The Last Guardian

by Eoin Colfer

  My gods, could that really be over two hundred years ago now? Time flies faster than wind through a bum flap, as Grandmother used to say, bless her.

  He’d been on a job with his cousin Nord, on Haven’s moneyed mountain, when the homeowner had come home unexpectedly from the convention in Atlantis where he was supposed to be living it up on taxpayers’ gold for two more days.

  I hate it when they come home early, thought Mulch. Why do people do that when there’s a very good chance they will find burglars in their living rooms?

  Anyway, the homeowner happened to be ex–law enforcement and the registered owner of a buzz baton, which he had used on the dwarf cousins with great gusto. Nord managed to escape into their tunnel, but Mulch had been forced to clutch his heart, faking a cardiac, and then crash through a window, playing dead all the way down to the river below.

  Corpsing was the hard part, remembered Mulch. There is nothing more unnatural than keeping your arms slack when they want to be pinwheeling.

  LEP had interviewed the ex–law enforcement homeowner, who had emphatically claimed: Yeah, I killed him. It was an accident, of course. I only meant to maim that dwarf, then kick him senseless; but you can put that sucker down as dead. Nobody can corpse for three stories.

  And so Mulch Diggums was declared deceased for the first time. There would be twelve more official occasions on which people mistakenly thought Mulch had flown the final coop; and he was, unbeknownst to himself, tunneling toward an unofficial one at this very moment.

  His instructions were simple enough. Dig a parallel tunnel to the one he had recently collapsed, sneak into the crashed Cupid, and then steal any weapons that were in the locker. Dig, sneak, and steal. Three of Mulch’s four favorite verbs.

  I do not know why I am doing this, Mulch thought as he tunneled. I should be heading down to the crust to find myself a nice crevice. They say that Opal’s death wave will only kill humans, but why take such irresponsible chances with the great gift of life?

  Mulch knew that this reasoning was a crock of troll patties, but he found he could dig better if he was annoyed, even if he was the object of his own annoyance. And so the dwarf fumed silently as he churned up through the earth toward the shuttle wreck.

  Twenty feet up and thirty yards to the south, Opal Koboi was sinking her hands into the deep algebraic enchantments of the second Berserker lock. Symbols wrapped themselves like glowworms around her fingers and surrendered their power one by one as she discovered their secrets. Some could be beaten into submission by the sheer force of her black magic, but others had to be coaxed with sly hexes or magical tickles.

  I am close, she thought. I can feel the earth’s strength.

  The wave of death would be in the form of geothermal energy, she presumed, and would be drawn from the entire planet’s resources and not just the shallow hydrothermal reservoirs. This would put quite a dent in the world’s reserves and could theoretically plunge Earth into another ice age.

  We’ll survive, she thought callously. I have some nice heated boots in storage.

  The work was challenging but manageable, and it gave Opal some satisfaction to know that she was the only fairy alive who had done enough research on the intricacies of ancient magicks to open the second lock. The first had been simple—that had required little more than a blast of black magic—but the second needed an encyclopedic knowledge of spell craft.

  That techno-fool Foaly would never have managed this. Not in a million years.

  Opal was not aware of it, but so self-satisfied was she at that moment that she rolled her shoulders and made a purring noise.

  Everything is going so well.

  This plan had been outlandish even by her standards; but unlikely or not, all the elements were falling into place. Her initial thought had been to sacrifice her younger self and use the ill-gotten power to escape from the Deeps. It then occurred to her that this power would have to be jettisoned almost immediately to prevent it from eating her alive—so why not put it to good use?

  Opportunity had presented itself to Opal when her younger self had made telepathic contact.

  One morning Opal had been deep in a cleansing coma and—ping!—suddenly there was a voice in her head, calling her Sister and asking for help. It had occurred to her briefly that she could in fact be insane but, little by little, the information filtered through. A younger Opal had followed Artemis Fowl from the past.

  I have no memory of this, Opal realized. Therefore, my younger self must have been captured and sent back with these events wiped from her mind.

  Unless…

  Unless the time line had split. Then anything was possible.

  Opal was surprised to find her younger self a little whiny, even boring. Had she really been so self-absorbed?

  It’s all me me me, thought Opal. I injured my leg in the explosion. My magic is fading. I need to get back to my own time.

  None of this was in the least helpful to Opal stuck in her prison.

  What you need to do is get me out of here, she broadcast to her younger self. Then we can see to your injuries and send you home.

  But how to accomplish this? That darned centaur Foaly had incarcerated her in the most technologically advanced cell in the world.

  The answer was simple: I have to force them to release me because the alternative would be simply too horrible to even contemplate.

  Opal wrestled with the problem for several minutes before she accepted that the younger Opal would have to be sacrificed, and once that piece of the puzzle had clunked into place, she quickly built the rest of the plan around it.

  Pip and Kip were two sleeper gnomes who worked in the civil service. The Council had sent them to do an audit of one of her factory’s accounts a few years ago, and Opal had hypnotized them using forbidden runes and dark magic. All it took was a phone call from young Opal to activate their loyalty even at the cost of one or both of their lives. She broadcast instructions to young Opal, telling her exactly how to set up the fake kidnapping and telling her how to use the traces of dark magic still left in her system to find the legendary Berserker Gate. The gate was the way back to the past—or at least that was the story Opal sent out.

  Younger Opal could not know, but the instructions for Pip and Kip were very specific for a reason. Hidden inside the words was a simple code that Opal had implanted along with their loyalty bonds. If young Opal had thought to write down all the letters that corresponded to prime numbers, she would have found a far more sinister message than the one she thought she was delivering:

  Kill the hostage when time runs out.

  You had to keep it simple for civil servants.

  Everything had worked out exactly as she had foreseen, except for the arrival of Fowl and Short. But in a way, that too was a stroke of good fortune. Now she could kill them up close and personal.

  Every cloud has a silver lining.

  Suddenly Opal felt her stomach churn as a wave of nausea assailed her. The pixie’s first thought was that the black magic was struggling with her own antibodies, but then she realized that the source was external.

  Something offends my enhanced magical senses, she thought. Something over there.

  The wrecked shuttle stood beyond the circle of warriors that stood guard over their queen.

  Below the shuttle. Something is coated in a substance that sickens me.

  It was that cursed dwarf, sticking his bum flap in where it didn’t belong, and not for the first time.

  Opal scowled. How many times must she bear humiliation from a flatulent dwarf? It was intolerable.

  Sent to retrieve weapons from the ship, no doubt.

  Opal raised her gaze fifteen degrees to the shuttle. Crushed though the Cupid was, her sixth sense could see an aura of magic winding around the fuselage like a fat snake. This particular wavelength would not help to open the second lock, but it could certainly provide enough juice for an extremely visible demonstration of her power.

  Opal withdrew a hand
from the sluggishly heaving rock and formed the fingers into a claw, arranging the molecules to attract any energy inside the Cupid. The power left the vehicle in a glowing morass, shrinking the Cupid to a wizened wreck and hovering in the air over the awed Berserkers.

  “See what your queen can accomplish!” she cried, eyes bright. Her tiny fingers twirled, manipulating the energy into a sharp wedge, which she sent crashing through the earth to where the dwarf labored. There was a solid thump, and a spume of dirt and rocks jetted skyward, leaving a scorched crater in their wake.

  Opal returned her attention to the second lock.

  “Can you see the dwarf?” she asked Oro, who stood peering into the hole.

  “I see one foot and some blood. The foot is jittering about, so he’s still alive. I’ll go and bring him up.”

  “No,” said Opal. “You do not leave Mommy’s sight. Send the earth creatures to kill him.”

  If the fairy bonds had not had Oro’s free will in such a tight bind, he would have taken Opal to task for repeatedly disrespecting her elders; but as it was, even the thought of reprimanding his queen cost him a severe stomach cramp.

  When the pain passed, he raised two fingers to his lips to whistle for his diggers. He found out that it was not an easy thing to whistle with strange fingers, and all that emerged from his mouth was a watery slobbering noise.

  “Don’t know that signal, chief,” said Yezhwi Khan, who had once been a pretty handy ax gnome. “Is that lunch break?”

  “No!” shouted Oro. “I need my diggers. Gather ’round.”

  A dozen rabbits hopped quickly to bunch at his feet. Their little whiskers quivered with anticipation of finally seeing some action.

  “Get the dwarf,” Oro ordered. “I would say bring him back alive, but you do not really have the skills for parlay.”

  The rabbits thumped their hind legs in agreement.

  “So the order is simple,” said Oro, with a touch of regret. “Kill him.”

  The rabbits piled en masse into the hole, eagerly scrabbling toward the injured dwarf.

  Death by bunny, thought Oro. Not a nice way to go.

  Oro did not wish to look. Dwarfs were part of the fairy world, and in other circumstances they could have been allies. From behind him he heard the crunch of bone and the rattled whoosh of earth collapsing.

  Oro shuddered. He would face a troll any day before a bunch of carnivorous rabbits.

  On the dais, Opal felt a load lift from her heart as another enemy suffered.

  Soon it will be your turn to suffer, Foaly, she thought. But death would be too easy for you. Perhaps you are already suffering. Perhaps your lovely wife has already opened the gift my little gnomes sent to her.

  Opal sang a little ditty as she worked on the second lock.

  “Hey, hey, hey,

  This is the day,

  Things are gonna go my way.”

  Opal was not consciously aware of it, but this was a popular song from the Pip and Kip show.

  Haven City, the Lower Elements

  Things were as grim as they had ever been in Haven City. Even the groups of empath elves, who could clearly perceive residual images from bygone millennia, and who liked to lecture school fairies on how life was a bucket of sweet chilies compared to how it used to be in the prospecting days, had to admit that this was the darkest day in Haven’s history.

  The citizens of Haven were weathering their darkest night, made darker still by the absence of main power, which meant the only lights were the emergency lamps powered by the old geothermal generators. Dwarf spit had suddenly become a very valuable commodity, and many of Mulch’s relatives could be seen roving the refugee camp that had sprung up around the statue of Frond, selling jars of luminous spit for an ingot or two.

  The LEP were coping the best they could, working in most cases with limited equipment. The main problem was coordination. The net of cameras and wireless hubs suspended on gossamer wire from the cavern ceiling had been upgraded three years previously with lenses from Koboi Labs. The entire network had caught fire and rained down on the citizens of Haven, branding many of them with a lattice of scars. This meant that the LEP were operating without intelligence, and relying on old radios for audio communication. Some of the younger police officers had never been in the field without full support from their precious helmets and were feeling a little exposed without constant updates of information from Police Plaza.

  Fifty percent of the force was currently committed to fighting a huge fire at Koboi Labs, which had been taken over by the Krom automobile company. The explosion and subsequent fire had collapsed a large section of the underground cavern, and a pressure leak was barely being contained by plasti-gel cannons. The LEP had bulldozed through the rubble and bolstered the roof with pneumatic columns, but the fire was still liquefying the metal struts, and several types of toxic gas were jetting from cylinders around the compound.

  Another ten percent of the officers were rounding up escaped prisoners from Howler’s Peak, which had, until its containment field flickered out, housed most of the criminal goblin kingpins behind Haven’s organized crime syndicates, as well as their enforcers and racketeers. These goblins were now scurrying around the backstreets of goblin town with their subcutaneous sleeper tags not responding to the frantic signals being repeatedly sent from headquarters. A few more-recently tagged goblins were unfortunate enough to have second-generation tags, which exploded inside their scalps, blowing holes in their skulls small enough to plug with a penny but large enough to be fatal to the cold-blooded creatures.

  More of the officers were up to their eyeballs in the miscellaneous rescues, crowd control, and pursuit of opportunistic felons that went with a catastrophe of this magnitude.

  And the rest of the LEP fairies had been put out of action by the explosion of the free cell phones they had recently won in a competition that they couldn’t remember entering—sent, no doubt, by Opal’s minions. In this manner, the evil pixie had managed to take out most of the Council, effectively crippling the People’s government in this time of emergency.

  Foaly and his brainiacs were left in Police Plaza, trying to somehow revive a network that had literally been fried. Commander Kelp had barely paused on his way out the door to issue instructions to the centaur.

  “Just get the tech working,” he said, strapping on a fourth holster. “Quick as you can.”

  “You don’t understand!” Foaly objected.

  Trouble cut him off with a chop of his hand through the air. “I never understand. That’s why we pay you and your dork posse.”

  Foaly objected again. “They are not dorks!”

  Trouble found space for yet another holster. “Really? That guy brings a Beanie Baby to work every day. And your nephew, Mayne, speaks fluent Unicorn.”

  “They’re not all dorks,” said Foaly, correcting himself.

  “Just get this city working again,” said Trouble. “Lives depend on it.”

  Foaly blocked the commander’s way. “You do understand that the old network is vaporized? Are you giving me free rein, to coin an offensive phrase, to do whatever I need to do?”

  Trouble brushed him aside. “Do whatever you need to do.”

  Foaly almost grinned.

  Whatever I need to do.

  Foaly knew that the secret of a successful product launch was often in the name. A catchy name is more likely to pique investors’ curiosity and help the new invention take off, whereas some plodding series of letters and numbers will put everyone to sleep and ensure the product crashes and burns.

  The lab name for Foaly’s latest pet project was Aerial Radiation-Coded Light-Sensitive Surveillance Pterygota 2.0, which the centaur knew had far too many syllables for potential investors. Rich people liked to feel cool, and embarrassing themselves by mispronouncing that mouthful was never going to help them to achieve that; so Foaly nicknamed the little guys ARClights.

  The ARClights were the latest in a series of experimental bio-mech organi
sms that Foaly was convinced were the future of technology. The centaur had met considerable resistance from the Council on ethical grounds because he was marrying technology to living beings, even though he argued that most of the LEP officers now had little chips implanted in their cerebellums to help them control their helmets. The Council’s counter-argument was that the officers could choose whether or not to have the implants, whereas Foaly’s little experiments were grown that way.

  And so, Foaly had not been given the go-ahead for public trials. Which is not to say that he hadn’t conducted any. He just hadn’t released his precious ARClights in public, not in the fairy public, at any rate. On the Fowl Estate—now, that was another matter.

  The entire ARClight project was contained in a single battered field kit case hidden in plain view on top of a locker in the lab. Foaly reared up on his hind legs to snag the case and plonked it down on his workstation.

  His nephew, Mayne, clopped up behind him to see what was going on.

  “Dung navarr, Oncle?” he said.

  “No unicorn-speak today, Mayne,” said Foaly, settling into his modified office harness. “I don’t have time.”

  Mayne folded his arms. “The unicorns are our cousins, Uncle. We should respect their tongue.”

  Foaly moved closer to the case so the scanner could identify him and pop the locks.

  “I do respect the unicorns, Mayne. But real unicorns cannot talk. That gibberish you’re spouting came from a miniseries.”

  “Written by an empath,” said Mayne pointedly.

  Foaly opened the case. “Listen, nephew, if you want to strap a horn to your forehead and go to conventions on the weekends, that’s completely fine. But today I need you in this universe. Understood?”

  “Understood,” said Mayne, grumpily. His mood lifted when he saw what was in the case. “Are those Critters?”

  “No,” said Foaly. “Critters are microorganisms. These are ARClights. The next generation.”

  Mayne remembered something. “You were refused permission for trials with those, weren’t you?”