Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex (8 page)

Murderer, thought Holly, more angry than horrified. Foaly didn’t design this
.

Foaly suddenly moved in front of her. “You’ve got that look in your eyes, Captain.”

“What look?”

“The one Julius Root always talked about. The I’m-about-to-do-something-incredibly-stupid look.”

There was no time for debate. “I need to get to Artemis’s project.”

“You can’t go. What does the LEP manual suggest in these kinds of situations?”

Holly ground her teeth. Her two geniuses were useless; she would have to do this herself.

“The manual, which you helped to write, would advise me to retreat to a safe distance and construct a bivouac, but, with respect, those guidelines are a pile of troll weevils.”

“Wow. Nice respect. Do you know what the word
respect
actually means? I’m no book professor, but I’m pretty sure comparing my manual to a steaming pile of troll weevils does not constitute respect.”

“I never said steaming,” said Holly, then decided that time was short and she could apologize later. “Listen, Foaly. I don’t have a downlink to Police Plaza. There are murdering blobby robots on our trail, and the only people who might be able to come up with a solution are either fast asleep dreaming or, in your case, wide awake dreaming. So I need you to cover me while I make a run for Artemis’s crate. Do you think you can do that?”

Holly handed the centaur her backup weapon. Foaly held the gun gingerly, as though it were radioactive, which to a certain degree it was.

“Okay. I know how this thing works, in theory.”

“Good,” said Holly, and slithered on her belly up and onto the ice field before she could change her mind.

Holly felt her torso numb and stiffen as she slid across the glacier. The ice stretched in front of her, carved by the prevailing wind into elegant swoops and whorls, a wind that was to her rear, making progress relatively easy considering she had until recently been suffering from several broken bones.

Saved by magic once more.

But now she had not a spark left in her.

The fox’s carcass lay smoking on a bed of snow, melting a grave for itself.

Holly tore her gaze from the pathetic mammal’s eyes, still rolled back in its blackened head, and looked instead at Artemis’s crate, which stood disregarded by the bots, but past their search line.

I need to breach the line unnoticed. Their default sensor is heat. I’ll give them a little heat to think about.

Holly switched on the air-conditioning in her suit, which had about five minutes left in it according to her visor readout, then selected the flare package on her Neutrino handgun. She also accidentally activated the tunes player in her helmet with a series of shivery winks. Luckily, the volume was muted and she managed to switch off Grazen McTortoor’s metal epic “Troll Sundown” before the amorphobots detected the vibration.

Grazen McTortoor’s music never killed anyone before. He’d probably be thrilled.

Holly flipped onto her back, looking up at a sky of pitch and granite, the bowed cloud bellies licked by flame.

Heat.

Holly steadied her hand and removed the detachable trigger finger section of her glove. She pointed her weapon skyward and sent a wide-arced spray of flares into the air.

Flares. If only someone could see them and come to help.

The amorphobots’ relaxed chittering amped up to a whine, and Holly realized that it was time to move.

She was up on her feet and running before her good sense had time to kick in. She raced full pelt for Artemis’s crate, taking as straight a tack as possible, weapon held along her sightline.

I don’t care what Foaly says. If one of those red-eyed monsters comes anywhere near me, I’m going to find out what a plasma grenade does to its innards.

The bots had without exception pointed their sensors toward the descending flares, which fizzled like the sputterings of an oxyacetylene torch cutting through the clouds. The amorphobots’ malleable bodies sprouted gel periscopes and they stood, following the flares’ progress like ill-defined meerkats. They may have noticed an inconsistent heat source jiggling across the glacier, but they were programmed to prioritize.

Not so smart after all.

Holly ran as fast as her brittle bones would carry her.

The terrain was flat but treacherous. The light September snow had dusted the grooves, and Holly almost lost her footing in a tractor trail. Her ankle grated but did not crack. Lucky.

Lucky little elf

Sat on the shelf

And the silly human boy

Mistook her for a toy

A nursery rhyme used to teach children to sit still if they saw a human.

Think like a little tree and that’s what the Mud Men will see.

I’m a tree, thought Holly, without much conviction. A little tree.

So far, so good: the bots were glued to the flares and were showing no interest in her heat signature. She skirted the wreckage of the shuttle, trying not to hear the groan of the chassis or notice the front panel of a flight suit melded with the windscreen. Beyond the shuttle lay Artemis’s great experiment. An oversized refrigerator cannon.

Great. More ice.

Holly knelt at the base of what Artemis had called his Ice Cube and quickly located the control panel, which luckily had an omnisensor, so it was a simple matter to sync it with her own helmet. Now the refrigerator cannon would fire when she wanted, and at whatever target she chose. She set a timer running and set herself running seconds afterward, straight back the way she had come.

It occurred to her that the flares were lasting well, and she really should congratulate Foaly on the new models, at which point they inevitably began to wink out.

With no more pretty lights in the sky, the amorphobots returned to their methodical searching of the site for signs of life. One was dispatched to check the erratic blob of heat crossing their grid. It rolled across the surface, scanning the ground as it went, sending out gel tendrils to scoop up debris and even whipping out a tongue like a bullfrog’s to snag a low-flying black-headed gull. If there had been a sound track to its movements it would have been
tum-ti-tum-ti-tum
. Business as usual, no worries. Then its vector crossed Holly’s, and they virtually collided. The bot’s scanner eyes flashed, and lightning bolts jittered inside its globulous body.

All I need is a few seconds, thought Holly, and blasted the bot with a narrow beam right in its gut.

The beam sliced through the center of the blobby body, but was diffused before reaching the hardware nerve center at the core. The bot bounced backward like a kicked ball, whining as it did so, updating its friends.

Holly did not slow down to see what the response might be; she did not need to—her keen elfin hearing gave her all the information she needed: they were coming for her. They were all coming. Their semisolid forms pummeled the ice as they moved like quick bongo rolls, along with that dreadful chittering
.

A bot in her path skittered to one side, a temporary Neutrino hole drilled in its top quadrant. Apparently Foaly was taking his job as cover provider seriously, even though he knew his weapon could not kill these things.

Thanks, Mr. Consultant.

The bots were converging on her now, trundling from all sides, burping and squeaking as they came.

Like kiddie-cartoon characters.

Which did not stop Holly from blasting as many of the cute critters as she could. She vaguely heard Foaly shouting at her to kindly only shoot when necessary, or to quote him verbatim:

Holly. In the name of all the gods, stop shooting energy into all-energy beings. Just how stupid are you?

The bots quivered and meshed, growing larger and more aggressive.

“D’Arvit,” huffed Holly, her breath coming hard now. Her helmet informed her cheerily that her heart rate was over 240 bpm, which would be fine for a sprite but not for an elf. Normally a flat-out sprint would not inconvenience Holly, nor indeed any fairy who had passed the LEP physical, but this was a desperate dash immediately after a major healing. She should be in a hospital sipping rejuvenation sludge through a straw.

“Two minutes to cardiac arrest,” said her helmet breezily. “Ceasing all physical activity would be a really great idea.”

Holly spared a nanosecond to despise the voice of her helmet. Corporal Frond, the glamorous face of the LEP, all blond hair and tight jumpsuits, who’d recently had her bloodline traced back to Frond the Elfin King, now insisted on referring to herself as Princess.

Foaly emerged from the crater and grabbed his friend’s elbow. “Come on, Holly. We have seconds of life left before those critters that you led right to our hidey-hole kill us all like rodents.”

Holly ran as fast as she could, bones creaking. “I have a plan.”

They stumbled over the frozen glacier, back to the depression where Artemis Fowl lay unconscious. The amorphobots flowed after them like marbles rolling down the side of a bowl.

Foaly dived into the hole. It was not elegant—centaurs do not make good divers, which is why they do not compete in pool events.

“Whatever your idea was, it’s not working,” he cried.

Holly also dived into the depression, covering Artemis as well as she could.

“Put your face in the ice,” she ordered. “And hold your breath.”

Foaly ignored her, his attention attracted by Artemis’s Ice Cube, which was swiveling on its base.

“It seems that Artemis’s cannon is about to fire,” he said, his scientific interest piqued in spite of the horrible death approaching them.

Holly grabbed the centaur’s mane, roughly dragging him to the ground. “Face down, hold breath. How hard is that?”

“Oh,” said Foaly. “I see.”

There must have been a buildup of heat somewhere, because the bots froze for a moment, exchanging curious chitters. The noise was quickly drowned out by a bass heavy thump followed by a descending whistle.

“Ooooh,” chorused the amorphobots, sprouting gel periscopes.

Foaly closed one eye and cocked his ear. “Mortar,” he proclaimed, and then as the whistling grew louder he decided that it might be a good idea to take a breath and cover as many orifices as possible.

This is really going to hurt, he thought, and for some reason giggled like a four-year-old pixette.

Then the entire indent was submerged in a pancake of densely packed nano-wafers that worked into every crack, coating the occupants of the hole and completely obliterating any heat signatures.

The amorphobots jiggled backward, away from the mystery substance, searched around for the beings they had been pursuing, and then shrugged their blobby shoulders and trundled after their mother ship, which had bludgeoned and melted its way through the surface to the subterranean volcanoes below.

Underneath the gunky quagmire, two fairies and one human lay still, blowing bubbles with their breath.

“It worked,” gasped Holly finally.

“Shut your face,” snapped Foaly.

Holly pulled his head free from the goo strings. “What did you say to me?”

“Don’t take it personally,” said Foaly. “I just felt like being rude to someone. Do you have any idea what it’s going to be like getting this stuff out of my mane? Cabelline will shave me for sure.”

“Save you?

“Shave me. What are you, deaf?”

“No. My ears are clogged with stuff.”

Holly flip-flopped herself and Artemis from the indent, using her glove-sensor to check the human’s vitals.

Still alive.

She tilted his head back to make sure the airway was clear.

Come back to us, Artemis. We need you.

The amorphobots had gone, and the only signs that they had ever been on the Vatnajökull glacier were the grooves in the ice and snow that marked their passage. The air was blessedly chitter free, though maybe a little chittering would have distracted from the crackle of still-burning troop shuttle.

Holly separated from Artemis with a noise like a very big Band-Aid being slowly pulled from a weeping wound.

What a disaster, she thought, the weight of her coated helmet causing her head to droop. What a total catastrophe
.

Holly looked around, trying to make some kind of assessment of the situation. Commander Vinyáya was gone, along with the military. An LEP Martian probe had been hijacked by forces unknown and seemed to be heading into Earth’s crust. The probe was blocking their link to Haven, and it was only a matter of time before humans came to investigate all the flares and explosions. And she had no magic left to shield herself.

“Come on, Artemis,” she said, desperation creeping into her voice. “We’re in deeper trouble than ever before. Come on, you love this kind of impossible problem. I’m sorry I shot you.”

Holly tugged off a glove and held her fingers high, inspecting them just in case a spark remained.

Nothing. No magic. Perhaps it was just as well. The mind was a delicate instrument, and Artemis’s dabblings with the fairy arts had probably triggered his Atlantis Complex in the first place. If Artemis wanted to get well, he would have to do it the old-fashioned way, with pills and electroshock
.
I already gave him his first shock, thought Holly, swallowing a guilty chuckle.

Artemis shifted on the ice, trying to blink under a faceful of sloppy nano-wafers.

“Unhhh,” he moaned. “Ayyy ga breee.”

“Wait,” said Holly, scooping handfuls of gunk away from his nostrils and mouth. “Let me help.”

Artemis’s own inventions dribbled from the corners of his mouth. There was something different about his eyes. They were the same colors as usual, but softer somehow.

You’re dreaming.

“Artemis?” she said, half expecting a typical snappy retort, as in,
Of course it’s Artemis. Who were you expecting?
But instead he simply said:

“Hello.”

Which was fine, and Holly was happy enough, until he followed it with:

“And who might you be?”

Ooooh, D’Arvit.

Holly tugged off her helmet. “It’s me, Holly.”