Juliet followed Myles to the compacted mud floor on top of the tower. From there they had a clear view down into the distant city. Usually the only sounds to ride the breeze this far north were the occasional beeps of traffic-jammed horns from cars stuck on the ring road. But today the highway to Dublin seemed more like the road to hell. Even from this distance, it was clear that the six lanes of traffic had come to a complete stop. Several engines exploded as they watched, and a pickup truck threw an unexpected forward flip. Farther into the city, bigger explosions rumbled from behind buildings and smoke belches drifted into the afternoon sky, a sky that had troubles of its own as a small aircraft landed in the center of a soccer stadium and an honest-to-God communications satellite dropped from space like a dead robot onto the roof of the U2 hotel.
Beckett climbed the steps and took Juliet’s hand.
“It is Harma-geddon,” he said quietly. “The world is going boom.”
Juliet pulled the boys close. Whatever was developing seemed too big to be directed specifically at the Fowl family, though there was a growing list of people who would happily destroy the entire county of Dublin just to get at Artemis.
“Don’t worry, boys,” she said. “I will protect you.”
She reached into her pocket. In situations like this where things were violently weird, the first course of action was always the same: Call Artemis.
She scrolled through the list of networks on her phone and was not overly surprised to see that the only available one was the FOX system that Artemis had set up for emergency secure calls.
I imagine that Artemis is the only teenager in the world to have built and launched his own satellite.
She was about to select Artemis’s name from her contacts when a bulky forearm appeared in space ten feet in front of her. There was a hand at the end of the arm, and it clutched a fairy Neutrino blaster.
“’Nighty-’night, Mud Wench,” said a voice from nowhere, and a blue bolt of crackling power erupted from the tip of the weapon.
Juliet was familiar enough with fairy weapons to know that she would survive a blue bolt, but that she would probably suffer a contact burn and wake up inside a cocoon of pain.
Sorry, my boys, she thought. I have failed you.
Then the bolt from Pip’s weapon hit her in the chest, scorched her jacket, and knocked her from the tower.
Oro of the Berserkers felt a moment of doubt.
Perhaps this anticipation of freedom is merely a yearning, he thought.
No. This was more than his own longing. The key was coming. He could feel the rush of power as it approached their tomb.
Gather yourselves, he sent down to his warriors. When the gate is open, take whatever shape you must. Anything that lives or has lived can be ours.
Oro felt the earth shake with the roar of his warriors.
Or perhaps that was mere yearning.
Tara Shuttleport, Ireland
When Captain Holly Short attempted to dock in her assigned shuttle bay, she found Tara’s electromagnetic clamps to be inoperable and so was forced to improvise a landing in the gate’s access tunnel. This was more or less what the Tara shuttleport supervisor would write in his Extraordinary Incident report when he got out of rehab, but the sentence did not convey the sheer trauma of the situation.
For their entire approach, Holly’s instruments had assured her that everything was hunky-dory; and then, just as she swung the Silver Cupid’s tail around to dock with the clamps, Tara’s flight-control computer had made a noise like raw meat hitting a wall at speed, then shut itself down, leaving Holly with no choice but to reverse into the shuttleport’s access tunnel and pray that there were no unauthorized personnel in there.
Metal crumpled, Plexiglas shattered, and fiber-optic cables stretched like warm toffee and snapped. The Silver Cupid’s reinforced hide took the punishment, but the hood ornament flew off like its namesake and would be found three months later in the belly of a soda machine, corroded to a barely recognizable stick figure.
Holly hauled on the brake as sparks and shards rained down, pockmarking the windshield. Her pilot’s gyro harness had absorbed most of the shock meant for her body, but Artemis and Butler had been tossed around like beads in a rattle.
“Everybody alive?” she called over her shoulder, and the assortment of groans that wafted back confirmed her passengers’ survival, if not their intact survival.
Artemis crawled out from under Butler’s protective huddle and checked the shuttle’s readings. Blood dripped from a slit on the youth’s brow, but he appeared not to notice.
“You need to find a way out, Holly.”
Holly almost giggled. Driving the Cupid out of here would mean willfully destroying an entire LEP installation. She would not just be tearing up the rulebook; she would be shredding the pages, then mixing them with troll dung, baking the concoction, and tossing the biscuits on a campfire.
“Dung biscuits,” she muttered, which made no sense if you didn’t know her train of thought.
“You may be making dung biscuits of the rulebook,” said Artemis, who could apparently track trains of thought, “but Opal must be stopped for all our sakes.”
Holly hesitated.
Artemis capitalized on her hesitation. “Holly. These are extraordinary circumstances,” he said urgently. “Do you remember Butler’s phrase? Kill box. That’s where my brothers are at this moment. In the kill box. And you know how much Juliet will sacrifice to save them.”
Butler leaned forward, grasping a hanging hand-grip loop and pulling it from its housing in the process.
“Think tactically,” he said, instinctively knowing how to galvanize the fairy captain. “We need to proceed under the assumption that we are the only small force standing between Opal and whatever form of world domination her twisted mind has cooked up in solitary. And remember, she was prepared to sacrifice herself. She planned for it. We need to go. Now, soldier!”
Butler was right, and Holly knew it.
“Okay,” she said, punching parameters into the Cupid’s route finder. “You asked for it.”
A sprite in a hi-vis jacket was flying down the access tunnel, wings tapping the curved walls in his haste. Sprite wing tips were sensitive bio-sonar sensors that took decades to heal, so the sprite must have been in some considerable distress for such reckless flight.
Holly moaned. “It’s Nander Thall. Mister By-the-Book.”
Thall was paranoid that the humans would somehow contaminate Haven on the way in, or steal something on the way out, so he insisted on full scans every time the Cupid docked.
“Just go,” Butler urged. “We don’t have time for Thall’s regulations.”
Nander Thall hollered at them through a megaphone. “Power down, Captain Short. What in Frond’s name do you think you are doing? I knew you were a wild card, Short. I knew it. Unstable.”
“No time,” said Artemis. “No time.”
Thall hovered two feet from the windshield. “I’m a-looking in your eyeball, Short, and I see chaos. We’re in lockdown here. The shield has failed, do you understand that? All it would take is some Mud Man with a shovel to unearth the entire shuttleport. It’s all hands to the fortifications, Short. Power down. I’m giving you a direct order.”
Nander Thall’s eyes bulged in their sockets like goose eggs, and his wings beat erratically. This was a sprite on the edge.
“Do you think if we ask for permission, he will let us go in time?” said Artemis.
Holly doubted it. The access tunnel stretched out behind Thall, passengers huddled nervously in the pools of light cast by emergency beacons. The situation would be difficult enough to contain without her driving up the panic levels.
The onboard computer beeped, displaying the optimum escape route on the screen, and it was this beep that sp
urred Holly.
“Sorry,” she mouthed at Nander Thall. “Gotta go.”
Thall’s wings beat with nervous rapidity. “Don’t you mouth Sorry at me! And you do not gotta go anywhere.”
But Holly was sorry and she did gotta go. So she went. Straight up toward the luggage conveyor, which generally trundled overhead, luggage floating along on a transparent smart-water canal that displayed the identity of the owner through the Plexiglas. Now the conveyor canal was stagnant, and the suitcases bumped each other like abandoned skiffs.
Holly nudged the joystick with one thumb, settling the Cupid into the canal, which the computer assured her was wide enough to accommodate the vehicle. It was, with barely an inch to spare on each side of the wheel arches.
Incredibly, Nander Thall was in pursuit. He bobbed alongside the canal, his comb-over blown back like a windsock, shouting into his little megaphone.
Holly shrugged theatrically. “Can’t hear you,” she mouthed. “Sorry.”
And she left the sprite swearing at the baggage tunnel, which flowed in gentle sloped circles toward the Arrivals hall.
Holly piloted the Cupid along the tunnel’s curves, guided by twin headlights that revealed Plexiglas walls embedded with miles of dead circuitry. Dim shapes could be seen beavering at circuit boxes, stripping out smoking capacitors and fuses.
“Dwarfs,” said Holly. “They make the best electricians. No lighting required, and small dark spaces a bonus. Plus, they eat the dead components.”
“Seriously?” wondered Butler.
“Absolutely. Mulch assures me that copper is very cleansing.”
Artemis did not involve himself in the conversation. It was trivial, and he was deep in visualization mode, picturing every conceivable scenario that would face them when they reached Fowl Manor, and plotting how to emerge from these scenarios as the victor.