“Hello, Commander,” said Artemis. “Nice to be appreciated.”
“I appreciate armpit lice more than I’m ever likely to appreciate you, Fowl. Get over it.”
Artemis could think of half a dozen withering responses to this comment off the top of his head, but he kept these put-downs to himself for the greater good.
I am fifteen now; time to behave maturely.
Holly cut through the male posturing. “Commander, is Atlantis safe?”
“Most of it,” said Trouble. “Half a dozen evac ships took a pasting. One shuttle suffered a direct hit, buried deeper than hell itself. It’s going to take months to put the pieces together.”
Holly’s shoulders drooped. “Casualties?”
“Definitely. We don’t know how many yet, but dozens.” Trouble’s brow was heavy with the weight of command. “It’s a dark day for the People, Captain. First Vinyáya and her troops, now this.”
“What happened?”
Trouble’s gaze shifted to a point off screen as his fingers tapped a V-board. “One of Foaly’s brainers did a simulation. I’m sending it to you now.”
Seconds later, a message icon pulsed on the screen of Foaly’s phone. Holly selected it, and a simple 2-D video played, depicting an outlined probe entering the Earth’s atmosphere over Iceland.
“Can you see that, Captain?”
“Yes, it’s up.”
“Good. Let me talk you through it. So, Foaly’s Martian probe shows up just below the Arctic Circle. We’re taking your word for this since we didn’t detect it, thanks to our own cloaking technology. Shields, stealth ore, all turned against us. I don’t have to tell you what happened next.”
On screen the probe sent a laser burst into a small target on the surface, then jettisoned a few bots to deal with survivors. The craft barely slowed down before plowing through the ice, taking a southwesterly course toward the Atlantic.
“Again, this part of the simulation was done without computer data. We took what you told us and also extrapolated backward from our own readings.”
Artemis interrupted. “You had readings? At what point did you start to get readings?”
“It was the strangest thing,” said Trouble, frowning. “We heeded Captain Short’s warning and ran a scan. Nothing. Then, five minutes later, up the probe pops on our screens. No shields, nothing. In fact, she was blowing heat out the vents, so we couldn’t miss her. She even blew her engine plates off. The thing was shining brighter than the North Star. And just in case we missed it, we got a tip-off from a bar in Miami, of all places. We had time enough to evacuate.”
“But not enough to reach her,” mused Artemis.
“Exactly,” said Trouble Kelp, who wouldn’t have agreed if it had occurred to him that he was agreeing with arch-criminal Artemis Fowl. “All we could do was pump up the water cannons, empty the city, and wait until the probe came into range.”
“And then?” prompted Artemis.
“Then I authorized a few practice shots along the trajectory before the probe was really in range. There shouldn’t have been enough power in them to cause any damage—the water shells dissipate over distance—but one must have held on to a bit of punch, because the probe spun off course and nose-dived straight into the seabed, taking a shuttle down with it.”
“Opal Koboi was on that shuttle, wasn’t she?” said Artemis urgently. “This is all her doing. This reeks of Opal.”
“No, Fowl, if it reeks of anyone, it reeks of you. This all started with your conference in Iceland, and now some of our best people are dead, and we have an underwater rescue mission on our hands.”
Artemis’s face was red. “Forget how you feel about me. Was Opal on the shuttle?”
“She was not,” thundered Trouble, and the pod’s speakers vibrated. “But you were in Iceland, and now you’re here.”
Holly stepped in to defend her friend. “Artemis had nothing to do with this, Commander.”
“That may be, but there are too many coincidences here, Holly. I need you to detain the Mud Boy until I can get a rescue bird up to you. It could be a few hours, so take on some ballast in the tanks and drop your buoyancy a little. You shouldn’t be spotted below the surface.”
Holly was not happy with this course of action. “Sir, Commander, we know what happened. But Artemis is right—we need to think about who made it happen.”
“We can talk about that in Police Plaza. For now, my priority is to keep people alive, simple as that. There are fairies still trapped in Atlantis. Everything watertight we have is headed there right now. We can discuss the Mud Boy’s theories tomorrow.”
“Maybe we can construct a bivouac while we’re at it,” muttered Holly.
Trouble Kelp was not one to swallow insubordination. He leaned close to the camera, his forehead stretching wide in the pinhole lens.
“Did you say something, Captain?”
“Whoever did this is not finished,” said Holly, doing a little leaning in herself. “This is part of a bigger plan, and detaining Artemis is the worst possible thing you could do.”
“Oh, really,” said Trouble, chuckling unexpectedly. “Odd you should say that, because in the message you sent earlier, you commented that Artemis Fowl had lost it. Your exact words were—”
Holly glanced guiltily at Artemis. “No need for the exact words, sir.”
“Sir now, is it? Your exact words were, and I quote— obviously since they are your exact words—you said that Artemis Fowl was ‘crazier than a salt-water-drinking troll with ringworm.’”
Artemis shot Holly a recriminating look that said:
Ringworm? Really?
Holly brushed the comment aside with a hand. “That was earlier. I have shot Artemis twice since then, and he’s fine now.”
Trouble grinned. “You shot him twice. That’s more like it.”
“The point is,” Holly persisted, “we need Artemis to help figure this out.”
“Like he figured out Julius Root and Commander Raine Vinyáya.”
“That is not fair, Trouble.”
Kelp was unrepentant. “You can call me Trouble in the officers’ club on the weekend. Until then it’s Commander. And I order you, no, I command you to detain the human Artemis Fowl. We’re not arresting him—I just want him down here for a little chat. What I certainly do not want is for us to act on any of his notions. Understood?”
Holly’s face was wooden and her voice dull. “Understood, Commander.”
“Your pod has enough juice to power the locator, no more, so don’t even think about making for the shore. You look a shade paler than death, Captain, so I’m guessing you don’t have any spare magic for shielding.”
“Paler than death? Thanks, Trubs.”
“Trubs, Captain? Trubs?”
“I meant Trouble.”
“That’s better. So all I want you to do is sit on the Mud Boy. Got it?”
Holly’s words were so honeyed that they could have charmed a bear. “I’ve got it good, Trouble. Captain Holly Short, babysitter extraordinaire, at your service.”
“Hmmm,” said Trouble, in a tone that Angeline Fowl’s son understood very well.
“Hmmm, indeed,” said Holly.
“I’m glad we understand each other,” said Trouble, with a flicker of one eyelid that could be interpreted as a wink. “I, as your superior, am telling you to stay put and not make any attempt to get to the bottom of what’s really going on here, especially not with the help of a human, especially especially not that particular human. Do you read me?”
“I read you loud and clear, Trouble,” said Holly, and Artemis understood that Trouble Kelp was not forbidding Holly to investigate further—he was actually covering himself on video in case Holly’s actions resulted in a tribunal, which they often did.
“I read you loud and clear too, Commander,” said Artemis. “If that makes any difference.”
Trouble snorted. “Remember those armpit lice, Fowl? Their opinions make more difference to me t
han yours.”
And he was gone before Artemis could trot out one of his pre-prepared retorts. And in years to come, when Professor J. Argon published the best-selling Artemis Fowl biography, Fowl and Fairy, this particular exchange would be deemed significant as one of the few times anyone got the last word over Artemis Fowl II.
Holly made a sound that was a little like a shriek, but not as girly and with more frustration.
“What’s the matter?” asked Foaly. “I thought that went pretty well. It seemed to me that Commander Trouble Kelp, a.k.a. your boyfriend, gave us the green light to investigate.”
Holly turned her mismatched eyes on him. “First of all, he’s not my boyfriend—we went on one date, and I told you that in confidence because I thought you were a friend who wouldn’t trot it out at the first opportunity.”
“It’s not the first opportunity. I held it back the time when we had that lovely tea.”
“Irrelevant!” shouted Holly, through funneled hands.
“Don’t worry, Holly, it stays in this room,” said Foaly, thinking it would be a bad time to mention that he had posted the gossip on his Web site www.horsesense.gnom.
“And secondly,” continued Holly, “maybe Trouble did give me the backhanded go-ahead, but what good is that to us in the middle of the Atlantic in a dead lump of metal?”