I can find the malfunction and then maybe I can program in a nice friendly hover at thirty yards. A little more shield would be nice too.”
“Less explaining,” said Vinyáya through gritted teeth, “and more fixing.”
Foaly kept up his line of drivel as he worked. “Come on, Commander. I know you military types thrive on these tense situations.”
Throughout this exchange, Artemis stood still as a statue, aware that should he release the tremors, they would engulf him perhaps forever, and he would be lost.
What has happened? he wondered. Am I not Artemis Fowl?
Then he noticed something.
That ship has four engines. Four.
Death.
As if to confirm this thought, or indeed prompted by the thought, an orange bolt of energy appeared at the very tip of the descending craft, roiling nastily, looking very much like a bringer of death.
“Orange energy,” noted Holly, shooting it with a finger gun. “You’re the explainer guy, Foaly, explain that.”
“Worry not, lesser intellect,” said Foaly, fingers a blur across his keyboard. “This ship is unarmed. It’s a scientific probe, for gods’ sake. That plasma bolt is an ice cutter, no more than that.”
Artemis could hold in the tremors no longer, and they wracked his slim frame.
“Four engines,” he said, teeth chattering. “F-f-four is death.”
Vinyáya paused on her way to the shuttle gangway. She turned, a sheaf of steel hair escaping her hood. “Death? What’s he talking about?”
Before Holly could answer, the orange plasma beam bubbled merrily for a moment, then blasted directly into the shuttle’s engine.
“No, no, no,” said Foaly, speaking as one would to an errant student. “That’s not right at all.”
They watched horrified as the shuttle collapsed in a ball of turgid heat, rendering the metal shell transparent for just long enough to reveal the writhing marines inside.
Holly dropped low and dived toward Vinyáya, who was searching for a pathway through the flames to her men inside.
“Commander!”
Holly Short was fast, actually getting a grip on Vinyáya’s glove before one of the shuttle’s engines exploded and sent Holly pinwheeling through the superheated air onto the roof of the Great Skua restaurant. She flapped on the slate like a butterfly on a pin, staring stupidly at the glove in her hand. Her visor’s recognition software had locked onto Commander Vinyáya’s face, and a warning icon flashed gently.
Fatal injury to central nervous system, read a text on her screen. Holly knew that the computer was saying the same thing in her ear, but she couldn’t hear it. Please seal off the area and call emergency services.
Fatal injury? This couldn’t be happening again. In that nanosecond she flashed back to her former commander Julius Root’s death. Reality returned in a fiery heatwave, turning the ice to steam and popping the heat sensors in her suit.
Holly dug her fingers into the roof slush and hauled her upper body higher. The scene played around her like a silent movie, as her helmet noise filters had expanded and ruptured in the nanosecond between the flash and the bang.
Everyone in the shuttle was gone . . . that much was clear.
Don’t say gone, say dead�
�that’s what they are.
“Focus!” she said aloud, pounding a fist into the roof to emphasize each syllable. There would be time to grieve later; this crisis was not yet past.
Who is not dead?
She was not dead. Bleeding but alive, smoke drifting from the soles of her boots.
Vinyáya. Oh gods.
Forget Vinyáya for now.
And in a snowdrift underneath the eaves, she spotted Foaly’s legs doing an inverted gallop.
Is that funny now? Should I be laughing?
But where was Artemis? Suddenly Holly’s heartbeat was loud in her ears, and her blood roared like the surf.
Artemis.
Holly’s journey to a crouch was harder than it was supposed to be, and no sooner had her knees found purchase than her elbows gave way, and she ended up almost back where she’d started.
Artemis. Where are you?
Then from the corner of her eye, Holly saw her friend loping across the ice. Artemis was apparently unharmed, apart from a slight drag in his left leg. He was moving slowly but determinedly away from the burning shuttle. Away from the crank and blackening of contracting metal and the mercury drip of stealth ore finally reaching its melting point.
Where are you going?
Not running away, that was for sure. If anything, Artemis was moving directly into the path of the still-falling space probe.
Holly tried to scream a warning. She opened her mouth but could only cough smoke. She tasted smoke and battle.
“Artemis,” she managed to hack after several attempts.
Artemis glanced up at her. “I know,” he shouted, a ragged edge to his voice. “The sky appears to be falling, but it isn’t. None of this is real, the ship, those soldiers, none of it. I realize that now. I’ve been . . . I’ve been having delusions, you see.”
“Get clear, Artemis,” cried Holly, her voice not her own, feeling like her brain was sending signals to someone else’s mouth. “That ship is real. It will crush you.”
“No it won’t, you’ll see.” Artemis was actually smiling benignly. “Delusional disorder, that’s all this craft is. I simply constructed this vision from an old memory, one of Foaly’s blueprints I sneaked a look at. I need to face my dementia. Once I can prove to myself that this is all in my head, then I can keep it there.”
Holly crawled across the roof, feeling her insides buzz as magic went to work on her organs. Strength was returning, but slowly, and her legs felt like lead pipes. “Listen to me, Artemis. Trust me.”
“No,” Artemis barked. “I don’t trust any of you. Not Butler, not even my own mother.” Artemis hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know what to believe, or who to trust. But I do know that there cannot be a space probe crash-landing here at this precise moment. The odds against it are just too astronomical. My mind is playing tricks on me, and I have to show it who’s boss.”
Holly registered about half of that speech, but she’d heard enough to realize that Artemis was referring to his own mind in the third person, which was a warning sign no matter which head doctor’s theories you subscribed to.
The spaceship continued to bear down on them, unaffected by Artemis’s lack of belief in its existence, shunting shock waves before it. For a memory, it certainly seemed very real, each panel richly textured by the tribulations of space travel. Long jagged striations were etched into the nose cone like scars from lightning bolts, and buckshot dents peppered the fuselage. A ragged semicircular chunk was missing from one of the three fins, as though a deep-space creature had taken a bite from the passing craft, and strangely colored lichen was crayoned in the square patch vacated by a hull plate.
Even Artemis had to admit it. “That doesn’t seem particularly ethereal. I must have a more vivid imagination than I had thought.”
Two of the ship’s silencers blew out in rapid succession, and engine roar filled the bowl of gray sky.
Artemis pointed a rigid finger at the craft. “You are not real!” he shouted, though even he did not hear the words. The ship was low enough now for Artemis to read the message written in several scripts and pictograms across the nose cone.
“‘I come in peace,’” he mumbled, and thought: Four words. Death.
Holly was thinking too, images of tragedy and destruction flashing past like the lights of a train carriage, but there was one other notion holding steady through the chaos.
I can’t reach him from this rooftop. Artemis is going to die, and there’s nothing I can do but watch.
And then a hysterical afterthought.
Butler is going to kill me.
CHAPTER 2
THE JADE PRINCESS
AND CRAZY BEAR
Cancún, Mexico; The Night Before
The man in the rental Fiat 500 swore loudly as his broad foot mashed the tiny brake and accelerator pedals, stalling the tiny car for the umpteenth time. It might be a little easier to drive this miniature vehicle if I could sit in the backseat so my knees were not jammed under my chin, the man reasoned. And with that thought he pulled over sharply onto the verge bordering Cancún’s spectacular lagoon. In the reflected light of a million twinkling luxury-suite balcony lamps, he performed an act of vandalism on the Fiat that would definitely cost him his deposit and possibly send him rocketing to number one on the Hertz blacklist.
“Better,” grunted the man, and tossed the driver’s seat down the verge.
Hertz only has itself to blame, he thought, on a reasoning roll. This is what happens when you insist on giving a toy car to a man of my proportions. It’s like trying to load fifty-caliber rounds into a Derringer boot gun. Ridiculous.
He crammed himself into the vehicle and, navigating from the backseat, pulled into the flow of cars, which even at close to midnight were packed together tighter than train carriages.
I’m coming, Juliet, he thought, squeezing the steering wheel as though it were a threat to his little sister somehow. I’m on my way.
The driver of this carelessly remodeled Fiat was of course Butler, Artemis Fowl’s bodyguard, though he had not always been known by that name. In the course of his career as a soldier of fortune, Butler had adopted many a nom de guerre to protect his family from recriminations. A band of Somali pirates knew him as Gentleman George, he had for a time hired himself out in Saudi Arabia under the name Captain Steele (Artemis had later accused him of having a touch of the screeching melodramas), and for two years a Peruvian tribe, the Isconahua, knew the mysterious giant who protected their village from an aggressive logging corporation only as El Fantasma de la Selva, the ghost of the jungle. Of course, since becoming Artemis Fowl’s bodyguard, there was no more time for side projects.
Butler had traveled to Mexico at Artemis’s insistence, though insistence had hardly been necessary once Butler had read the message on his principal’s smartphone. They had been in the middle of a mixed martial-arts session earlier in the day when the phone rang. A polyphonic version of Morricone’s “Miserere,” which signified the arrival of a message.
“No phones in the dojo, Artemis,” Butler had rumbled. “You know the rules.”
Artemis had delivered one more blow to the hand pad, a left jab that had little power and less accuracy, but at least his shots were landing on the pad now. Until recently, Artemis’s punches were so wide of the mark that in the event of actual combat a passerby would be in more danger than any assailant.
“I know the rules, Butler,” said Artemis, taking several breaths to get the sentence out. “The phone is definitely off. I checked it five times.”
Butler pulled off a pad, which in theory protected the wearer’s hand from punches, but in this case protected Artemis’s knuckles from Butler’s spadelike palm. “The phone is off, and yet it rings.”
Artemis trapped a glove between his knees and tugged his hand free. “It’s set to emergency breakthrough. It would be irresponsible of me not to check it.”
“Your speech seems strange,” noted Butler. “Stilted somehow . . . Are you counting yo
ur words?”
“That is patently ridiculous . . . actually,” said Artemis, coloring. “I am simply choosing carefully.” He hurried to the phone, which was one of his own design with a dedicated operating platform based on an amalgamation of human and fairy technology. “The message is from Juliet,” he said, consulting the three-inch touch screen.
Butler’s pique immediately evaporated. “Juliet sending an emergency message? What does it say?”
Artemis wordlessly handed over the phone, which seemed to shrink as Butler’s massive hand enfolded it.
The message was short and urgent. Five words only.
In trouble, Domovoi. Come alone.
Butler’s fingers squeezed the phone until its casing cracked. The first names of all Blue Diamond bodyguards were closely guarded secrets, and the mere fact that Juliet had invoked his name to summon him was an indicator of how much trouble she was in.
“Naturally I’m coming with you,” said Artemis briskly. “My phone can trace that call to the nearest square centimeter and we can be anywhere in the world in just less than a day.”
Butler’s features belied the struggle between big brother and detached professional that raged inside him.
Finally the professional got the upper hand. “No, Artemis. I cannot put you in harm’s way.”
“But . . .”
“No. I must go, but you will return to school. If Juliet is in trouble, I need to move quickly, and caring for you will simply double my responsibility. Juliet knows how seriously I take my job, and she would never ask me to come alone unless the situation was dangerous.”
Artemis coughed. “It’s probably not too dangerous. Perhaps Juliet is more inconvenienced than in any actual peril. But in any case you should go as soon as . . .”
He plucked the phone from Butler’s grasp and tapped the screen.
“Cancún, Mexico, that’s your destination.”
Butler nodded. It made sense. Juliet was currently with a Mexican wrestling troupe, building a rep for her character, the Jade Princess, and praying for that magic call from the World Wrestling Entertainment group.
“Cancún,” he repeated. “I’ve never been. There’s not much call for people like me there. Too safe.”