The Last Guardian

by Eoin Colfer

  It irritated Foaly immensely that a centaur of his genius was being forced to justify himself to an assistant for the sake of relations with his sister.

  “I got permission just now, from Commander Kelp. It’s all on video.”

  “Wow,” said Mayne. “In that case, let’s see those little fellows in action.”

  Maybe he’s not so bad, thought Foaly, keying in the activation code on an old-fashioned manual keyboard in the case.

  Once the code was punched in, the case synched with the lab’s wall screen, splitting it into a dozen blank boxes. This was nothing particularly special, and would have absolutely no one clapping their hands and saying Ooooh. What would have people applauding and gushing was the swarm of miniature genetically modified dragonflies waking up inside the case. The insects shook their sleepy heads and set their wings buzzing, then lifted off in perfect synchronized formation to hover at Foaly’s eye level.

  “Oooh,” said Mayne, clapping his hands.

  “Just wait,” said Foaly, activating the little dragonflies’ sensors. “Prepare to be amazed.”

  The cloud of dragonflies jittered as though suddenly charged, and their tiny eyes glowed green. Eleven of the twelve onscreen boxes displayed composite 3-D views of Foaly, stitched together from the viewpoint of each insect. Not only did the insects read the visible spectrum, but also infrared, UV, and thermal. A constantly updating stream of data scrolled down the side of the screens, displaying reams of information on Foaly’s heart rate, blood pressure, pulse, and gas emissions.

  “These little beauties can go anywhere and see everything. They can glean information from every microbe. And all anyone can see is a swarm of dragonflies. My little ARClights could fly through the X-ray in an airport, and no one could tell they are stuffed with bio-tech. They go where I send them, and spy on who I tell them to.”

  Mayne pointed at a corner of the screen. “That section is blank.”

  Foaly harrumphed. “I did a trial in Fowl Manor. And Artemis somehow detected the virtually undetectable. I imagine my beauties are lying in pieces under an electron microscope in his laboratory.”

  “I didn’t read that in any report.”

  “No. I forgot to mention it. That trial wasn’t exactly an unqualified success, but this one will be.”

  Foaly’s fingers were clicking blurs on the keyboard. “Once I program in the mission parameters, then my ARClights will have citywide surveillance restored in minutes.” Foaly instructed a single bug to land on his index finger. “You, my little fellow, are special, because you will be going to my home, just to make sure my beloved Caballine is all right.”

  Mayne leaned in, peering at the little bug. “You can do that?”

  Foaly wiggled his finger, and the bug flew off, winding sideways through a vent.

  “I can do whatever I like. They are even coded to my voice. Watch.” Foaly leaned back in his chair and cleared his throat. “ARClight activation code alpha alpha one. I am Foaly. Foaly is my name. Immediate deployment to downtown Haven. Scenario three. All sections. Citywide disaster. Fly, my pretties, fly.”

  The ARClights moved like a shoal of silver fish through water, gliding through the air in perfect synchronized flight, then forming into a tight cylinder and shooting through the vent. Their wings skittered against the chute wall, sending back data from every inch covered.

  The theatricality appealed to Mayne’s graphic novel–loving sensibility.

  “‘Fly, my pretties, fly.’ Cool. Did you make that up yourself?”

  Foaly began analyzing the data that was already flooding in from his ARClights.

  “Absolutely,” he said. “Every word a Foaly original.”

  The ARClights could be steered manually; or, if that function was off-line, they would fly to preordained irradiated spots on the cavern roof. The tiny bio-tech insects performed perfectly, and within minutes Foaly had a functioning network suspended above Haven that could be manipulated with a word or gesture.

  “Now, Mayne,” he said to his nephew. “I want you to take over here and feed information to Commander Kelp over the”—he shuddered—“radio. I am going to take a minute to check on your Aunty Caballine.”

  “Mak dak jiball, Oncle,” said Mayne, saluting. Something else actual unicorns could not do.

  Humans have a saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which basically means if you think it’s beautiful, then it is beautiful. The elfin version of this saying was composed by the great poet B.O. Selecta, who said: Even the plainest of the plain shall deign to reign, which critics have always thought was a bit rhymey. The dwarf version of the maxim is: If it don’t stink, marry it, which is slightly less romantic, but the general gist is the same.

  Foaly had no need of these sayings, for in his mind beauty was personified by his wife, Caballine. If anyone had ever asked him for a definition of beauty, he would simply have directed their gaze to his wrist, and then activated the hologram crystal built into his wrist computer, projecting a revolving CG rendering of his wife into midair.

  Foaly was so in love with his wife that he sighed whenever Caballine crossed his mind, which was several times an hour. As far as the centaur was concerned, he had found his soul mate.

  Love had tugged Foaly’s fetlock relatively late in life. When all the other centaurs had been galloping around the sim-pasture, pawing the dirt, texting the fillies, and sending their chosen ones candied carrots, Foaly had been up to his armpits in laboratory equipment, trying to get his radical inventions out of his head and into the real world. By the time he realized that love might be passing him by, it had already disappeared over the horizon. So the centaur convinced himself that he didn’t need companionship and was content to live for his job and work friends.

  Then, when Holly Short was missing in another dimension, he met Caballine at Police Plaza. At least that was what he told everyone. Met might be a slightly misleading verb, as it implies that the situation was pleasant, or at least nonviolent. What actually happened was that one of Foaly’s face-recognition software programs malfunctioned in a bank camera and identified Caballine as a goblin bank robber. She was immediately pounced on by the security guard jumbo pixies and ridden to Police Plaza. The ultimate ignominy for a centaur.

  By the time the entire mess was traced back to software error, Caballine had been confined to a gel cell for over three hours. She had missed her mother’s birthday party and was extremely anxious to throttle the person responsible for the mix-up. Foaly was told by Commander Kelp in no uncertain terms to get down to the holding cells and take responsibility for his foul-up.

  Foaly trudged down there, ready to spout one of a dozen standard excuses, all of which evaporated when he came face-to-face with Caballine in the hospitality suite. Foaly didn’t meet many centaurs, and he certainly would never bump into one as beautiful as Caballine, with her chestnut eyes, strong wide nose, and glossy hair down to her waist.

  “Just my luck,” he blurted, without thinking. “That’s just typical of my luck.”

  Caballine had herself all psyched up to tear metaphorical strips off the hide of whatever imbecile had been responsible for her incarceration—and perhaps actual strips, too—but Foaly’s reaction gave her pause, and she decided to give him one chance to dig himself out of the hole he was in.

  “What is just typical of your luck?” she said, regarding him frankly, letting him know that his answer better be a good one.

  Foaly knew the pressure was on and so thought carefully before answering.

  “It’s just typical of my luck,” he said eventually, “that I finally meet someone as beautiful as you, and all you want to do is kill me.”

  This was a pretty good line, and, judging by the misery in Foaly’s eyes, there was also more than a grain of truth in it.

  Caballine decided to take pity on the dejected centaur before her and dial down her antagonism a few notches, but it was too early to let Foaly off the hook completely.

  “And why wouldn�
��t I want to kill you? You think I look like a criminal.”

  “I don’t think that. I would never think that.”

  “Really? Because the algorithm that identified me as a goblin bank robber is based on your thought patterns.”

  This lady is smart, Foaly realized. Smart and gorgeous.

  “True,” he said. “But I imagine there were secondary factors involved.”

  “Such as?”

  Foaly decided to go for broke. He felt an attraction toward this centaur that was short-circuiting his brain. The closest he could come to describing the sensation was a sustained low-level electrical shock, like the ones he inflicted on volunteers in his sleep-deprivation experiments.

  “Such as, my machine is incredibly stupid, because you are the opposite of a goblin bank robber.”

  Caballine was amused but not won over just yet.

  “Which is?”

  “Which is a non-goblin customer making a deposit.”

  “Which is what I am, dummy.”

  Foaly flinched. “What?”

  “Dummy. Your machine is a dummy.”

  “Yes. Absolutely. I will have it disassembled immediately and reassembled as a toaster.”

  Caballine bit her lip and could have conceivably been holding back a smile.

  “That’s a start. But you still have a long way to go before we’re done here.”

  “I understand. If you have any capital crimes in your past, I could wipe them from your record. In fact, if you’d like to disappear altogether, I could arrange that.” Foaly rethought this last sentence. “That sounded like I was going to have you killed, which I totally am not. The last thing I would ever do is have you killed. Quite the opposite.”

  Caballine took her handbag from the back of a chair and slung it across her fringed blouse. “You are quite fond of opposites, Mr. Foaly. What is the opposite of having me killed?”

  Foaly met her gaze for the first time. “Keeping you happy and alive forever.”

  Caballine moved to leave, and Foaly thought, Stupid donkey. You blew it.

  But she stopped at the threshold and threw Foaly a lifeline.

  “I do have a parking ticket that I did pay, but your machines seem to have it in for me, and they swear I didn’t. You could have a look at that.”

  “No problem,” said Foaly. “Consider it done and that machine compacted.”

  “I’m going to tell all my friends about this,” said Caballine, already leaving the room, “when I see them at the Hoovre Gallery launch this weekend. Do you like art, Mr. Foaly?”

  Foaly stood there for a full minute after she was gone, staring at the spot where Caballine’s head had been when she’d last spoke. Later on, he had to rewind the suite’s surveillance footage to make sure Caballine had kind of, sort of, asked him on a date.

  And now they were married, and Foaly considered himself the luckiest dummy in the world and, even though the city was mired in a crisis the likes of which had never before been visited on the subterranean metropolis, he had no hesitation in taking a moment to check on his gorgeous wife, who would probably be at this moment at home worrying about him.

  Caballine, he thought, I will be with you soon.

  Since their wedding ritual, Foaly and his wife had shared a mental bond like the one often experienced by twins.

  I know she is alive, he thought.

  But that was all he knew. She could be hurt, trapped, distressed, or in danger. Foaly did not know. And he had to know.

  The ARClight Foaly had dispatched to check on Caballine had been built especially for that purpose and knew exactly where to go. Foaly had months ago painted a corner of the kitchen ceiling with a laser that would attract the bug from hundreds of miles away if need be.

  Foaly shunted the other ARClight feeds to the main situation room, where Mayne could monitor them, and then concentrated on Caballine’s bug.

  Fly, my pretty. Fly.

  The modified dragonfly zipped through Police Plaza’s vent system and out over the city, darting through the chaos that permeated the streets and buildings. Fires flared in the piazza and on the freeway. The billboards that lined every street had been reduced to carbonized frames, and floodwater filled the sunken open-air amphitheater as far as Row H.

  Mayne can handle that for five minutes, thought Foaly. I am coming, Caballine.

  The ARClight buzzed beyond the central plaza to the southern suburb, which had more of a rural feel. Genetically modified trees grew in small copses, and there were even controlled amounts of woodland creatures that were carefully monitored and released aboveground when they multiplied to nuisance levels. The dwellings here were modest, less modern in their architecture, and outside the evacuation zone. Foaly and Caballine lived in a small split-level with adobe walls and curved windows. The color scheme was autumnal throughout, and the décor had always been a little back to nature for Foaly’s taste, though he would never have dreamed of mentioning it.

  Foaly pulled his V-board toward him and expertly controlled the little bug with numerical coordinates, though it would have been easier to use a joystick, or even voice control. It was ironic that someone who was responsible for so many technological breakthroughs still preferred to use an ancient virtual keyboard that he had made from a window frame when he was in college.

  The top half of the door was ajar, and so Foaly had his ARClight dip inside the lobby, which was decorated with woven wall hangings depicting great moments in centaurian history, such as the discovery of fire by King Thurgood, and the accidental discovery of penicillin by the stable hand Shammy Sod, whose name had entered the popular vernacular to mean an extremely lucky person, for example: He’s won the lottery for the second time, the shammy sod.

  The dragonfly whirred along the corridor to find Caballine sitting on her yoga blanket, staring at the cell phone in her hand. She looked shaken but unhurt, and was scrolling through the menus on her screen, looking for a network.

  You will have no luck there, my love, thought Foaly, then sent a text to her phone directly from the ARClight.

  There’s a little dragonfly watching over you, said the text. Caballine read it and raised her face, searching for the bug. Foaly set the eyes flashing green to help her. Foaly’s wife raised her hand, and the bug swooped down to land on her finger.

  “My clever husband,” she said, smiling. “What is happening to our city?”

  Foaly sent another message, and made a mental note to add a voice box to the next version of the ARClights.

  You are safe at home. We have had some major explosions, but all is under control.

  Caballine nodded. “Will you be home soon?” she asked the bug.

  Not soon. It could be a long night.

  “Don’t worry, honey. I know they need you. Is Holly okay?”

  I don’t know. We’ve lost contact, but if anyone can look after herself, it’s Holly Short.

  Caballine lifted her finger and the dragonfly hovered before her face. “You need to look after yourself, too, Mr. Technical Consultant.”

  I will, texted Foaly.

  Caballine took a ribboned box from the low table. “While I’m waiting for you, I will open this lovely gift that someone sent to me, you romantic centaur.”

  Back in the lab, Foaly felt a stab of jealousy. A gift? Who would have sent a present? His jealousy was quickly trumped by anxiety. After all, this was the day of Opal Koboi’s great revenge, and there was no one the pixie hated more than him.

  Don’t open it, he sent quickly. I did not send it, and bad things are happening.

  But Caballine did not need to open the box, for it was both time- and DNA-coded, and as soon as she touched it, the omni-sensor on the side scanned her finger and set the opening mechanism whirring. The lid pinged away from the box, spinning away to slap the wall, and inside was…nothing. Literally nothing. A black absence that seemed to repel ambient light.

  Caballine peered into the box. “What is this?” she asked. “One of your gizmos?”
r />   Which was as much as Foaly heard, because the blackness—or whatever it was—shorted out the ARClight, leaving Foaly ignorant as to his wife’s fate.

  “No!” he blurted. “No. No.”

  Something was happening. Something sinister. Opal had decided to target Caballine specifically to torture him. He was sure of it. The pixie’s accomplice, whoever it was, had mailed his wife this seemingly innocuous box, but it was far from harmless; Foaly would bet his two hundred plus patents on it.

  What has she done?

  The centaur agonized over the question for about five seconds, until Mayne stuck his head into the room.

  “We have something from the ARClights. I think I should push it across to your screens.”

  Foaly stamped a hoof. “Not now, stupid pony. Caballine is in danger.”

  “You need to see this,” said Mayne, standing his ground.

  Something in his nephew’s tone, a bite of steel that hinted at the centaur this boy would become, made Foaly look up. “Very well. Shunt it across.”

  The screens immediately came to life with overhead shots of Haven from dozens of angles. Each shot was black and white except for clusters of red dots.

  “The dots are the escaped goblin sleeper/seekers,” explained Mayne. “The ARClights can detect their radiation signatures but not activate them.”

  “But this is good news,” said Foaly irritably. “Send the coordinates to the agents on the ground.”

  “They were moving randomly, but seconds ago they all changed direction, at exactly the same time.”

  Foaly knew then what Opal had done, how her weapon had gotten past the courier’s security scans. She had used a sonix bomb.

  “And they’re headed for my house,” he said.

  Mayne swallowed. “Exactly. Just as fast as they can run. The first group will arrive in less than five minutes.”

  At this point Mayne was talking to thin air, as Foaly had already galloped out through the side door.

  Fowl Manor

  Myles Fowl sat behind Artemis’s desk in the mini office chair that his big brother had given to him as a birthday present. Artemis claimed it was custom-built, but actually the chair came from Elf Aralto, the famous design store that specialized in beautiful yet practical furniture for elves.