by Eoin Colfer
Foaly dived into the hole. It was not elegant—centaurs do not make good divers, which is why they do not compete in pool events.
“Whatever your idea was, it’s not working,” he cried.
Holly also dived into the depression, covering Artemis as well as she could.
“Put your face in the ice,” she ordered. “And hold your breath.”
Foaly ignored her, his attention attracted by Artemis’s Ice Cube, which was swiveling on its base.
“It seems that Artemis’s cannon is about to fire,” he said, his scientific interest piqued in spite of the horrible death approaching them.
Holly grabbed the centaur’s mane, roughly dragging him to the ground. “Face down, hold breath. How hard is that?”
“Oh,” said Foaly. “I see.”
There must have been a buildup of heat somewhere, because the bots froze for a moment, exchanging curious chitters. The noise was quickly drowned out by a bass heavy thump followed by a descending whistle.
“Ooooh,” chorused the amorphobots, sprouting gel periscopes.
Foaly closed one eye and cocked his ear. “Mortar,” he proclaimed, and then as the whistling grew louder he decided that it might be a good idea to take a breath and cover as many orifices as possible.
This is really going to hurt, he thought, and for some reason giggled like a four-year-old pixette.
Then the entire indent was submerged in a pancake of densely packed nano-wafers that worked into every crack, coating the occupants of the hole and completely obliterating any heat signatures.
The amorphobots jiggled backward, away from the mystery substance, searched around for the beings they had been pursuing, and then shrugged their blobby shoulders and trundled after their mother ship, which had bludgeoned and melted its way through the surface to the subterranean volcanoes below.
Underneath the gunky quagmire, two fairies and one human lay still, blowing bubbles with their breath.
“It worked,” gasped Holly finally.
“Shut your face,” snapped Foaly.
Holly pulled his head free from the goo strings. “What did you say to me?”
“Don’t take it personally,” said Foaly. “I just felt like being rude to someone. Do you have any idea what it’s going to be like getting this stuff out of my mane? Cabelline will shave me for sure.”
“Save you?
“Shave me. What are you, deaf?”
“No. My ears are clogged with stuff.”
Holly flip-flopped herself and Artemis from the indent, using her glove-sensor to check the human’s vitals.
Still alive.
She tilted his head back to make sure the airway was clear.
Come back to us, Artemis. We need you.
The amorphobots had gone, and the only signs that they had ever been on the Vatnajökull glacier were the grooves in the ice and snow that marked their passage. The air was blessedly chitter free, though maybe a little chittering would have distracted from the crackle of still-burning troop shuttle.
Holly separated from Artemis with a noise like a very big Band-Aid being slowly pulled from a weeping wound.
What a disaster, she thought, the weight of her coated helmet causing her head to droop. What a total catastrophe.
Holly looked around, trying to make some kind of assessment of the situation. Commander Vinyáya was gone, along with the military. An LEP Martian probe had been hijacked by forces unknown and seemed to be heading into Earth’s crust. The probe was blocking their link to Haven, and it was only a matter of time before humans came to investigate all the flares and explosions. And she had no magic left to shield herself.
“Come on, Artemis,” she said, desperation creeping into her voice. “We’re in deeper trouble than ever before. Come on, you love this kind of impossible problem. I’m sorry I shot you.”
Holly tugged off a glove and held her fingers high, inspecting them just in case a spark remained.
Nothing. No magic. Perhaps it was just as well. The mind was a delicate instrument, and Artemis’s dabblings with the fairy arts had probably triggered his Atlantis Complex in the first place. If Artemis wanted to get well, he would have to do it the old-fashioned way, with pills and electroshock. I already gave him his first shock, thought Holly, swallowing a guilty chuckle.
Artemis shifted on the ice, trying to blink under a faceful of sloppy nano-wafers.
“Unhhh,” he moaned. “Ayyy ga breee.”
“Wait,” said Holly, scooping handfuls of gunk away from his nostrils and mouth. “Let me help.”
Artemis’s own inventions dribbled from the corners of his mouth. There was something different about his eyes. They were the same colors as usual, but softer somehow.
You’re dreaming.
“Artemis?” she said, half expecting a typical snappy retort, as in, Of course it’s Artemis. Who were you expecting? But instead he simply said:
“Hello.”
Which was fine, and Holly was happy enough, until he followed it with:
“And who might you be?”
Ooooh, D’Arvit.
Holly tugged off her helmet. “It’s me, Holly.”
Artemis smiled in delight. “Of course, yes. Artemis thinks about you all the time. It’s embarrassing that I didn’t recognize you. First time up close.”
“Uh . . . Artemis thinks about me. But you don’t?”
“Oh yes, I do constantly, and may I say you look even more bewitching in the flesh.”
Holly felt a feeling of foreboding creep over her like the shadow of a summer storm cloud.
“So, we haven’t met before?”
“Not met, per se,” replied the human youth. “I have of course been aware of you. Seen you from afar, submerged as I was by Artemis’s personality. Thank you for releasing me, by the way. I had been making inroads in the host consciousness for some time now, since Artemis developed his little number obsession, but that jolt from your weapon was just the thing to give me the boost I needed. It was your weapon, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was,” said Holly absently. “And you’re welcome.
I think.” A sudden idea cut through her confusion. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
The boy did a quick digit check. “Four.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
“No. To me a number is a number. Four is no more a harbinger of death than any other whole number. Fractions, though, they’re freakish.”
The youth smiled at his own joke. A smile of such simple saintly goodness that it would have made Artemis retch.
Holly was drawn into the psychosis and had to ask, “So if you’re not Artemis Fowl, then who are you?”
The boy extended a dripping hand straight up. “My name is Orion. I am so pleased to meet you at last. I am, of course, your servant.”
Holly shook the proffered hand, thinking that manners were lovely, but she really needed someone cunning and ruthless right now, and this kid didn’t appear to be very cunning.
“That’s great, em . . . Orion. Really. We’re in a bind here, and I can use all the help I can get.”
“Excellent,” said the boy. “I have been taking stock of the situation from the rear seat, as it were, and I suggest that we retire to a safe distance and construct some form of bivouac.”
Holly groaned. Of all the times for Artemis to go AWOL inside his own head.
Foaly clambered from the morass of nano-wafers, using his fingers to draw aside curtains of gunk that obscured his vision.
“I see Artemis has woken up. Good. We could do with one of his trademark apparently-ridiculous-but-actually-ingenious plans.”
“Bivouac,” said the boy in Artemis Fowl’s head. “I suggest a bivouac, and perhaps we could gather kindling for a campfire, and some leaves to make a cushion for the lovely lady.”
“Kindling? Did Artemis Fowl just use the word kindling? And who’s the lovely lady?”
The wind picked up suddenly, lifting loose surface snow and s
ending it skittering across the ice. Holly felt flakes settle on her exposed neck, sending a prickling chill trickling down her spine.
Things are bad now, she realized. And they’re about to get worse. Where are you, Butler? Why aren’t you here?
CHAPTER 4
FLOYD’S STAG NIGHT
Cancún, Mexico; The Night Before
Butler had an excuse for not being in Iceland that would hold up in any court of law and possibly even on a note for teacher. In fact, he had a number of excuses.
One: his employer and friend had sent him away on a rescue mission that had turned out to be a trap. Two: his sister had been in fake trouble, whereas now she was in very real trouble. And three: he was being chased around a theater in Mexico by a few thousand wrestling fans, who at this moment looked very much like zombies, without the rotting limbs.
Butler had read in the entertainment section of his in-flight magazine that vampires had been all the rage, but this year zombies were in.
They’re certainly in here, thought Butler. Far too many of them.
Strictly speaking, zombies wasn’t an accurate description of the mass of mindless humans milling about in the theater. They were of course mesmerized, which is not the same thing at all. The generally accepted definition of a zombie is: a reanimated corpse with a taste for human brains. The mesmerized wrestling fans were not dead and had no desire to sniff anyone’s brains, never mind take a bite out of them. They were converging on the aisle from all sides, cutting off any possible escape routes, and Butler was forced to back up over the collapsed ring and onto the wrestling platform. This retreat would not have made the top one hundred on his list of preferred options, but at this stage, any action that granted a few more heartbeats was preferable to standing still and accepting one’s fate.
Butler slapped his sister’s thigh, which was easy, as she was still slung over his shoulder.
“Hey,” she complained. “What was that for?”
“Just checking your state of mind.”
“I’m me, okay? Something happened in my brain. I remember Holly and all the other fairies.”
Total recall, Butler surmised. Her encounter with the fairy mesmerist had watered the seed of memory in his sister’s mind, and it had sprawled in there, bringing everything back. It was possible, he supposed, that the strength of this mental chain reaction had obliterated the attempted mesmerization.
“Can you fight?” Juliet swung her legs high, then flipped into a fighting stance.
“I can fight better than you, old-timer.”
Butler winced. Sometimes having a sister two decades younger than oneself meant putting up with a lot of ageist comments.
“My insides are not as old as my outsides, if you must know. Those Fairy People you are just now remembering gave me an overhaul. They took fifteen years off, and I have a Kevlar chest. So I can look after myself, and you, if need be.”
As they bantered, the siblings automatically swiveled so they were back to back and covering each other. Butler talked to let his sister know that he was hopeful they could escape from this. Juliet responded to show her big brother that she was not afraid so long as they stood side by side. Neither of these unspoken messages was true, exactly, but they gave a modicum of comfort.
The mesmerized wrestling fans were having a little trouble negotiating the wrestling platform, and their packed bodies clogged the ringside like sticks in a dam. When one did manage to climb up, Butler tossed him or her back out as gently as possible. Juliet was not so gentle on her first toss, and Butler definitely heard something snap.
“Easy, sister. These are innocent people. Their brains have been hijacked.”
“Oops, sorry,” said Juliet, not sounding in the least penitent, and rammed the heel of her hand into the solar plexus of someone who was probably a soccer mom when not mesmerized.
Butler sighed. “Like this,” he said patiently. “Watch. You pick them up and just slide them out over the top of their friends. Minimum impact.” He performed the move a few times just to give Juliet the idea.
Juliet jettisoned a drooling teenager. “Better?”
“Much.” Butler jerked a thumb at the screen overhead. “That fairy has mesmerized everyone who looked into his eyes and heard his voice. It’s not their fault they’re attacking us.”
Juliet almost looked upward, but stopped herself in time. On screen, the red eyes still burned, and over the speaker system that soft hypnotic voice flowed through the crowd like warm honey, telling them everything would be all right if they could just kill the princess and the bear. If they could perform that one simple act, all their dreams would come true. The voice affected the Butlers, made their sense of purpose a little mushy, but without eye contact it could not control their actions.
More of the crowd was making it onto the stage now, and it was only a matter of seconds before the platform collapsed.
“We need to shut that guy up,” shouted Butler over the rising hubbub of mesmerized moaning. “Can you reach the screen?”
Juliet squinted, measuring the distance. “I can reach the gantry if you give me a little height.”
Butler patted one of his broad shoulders. “Climb aboard, little sister.”
“Just a sec,” said Juliet, dispatching a bearded cowboy with a roundhouse kick. She climbed up Butler’s frame with the agility of a monkey and stood on his shoulders. “Okay, boost me.”
Butler grunted a grunt that any family member could interpret as Hold on a moment, and with Juliet balanced overhead, he punched one of the support wrestlers in the windpipe, and swept another’s legs from under him.
Those two were twins, he realized. And dressed as Tasmanian devils. This is the strangest fight I have ever been in, and I’ve tangled with trolls.
“Here we go,” he said to Juliet, sidestepping a man in a hot-dog costume. Butler wiggled his fingers under her toes.
“Can you lift me?” asked his sister, keeping her balance with the ease of an Olympic gymnast, which Juliet might have been if she could have woken up in time for the early morning training sessions.
“Of course I can lift you,” snapped Butler, who might have been an Olympic weightlifter if he hadn’t been battling goblins in an underground laboratory when the last trials were on.
He sucked in a breath through his nose, tightened his core, and then with a burst of explosive power and a growl that would not have sounded out of place in a Tarzan movie, he thrust his baby sister straight up toward the twenty-foot-tall metal gantry supporting the screen and a pair of conical speakers.
There was no time to check if Juliet had made it, as the zombies had formed a body ramp, and the wrestling fans of Cancún were pouring onto the stage, all determined to kill Butler slowly and painfully.
Right now would have been a prudent time to have activated the jet pack he often wore underneath his jacket, but in the absence of a jet pack, and his jacket, Butler thought it might be an idea to increase the aggression of his defense, enough to buy himself and Juliet a few more seconds.
He stepped forward to meet the throng, using an adapted form of tai chi to tumble the front row back into the crowd, building a mountain of bodies the mesmerized fans would have to climb over. Which worked fine for about half a minute until half of the stage collapsed, allowing the unconscious bodies to roll off and form an effective ramp for the wrestling fans to climb. The injured fans seemed not to feel any pain and climbed instantly to their feet, often walking on twisted and swollen ankles.
The drones flowed onto the stage with only one desire in their hijacked minds.
Kill Crazy Bear.
It’s hopeless, thought Butler, for the first time in his life. Utterly hopeless.
He didn’t go down easy, but go down he did under the sheer weight of bodies flowing over him. His face was smooshed by back fat, and he felt teeth close around his ankle. Punches were thrown, but they were badly aimed and weak.
I am going to be crushed to death, Butler realized. Not beate
n.
This realization didn’t make him feel any better. What did make him feel better was the fact that Juliet should be safe on the gantry.
Butler fell back, like Gulliver dragged down by the lilliputians. He could smell popcorn and beer, deodorant and sweat. His chest was pressed and tight, breath came hard. Someone wrestled with one of his boots for some reason, and suddenly he could not move. He was a prisoner under the sheer weight of bodies.
Artemis is alone. Juliet will know to take my place as his bodyguard.
Lack of oxygen turned the world black, and it was as much as Butler could do to shove his arm through the mass of bodies smothering him, and wiggle his fingers good-bye to his sister.
Someone bit his thumb.
Then he disappeared utterly, and the fairy on the screen laughed.
Juliet hooked two fingers of her left hand around the bottom lip of a gantry beam and pressed down so hard that she could almost feel her fingerprints. For ninety-nine percent of the world’s population, two fingers would simply not be enough to bear one’s own bodyweight. Most mere mortals would need a strong two-handed grip to keep them up for no more than a minute, and there is a large percentage of people who couldn’t hoist themselves aloft with anything short of a winch system and a couple of trained shire horses. But Juliet was a Butler and had been trained at Madame Ko’s Personal Protection Agency, where there had been an entire semester devoted to body-weight vectors. In a pinch, Juliet could keep herself off the ground using only a single toe, so long as no passing mischief-maker decided to tickle her in the weak spot under her rib cage.
While it is one thing to hold oneself aloft, it is quite another to hoist oneself upward, but fortunately Madame Ko had put a few seminars into that too. That is not to say it was easy, and Juliet imagined her muscles screaming as she swung her other hand about for a better grip, then hauled herself on to the beam. On another day, she would have paused to allow her heart to slow down a little, but from the corner of her eye she saw her brother about to be engulfed by wrestling fans, and decided that this was not the day for leisurely recuperation.