by Eoin Colfer
Something had been puzzling No1. “Aren’t you a little young to be studying other species? And you’re a girl, too. That pony offer made by the magic voice box sounded pretty good.”
Minerva had obviously come across this attitude before. “Times are changing, demon,” she snapped. “Children are a lot smarter than they used to be. We’re writing books, mastering computers, tearing apart scientific myths. Did you know that most scientists won’t even acknowledge the existence of magic? Once you add magic into the energy equation, nearly all the current laws of physics are shown to be seriously flawed.”
“I see,” said No1, not convincing anyone.
“I am exactly the right age for this project,” added Minerva. “I am young enough to believe in magic, and old enough to understand how it works. When I present you in Stockholm, and we put forward our thesis on time travel and magic as elemental energy, it will be a historic moment. The world will have to take magic seriously, and make ready for the invasion!”
“There is no invasion,” protested No1.
Minerva smiled, as a kindergarten teacher would at a fibbing child. “I know all about it. Once Abbot’s warrior personality became dominant, he told us about the Battle of Taillte and how the demons would return and wage a terrible war with the Mud Men, as he called us. There was a lot of blood and hacking of limbs involved.”
No1 nodded. That sounded like Abbot.
“That’s what Abbot believed, but things have changed.”
“I explained that to him. I explained that he had been flitting through time and space for ten thousand years, and that we had come a long way since then. There are more of us than there used to be, and we didn’t use crossbows anymore.”
“You didn’t? You don’t?”
“You saw Mr. Kong’s gun. That’s only a tiny example of the kind of weaponry we have. Even if your entire pride of demons arrived all together, armed to the teeth, it would take about ten minutes to have you all locked up.”
“Is that what you’re going to do? Lock us up?”
“That was the plan, yes,” admitted Minerva. “As soon as Abbot realized that the demons could never beat us, he changed his tactics. He voluntarily explained the mechanics of the time tunnel to me, and in return I gave him books to read and old weapons to examine. After a few days’ reading, he asked to be called Abbot, after General Leon Abbot in the book. I knew that once I presented Leon Abbot in Stockholm, it would be easy to get funding for an international task force. Whenever a demon popped up, we could tag him with silver and house him in an artificial demon community for study. The Central Park Zoo was my preferred location.”
No1 ran the word “zoo” through his new lexicon. “Aren’t zoos for animals?”
Minerva gazed at her feet. “Yes. I am rethinking that, especially having met you. You seem quite civilized, not like that Abbot person. He was an animal. When he arrived, we tended his wounds, nursed him back to health, and all he could do was try to eat us, so we had no choice but to restrain him.”
“So you’re not going to lock us up in a zoo anymore?”
“Actually, I don’t have a choice. Judging by my calculations, the time tunnel is unraveling at both ends and deteriorating along the shaft. Soon, any calculations will be unreliable, and it will be impossible to predict where or when demons will materialize. I’m afraid, No1, that your pride doesn’t have long left before it disappears altogether.”
No1 was stunned. This was more information than anyone could absorb in one day. For some reason the demoness with the red markings flashed into his mind. “Isn’t there any way to help? We are intelligent beings, you know. Not animals.”
Minerva stood and paced, stretching one of her corkscrew curls.
“I have been giving this some thought. There’s nothing that can be done without magic, and Abbot told me the warlocks all died in the transition.”
“It’s true,” said No1. He did not mention that he might be a warlock himself. Something told him that this was valuable information, and it was not a good idea to reveal too much valuable information to a person who had tied you to a chair. He had said too much already.
“Maybe if Abbot had known about the time spell, he wouldn’t have been so eager to get back to Hybras,” mused Minerva. “Papa told him that there was a silver chip in his arm, and that very night he dug it out with his nails and disappeared. We have the whole thing on tape. I have wondered every day if he’d managed to make it home.”
“He made it,” said No1. “The time spell took him right back to the beginning. He never said anything about this place. Just turned up with the book and the crossbow, claiming to be our savior. It was all lies.”
“Well then,” sighed Minerva, and she seemed genuinely sorry. “I don’t have a single idea about how to save the pride. Maybe your little friend in the next room can help when she wakes up.”
“What little friend?” asked No1, puzzled.
“The one who knocked out Bobo, my brother. The little creature we captured trying to rescue you,” explained Minerva. “Or more accurately, trying to rescue an empty golf bag. She looks like a magical creature. Maybe she can help.”
Who would want to rescue a golf bag? wondered No1.
The door opened a crack, and Juan Soto’s head appeared in the gap.
“Minerva?”
“Not now,” snapped Minerva, waving at the man to go away.
“There’s a call for you.”
“I’m not available. Take a number.”
The security guard persisted; he stepped into the room, one hand cupped over the mouthpiece of a cordless phone. “I think you might want to talk to this person. He says his name is Artemis Fowl.”
Minerva gave Soto her full attention.
“I’ll take it,” she said, reaching for the phone.
The LEPrecon field helmet is an amazing piece of equipment. The Section 8 field helmet, on the other hand, is a miracle of modern science. To compare the two would be akin to comparing a flintlock to a laser-sighted sniper rifle.
Foaly had taken full advantage of his almost unlimited budget to indulge his every tech-head fantasy and stuff the helmet with every piece of diagnostic, surveillance, defense, and just plain cool equipment he could cram in there.
The centaur was vocally proud of the entire package. But if forced to pick just one add-on to brag about, he would go for the bouncing bags every time.
Bouncing bags in themselves were not a recent addition. Even civilian helmets had gel bags in between their outer and inner shells that provided a bit of extra buffering in case of a crash. But Foaly had replaced the helmet’s rigid outer shell with a more yielding polymer and then swapped the electro-sensitive gel for tiny electro-sensitive beads. The beads could be controlled with electronic pulses to expand, contract, roll, or group, providing the helmet with a simple but highly effective propulsion system.
“This little marvel can’t fly, but it can bounce wherever you want it to,” Foaly had said earlier, when Holly was signing out her equipment. “Only commanders get the flying helmets. I wouldn’t recommend them, though; the engine’s field has been known to straighten perms. Not that I’m saying you have a perm. Or need one, for that matter.”
While No1 was being interrogated by Minerva, Foaly was flexing his fingers over the remote controls for Holly’s Section 8 helmet. At the moment, the helmet was locked in a wire mesh strongbox at the rear of the security office.
Foaly liked to sing a little ditty while he worked. In this instance the song was the Riverbend classic: “If It Looks Like a Dwarf, and Smells Like a Dwarf, Then It’s Probably a Dwarf (Or a Latrine Wearing Dungarees).” This was a relatively short title for a Riverbend song, which was the fairy equivalent of human Country & Western.
“When I got an itch I can’t scratch,
When there’s a slug in my vole stew,
When I got sunburn on my bald patch,
That’s when I remember you…”
Foaly had considerately switched off h
is mike, so Artemis would not have the chance to object to his singing. In fact, he was using an extremely old hardwired antenna to send his signal, in the hope that no one in Police Plaza would pick up on his transmission. Haven City was in lockdown, and that meant no communications with the surface. Foaly was knowingly disobeying Commander Ark Sool’s orders, and he was quite enjoying himself while doing it.
The centaur donned a set of V-goggles through which he could see everything in the helmet’s vista. Not only that, but the goggles’ PIP facility gave him rear and side views from the helmet’s cameras. Foaly already had control of the chateau’s security systems; now he wanted to have a little peek through their computer files, something he could not do from Section 8 HQ, especially not with the LEP waiting to pounce on any signal coming out of the city.
The helmet was naturally equipped with wireless omnisensor capabilities, but the closer he could get to an actual hard drive, the quicker the job could be completed.
Foaly pressed a combination key command on his V-keyboard. To anyone watching, it would have seemed like the centaur was playing an invisible piano, but in fact the V-goggles interpreted the movements as keystrokes. A small laser pencil popped out of a hidden compartment just above the right ear cushion of Holly’s helmet.
Foaly targeted the wire mesh box’s locking mechanism.
“One-second burst. Fire.” Nothing happened, so Foaly swore briefly, turned on his microphone, and tried it again.
“One-second burst. Fire.”
This time, a red beam pulsed from the pencil’s tip, and the lock melted into metallic mush.
Always good to have the equipment switched on, thought Foaly, glad that no one had witnessed his mistake, especially Artemis Fowl.
Foaly targeted a desktop computer at the far side of the office with a glare and three blinks.
“Compute bounce,” he ordered the helmet, and almost immediately an animated dotted arrow appeared on the screen, dipping once to the floor and then rising to the computer desk.
“Execute bounce,” said Foaly, and smiled as his creation rolled into life. The helmet hit the floor with a basketball ping, then bounced across the room, directly onto the computer desk.
“Perfect, you genius,” said Foaly, congratulating himself. Sometimes his own achievements brought a tear to his eye.
I wish Caballine could have seen that, he thought. And then, Wow, I must be getting serious about this girl.
Caballine was a centaur he had bumped into at a gallery downtown. She was a researcher with PPTV by day and a sculptor by night. A very smart lady, and she knew all about Foaly. Apparently, Caballine was a big fan of the mood blanket, a multi-sensor massage and homeopathic garment designed by Foaly specifically for centaurs. So they talked about that for a half hour. One thing led to another, and now he found himself jogging with her every evening. Whenever there wasn’t an emergency.
Which there is now! he reminded himself, turning his attention back to work.
The helmet was sitting next to the human computer keyboard, with its omnisensor pointed directly at the hard drive.
Foaly stared at the hard drive and blinked three times, selecting it on the screen.
“Download all files from this and any networked computers,” instructed the centaur, and the helmet immediately began to suck information from the Apple Mac.
After several seconds, an animated bottle on the V-goggles screen was filled to the brim, and burped. Transfer completed. Now they could find out exactly how much information these humans had, and where they were getting it from. But there was still the matter of back-up files. This group could have burned their information onto CDs, or even sent it by e-mail or stored it on the Internet.
Foaly used the virtual keyboard to open a data-charge folder and send a virus into the human computer. The charge would completely wipe out any computers on the network, but before that, it would run along any Internet pathways explored by these humans and completely burn the sites. Foaly would have liked to have been a bit more delicate about it, and just erase fairy-related files, but he couldn’t afford to take chances with this mysterious group. The mere fact that they had avoided detection for so long was proof that they were not to be trifled with.
This was a major virus to lob into a human system. It would probably crash thousands of sites, including Google and Yahoo, but Foaly didn’t see that he had a choice.
On Foaly’s screen, the data charge appeared as a red flickering flame that chuckled nastily as it dived into the omnisensor’s data stream. In five minutes, the Paradizos’ hard drives would be burned beyond repair. And as an added bonus, the charge would also attach itself to any storage devices within the sensor’s range that bore the network’s signature. So any information stored on CDs or flash drives would disintegrate as soon as someone tried to load them. It was potent stuff, and there wasn’t a firewall or antivirus that could stop it.
Artemis’s voice issued from two gel speakers in jars on the desk, interrupting his concentration.
“There’s a wall safe in the office. It’s where Minerva keeps her notes. You need to burn anything inside it.”
“Wall safe,” replied Foaly. “Let’s see.”
The centaur ran an X-ray scan on the room and found the safe behind a row of shelving. Given the time, he would have liked to have scanned all the contents, but he had a rendezvous to keep. He sent a concentrated laser beam the width of a length of fishing line into the belly of the safe, reducing the contents to ash. Hopefully he was destroying more than the family jewels.
The X-ray scan revealed nothing else promising, so Foaly sent the helmet beads spinning, toppling Holly’s helmet off the desk. In a display of keyboard virtuosity, Foaly used the laser to carve a section from the base of the office door while the helmet was in midair. In two choreographed bounces, the helmet was through the section and into the corridor outside.
Foaly grinned, satisfied.
“Never even touched the wood,” he said.
The centaur called up a blueprint for the Chateau Paradizo and superimposed it over a grid on his screen. There were two dots on the grid. One was the helmet, and the other was Holly. It was time the two were reunited.
As he worked, Foaly unconsciously sang a verse of the Riverbend dirge.
“When my lucky numbers run out of luck,
When I’m stuck in the hole I tumbled into,
When my favorite dawg gets squashed by a truck,
That’s when I think me some thoughts of you.”
On the planet’s surface, Artemis winced as the song twanged through his tiny phone and along his thumb.
“Please, Foaly,” he said in pained tones. “I’m trying to negotiate on the other line.”
Foaly whinnied, surprised. He’d forgotten about Artemis.
“Some people ain’t got no Riverbend in their souls,” he said, switching off his microphone.
Billy Kong decided that he’d have a little word with the new prisoner. The female. If indeed she was female. How was he supposed to know for sure what class of a creature it was? It looked like a girl, but maybe demon girls weren’t the same as human ones. So Billy Kong thought he might ask it what exactly it was, among other things. If the creature decided not to answer, Kong didn’t mind. There were ways to persuade people to talk. Asking them nicely was one way. Giving them candy was another. But Billy Kong preferred torture.
Back in the early eighties, when Billy Kong was still plain old Jonah Lee, he had lived in the California beach town of Malibu with his mother, Annie, and big brother, Eric.
Annie worked two jobs to keep her boys in sneakers, so Jonah got left with Eric in the evenings. That should have worked out fine. Eric was sixteen and old enough to look after his kid brother. But like most sixteen-year-olds, he had more on his mind than little brothers. In fact, babysitting Jonah was seriously interfering with his social life.
The problem was, as Eric saw it, that Jonah was an outdoorsy kind of boy. As soon as Eric took off
to hang out with his friends, Jonah would ignore his big brother’s orders and head out into the California evening. And outdoors in the city was no place for an eight-year-old. So what Eric needed to do was devise a scheme that kept Jonah indoors, and allowed Eric to roam free.
He came upon the perfect strategy quite by accident one night, returning home after a late-night argument with his girlfriend’s other boyfriend and his brothers.
For once, Jonah had not ventured out, and was plonked in front of the TV, watching a horror show on hacked cable. Eric, who had always been impulsive and reckless, had taken to sneaking around with the girlfriend of a local gangster. Now word had leaked out, and the gang was after him. They had roughed him up a bit already, but he had gotten away. He was bloody and tired, but still kind of enjoying himself.
“Lock the doors,” he’d called to his little brother, startling him out of his TV stupor.
Jonah jumped to his feet, eyes widening as he noticed Eric’s bloodied nose and lip.
“What happened to you?”
Eric grinned. He was that kind of person—exhausted, battered, but buzzing with adrenaline.
“I got…There was this bunch of…”
And then he stopped, because the spark of an idea was ricocheting around in his head. He must look pretty beat up. Maybe he could use this to keep little Jonah indoors while Mom was working.
“I can’t tell you,” he said, dragging a smear of blood across his face with one sleeve. “I’ve sworn an oath. Just bolt the doors and close the shutters.”
Usually Jonah didn’t have time for his brother’s theatrics, but tonight there was blood and horror on the TV, and he could hear footsteps pounding up the driveway.
“Dammit, they’ve found me,” swore Eric, peeking through a shutter.
Little Jonah grabbed his brother’s sleeve. “Who’s found you, Eric? You gotta tell me.”
Eric appeared to consider it.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I belong to a…uh…secret society. We fight a secret enemy.”
“What, like a gang?”