Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex (11 page)

This was enough to elicit a deafening moment of silence even in the middle of a crisis, which Orion seemed to be blissfully unaffected by.

Foaly was the first to speak. “What’s that look you have on your face there, Commander Short? What’s going through your head right now? Don’t think about it, just tell me.”

Holly ignored him, but that didn’t stop the centaur talking.

“You had a moment of passion with Artemis Fowl?” he said. “I don’t remember reading that in your report.”

Holly may have been blushing, or it may have been the aforementioned dramatic backlighting. “It wasn’t in my report, okay? Because there was no moment of passion.”

Foaly didn’t give up so easily. “So nothing happened, Holly?”

“Nothing worth talking about. When we went back in time, my emotions got a little jumbled. It was temporary, okay? Can we please focus? We are supposed to be professionals.”

“Not me,” said Orion cheerily. “I’m just a teenager with hormones running wild. And may I say, young fairy lady, they’re running wild in your direction.”

Holly lifted her visor and looked the hormonal teenager in the eye. “This had better not be a game, Artemis. If you do not have some serious psychosis, you will be sorry.”

“Oh, I’m crazy, all right. I do have plenty of psychoses,” said Orion cheerily. “Multiple personality, delusional dementia, OCD. I’ve got them all, but most of all, I’m crazy about you.”

“That’s not a bad line,” muttered Foaly. “He is definitely not Artemis.”

Holly stamped the slush from her boots. “We have two objectives: first, we need to hide evidence of fairy technology, i.e. the shuttle, from curious humans until such time as we can send a LEPretrieval team to haul it below. And our second objective is to somehow stay on the tail of that probe and get a message through to Police Plaza that it’s up here.” She glanced sharply at Foaly. “Could this be a simple malfunction?”

“No,” said the centaur with absolute certainty. “And I say that with absolute certainty. That probe has been deliberately reprogrammed, the amorphobots too. They were never meant to be used as weapons.”

“Then we have an enemy. Police Plaza needs to be warned.”

Holly turned to Orion. “Well, any ideas?”

The boy’s eyebrows rose a notch. “Bivouac?”

Holly rubbed the spot on her forehead where a headache had just blossomed.

“Bivouac. Fabulous.”

From behind came a sudden wrenching noise as the shuttle sank a little lower in the ice like a defeated warrior.

“You know,” mused Foaly, “that ship is pretty heavy and the rock shelf there is not very—”

Before he could finish, the entire shuttle disappeared into the landscape, taking the restaurant with it, as though both had been swallowed by a subterranean kraken.

Seconds later, Artemis’s Ice Cube nano-wafer cannon tumbled into the newborn chasm.

“That was incredibly quiet,” said Orion. “If I hadn’t seen it, I would never have known.”

“This terrain is like dwarf cheese. Full of holes,” said Holly, then she was up and gone, racing across the ice toward the new crater.

Orion and Foaly took their time strolling across the glacier, chatting amiably.

“On the plus side,” said Foaly, “there’s our first objective achieved. The evidence is gone.”

Orion nodded, then asked, “Dwarf cheese?”

“Cheese made by dwarfs.”

“Oh,” said Orion, relieved. “They make it. It’s not actually . . .”

“No. What a horrible thought.”

“Exactly.”

The hole in the surface of the ice revealed a cavernous underworld. A subterranean river pulsed along, tearing shreds from what was left of the Great Skua restaurant. The water was deep blue and moving with such power that it almost seemed alive. Great chunks of ice, some the size of elephants, sheared away from the banks, tumbled against the current, and then submitted to its will, gathering speed until they struck the building, pulverizing what was left. The only sound was one of raging water; the building seemed to surrender without a whimper.

The shuttle had become impaled on an ice ridge below a slight bank in the underground river. An ice bank that could not survive the pounding waters for long. The craft was stripped down by the brute force of nature until only a small section remained, an obsidian arrowhead jammed point down into the ice and rock.

“The shuttle’s escape pod,” shouted Holly. “Of course.”

Objective two, staying on the probe’s tail, was now actually possible. If they could board the pod, and if the pod still had any power in it, they would be able to follow the probe and try to get a message to LEP headquarters.

Holly tried to scan the small craft with her helmet, but her beams were still blocked.

She turned to the centaur. “Foaly? What do you think?”

Foaly did not need her question explained. There was only one thing to think about: the escape pod wedged into the ice below them.

“Those things are damn near indestructible and built to hold the entire crew in a pinch. Also, the power source is a solid fuel block, so there aren’t many moving parts to go wrong. All the usual modes of communication are on board, plus a good old-fashioned radio, which our secret enemy might not have thought to block, though considering he thought to phase the probe’s shield to repulse our own sensors, I doubt there’s much he didn’t think of.”

Holly lay down and wiggled forward until her torso hung over the rim, spray from the subterranean river painting a sheen on her visor.

“So that’s our way out, if we can make it down.”

Foaly clopped his front hooves. “We don’t all have to make it down. Some of us are a tad less nimble than others, those with hooves for example. You could hop on down there, then fly the pod back up to collect the rest of us.”

“That makes perfect sense,” said Orion. “But I should be the one to go. Chivalry demands that I take the risk.”

Foaly scowled. “Come on, Holly. Please sedate this deluded idiot.”

Orion cleared his throat. “You are not being very sensitive to my illness, centaur.”

Holly seriously considered the sedation, then shook her head. “Artemis . . . Orion is right. One of us should go.”

Holly unraveled a piton cord from the reel on her belt, quickly wrapping it around one of the exposed steel rods in the restaurant’s foundations.

“What are you doing?” asked Orion.

Holly strode briskly to the hole. “What you were going to do in about five seconds’ time.”

“Haven’t you read the classics?” shouted Orion. “
I
should go.”

“That’s right,” she said. “You should go.” And she hopped into the underground cavern.

Orion made an animalistic noise, if the animal were a tiger having its tail tied in a knot, and he actually stamped his foot.

“Wow,” said Foaly. “Foot stamping. You are really angry.”

“It would seem so,” said Orion, peering over the edge.

“Generally, the foot stamping is on the other foot, as you are usually the one driving Holly crazy. The other you.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” said Orion, calming somewhat. “I can be insufferable.”

The youth lay flat on the ice.

“You’re on a good line, Holly,” he said, almost to himself. “You should definitely miss that big wall of ice.”

“I doubt it,” grunted Foaly, and, as it turned out, the centaur was right.

Captain Short went down faster than she would have liked, which was totally due to equipment malfunction. If the reel at her belt had not been damaged during the recent amorphobot attack, then it would have automatically slowed her descent, and Holly could have avoided the impact that was surely to come. As it was, she was more or less falling at full g with nothing to lessen her impact other than a slight tension from the piton line.

A thought flashed through Holly’s mind even faster than the ice could flash past her head.

I hope nothing breaks; I have no magic left to fix it.

Then she crashed into the ice wall with her knees and elbows. It was harder than rock and sharper than glass, cutting her uniform as though it were paper. Cold and pain jittered along her limbs, and there was a cracking noise, but it was surface ice and not bones.

The wall sloped gradually to the bank of the underground glacier run-off river, and Holly Short slid down helplessly, tumbling end over end, landing feetfirst through sheer luck. The final gasp of air huffed from her lungs as the shock of impact traveled along her legs. She prayed for a spark of magic, but nothing came to take away the pain.

Get a move on, soldier, she told herself, imagining Julius Root giving the order.

She scrambled across the ice bank, seeing her own distorted reflection in the ice stare wild-eyed back at her, like a desperate swimmer trapped under a skating pond.

Look at that face. I could use a day in a sludge-immersion tank, she thought.

Usually the idea of spending time in a relaxation spa would horrify Holly, but today it seemed a most attractive prospect.

Regeneration sludge and cucumber eye pads. Lovely.

No point dreaming about it now, though. There was work to be done.

Holly scrambled to the escape pod. The river rushed past, pounding the fuselage, hammering cracks in the ice.

I hate the cold. I really hate it.

Mist rose in freezing clouds from the water, draping a spectral blue tent over the massive stalactites.

Spectral blue tent? thought Holly. Maybe I should write a poem. I wonder what rhymes with
crushed
?

Holly kicked at the ice clustered at the pod’s base, clearing the hatch, thankful that the doorway wasn’t completely submerged, as, without her Neutrino, she would have no way to clear it.

The captain channeled all the day’s frustrations into the next few minutes of furious kicking. Holly stamped on that ice as though it had somehow been responsible for blowing up the shuttle, as though its crystals were somehow to blame for the probe’s attack. Whatever the source of Holly’s strength, her efforts bore fruit, and soon the hatch’s outline was visible beneath a transparent sheath of mashed ice.

A voice floated down from above. “Helloooo. Holly. Are you okay?”

There was another phrase at the end. Muffled. Could this Orion person have called her
fair lady
again? Holly fervently hoped not.

“I . . . am . . . .fine!” she grunted, each word punctuated with another blow to the shell of ice.

“Try not to become too stressed,” said the echoing voice. “Do a few breathing exercises.”

Unreal, thought Holly. This guy has lived in the back of Artemis’s head for so long that he has no idea how to handle the actual world
.

She wormed her fingers into the recessed handle grip, flicking away tenacious clots of ice blocking the handle. The hatch was purely mechanical, so there was no problem with jammers, but that did not necessarily hold for the pod’s controls. The rogue probe could theoretically have fried the pod’s guidance systems just as easily as it had taken out their communications.

Holly planted a boot on the hull and hauled the hatch open. A deluge of pink disinfectant gel poured out, pooling around her second boot, and quickly evaporated to mist.

Disinfectant gel. In case whatever destroyed the shuttle had been bacterial.

She poked her head inside, and the motion sensors heated a couple of phosphorescent plates on the roof panels.

Good. Emergency power
,
at least.

The escape pod was totally inverted, pointed straight down to the center of the Earth. The interior was Spartan and made with soldiers in mind, not passengers.

Orion is going to love this, she thought, strapping herself into the pilot’s harness. There were six separate belts in the harness, as this ship had little in the way of gyroscopes or suspension.

Maybe I can shake Artemis out of his own brain. We can count up to five together.

She flexed her fingers, then allowed them to hover above the control panel.

Nothing happened. No activation, no sudden heads-up controls. No icon asking her for a start code.

Stone age it is, thought Holly, and leaned forward to the limits of her harness, reaching underneath the console for a good old-fashioned steering wheel and manual propulsion controls.

She pressed the ignition plunger, and the engine coughed.

Come on. I have things to do.

One more press and the escape pod’s pitiful engine caught and turned over, irregular as a dying man’s breathing, but it turned over nevertheless.

Thank you.

Holly thought this just before jets of black smoke blurted through the vents into the cabin, making her splutter.

There’s some damage, but we should be okay.

Holly cranked open the for’ard porthole and was alarmed by the view that was suddenly revealed. She had expected to see the blue waters of a subterranean river splashing across the transparent polymer, but instead she saw an abyss. The pod had punched into a vast underground cavern that seemed to run right through the glacier in a dizzyingly sheer drop toward the bedrock below. Rippling walls of ice stretched below her, illuminated by the distant flickering blue lights of the probe’s engines as it made its way into the depths of the cavern.

There it is. Heading down.

Holly hit the thaw button for the fuel block and tapped her fingers impatiently while it heated up.

“What I need now,” she muttered to herself, “is reverse. And quickly.”

But reverse did not come soon enough. The glacier river worked its tendrils into the ice ridge supporting the escape pod, and quickly stripped it away. For a moment the probe hung suspended, then it dropped through the hole and fell powerless straight down.

A couple of minutes earlier, the boy who wore Artemis Fowl’s face had been standing on the surface, peering down at Holly Short. Appreciating her labors and admiring her form.

“She’s a feisty one,
n’est-ce pas?
Look at her battling the elements.”

Foaly clopped to his side. “Come on, Artemis. You can’t kid me. What are you up to?”

Orion’s face was smooth. On him, Artemis’s features seemed open and trustworthy. This was a neat trick, as, on Artemis, these same features seemed conniving and almost sinister, some would say sneaky. Indeed, one music teacher did use this term in Artemis’s school report, which was quite an unprofessional thing to do, but in fairness, Artemis had rewired the man’s keyboard so that it would only play “Jingle Bells” no matter what keys were pressed.