“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.