The Arctic Incident (3 page)

Captain Short squeezed off a few bursts on the run. One clipped the backside of the nearest goblin. Holly groaned. Nowhere near a nerve center. But it didn’t have to be. There was a disadvantage to those foil suits. They conducted neutrino charges. The charge spread through the suit’s material like fiery ripples across a pond. The goblin jumped a good six feet straight up, then tumbled unconscious to the foot of the escalator. The hover trolley spun out of control, crashing into a luggage carousel. Hundreds of small cylindrical objects spilled from a shattered crate.

Goblin number two fired a dozen rounds Holly’s way. He missed, partly because his arms were jittery with nerves. But also because firing from the hip only works in the movies. Holly tried to take a screen shot of his weapon with her helmet camera for the computer to run a match on, but there was too much vibration.

The chase continued down the conduits and into the departure area itself. Holly was surprised to hear the hum of docking computers. There wasn’t supposed to be any power here. LEP engineering would have dismantled the generators. Why would power be needed here?

She already knew the answer. Power would be needed to operate the shuttle monorail and mission control. Her suspicions were confirmed as she entered the hangar. The goblins had built a shuttle!

It was unbelievable. Goblins had barely enough electricity in their brains to power a ten-watt bulb. How could they possibly build a shuttle? Yet there it was, sitting in the dock like a used-craft seller’s worst nightmare. There wasn’t a bit of it less than a decade old, and the hull was a patchwork of weld spots and rivets.

Holly swallowed her amazement, concentrating on the pursuit. The goblin had paused to grab a set of wings from the cargo hold. She could have taken a shot then, but it was too risky. She wouldn’t be surprised if the shuttle’s nuclear battery was protected by nothing more than a single layer of lead.

The goblin took advantage of his reprieve to skip down the access tunnel. The monorail ran the length of the scorched rock to the massive chute. The chutes were natural vents that riddled the earth’s mantle and crust. Magma streams from the planet’s molten core blasted toward the surface at irregular intervals. If it wasn’t for these pressure releases, the earth would have shaken itself to fragments aeons since. The LEP had harnessed this natural power for express surface shots. Recon officers rode the flares in titanium eggs in times of emergency. For a more leisurely trip, shuttles ascended to the various terminals around the world.

Holly slowed her pace. There was nowhere for the goblin to go. Not unless he was going to fly into the chute itself, and nobody was that crazy. Anything that got caught up in a magma flare got fried right down to the subatomic level.

The chute’s entrance loomed ahead. Massive and ringed by charred rock.

Holly switched on the helmet’s microphone.

“That’s far enough,” she shouted over the howl of core wind. “Give it up. You’re not going into the chute without science.”

Science
was LEP-speak for technical information. In this case, science would be flare-prediction times. Accurate to within a tenth of a second. Generally.

The goblin raised a strange rifle, this time taking careful aim. The firing pin dropped, but whatever this weapon was firing, there wasn’t any left.

“That’s the problem with nonnuclear weapons, you run out of charge,” quipped Holly, fulfilling the age-old tradition of firefight banter, even though her knees were threatening to fold.

In response, the goblin heaved the rifle in Holly’s direction. It was a terrible throw, landing fifteen feet short. But it served its purpose as a distraction. The B’wa Kell triad member used the moment to fire up his wings. They were old models: rotary motor and a broken muffler. The roar of the engine filled the tunnel.

There was another roar, behind the wings. A roar that Holly knew well from a thousand logged flight hours in the chutes. There was a flare coming.

Holly’s mind raced. If the goblins had somehow managed to hook up the terminal to a power source, then all the safety features would have been activated. Including . . .

Captain Short whirled, but the blast doors were already closing. The fireproof barriers were automatically triggered by a thermo sensor in the chute. When a flare passed by below, six-foot-thick steel doors shut the access tunnel off from the rest of the terminal. They were trapped in here, with a column of magma on the way. Not that the magma would kill them, there wasn’t much overspill from the flares. The superheated air would bake them drier than autumn leaves.

The goblin was standing on the tunnel’s edge, oblivious to the impending eruption. Holly realized that it wasn’t a question of the fugitive being crazy enough to fly into the chute. He was just plain stupid.

With a jaunty wave the goblin hopped into the chute, rising rapidly from view. Not rapidly enough. A twenty-foot-thick jet of roiling lava pounced on him like a waiting snake, consuming him completely.

Holly did not waste time grieving. She had problems of her own. LEP jumpsuits had thermal coils to disperse excess heat, but it wouldn’t be enough. In seconds a wall of dry heat would roll in here, and raise the temperature enough to crack the walls.

Holly glanced upward. A reinforced line of ancient coolant tanks were still bolted to the tunnel roof. She slid her blaster to maximum power and began sinking charges into the bellies of the tanks. This was no time for subtlety.

The tanks buckled and split, belching out rancid air and coolant traces. Useless. They must have bled out over the centuries, and the goblins had never bothered replacing them. But there was one. A black oblong, out of place among the standard green LEP models. Holly positioned herself directly underneath and fired.

Three thousand gallons of coolant-enhanced water crashed onto her head, at the very moment a heat wave came billowing in from the chute. It was a curious sensation to be frozen and burned almost simultaneously. Holly felt blisters pop on her shoulders only to be flattened by water pressure. Captain Short was driven to her knees, lungs starving for air. But she couldn’t take a breath, not now, and she couldn’t raise a hand to switch on her helmet tank.

After an eternity the roaring stopped, and Holly opened her eyes to a tunnel full of steam. She activated the de-mister in her visor and got up off her knees. Water slid in sheets from her nonfriction suit. She released her helmet seals, taking deep breaths of tunnel air. Still warm, but breathable.

Behind her the blast doors slid open, and Captain Trouble Kelp appeared in the gap along with an LEP Rapid Response team.

“Nice maneuver, Captain.”

Holly didn’t answer, too absorbed by the weapon abandoned by the recently vaporized goblin. This was the prize pig of rifles, almost two feet long, with a starlite scope clipped above the barrel.

Holly’s first thought had been that somehow the B’wa Kell were manufacturing their own weapons. But now she realized that the truth was far more dangerous. Captain Short pried the rifle from the half-melted rock. She recognized it from her
History of Law Enforcement
in-service. An old softnose laser. Softnoses had been outlawed long ago. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Instead of a fairy power source, the gun was powered by a human AA alkaline battery.

“Trouble,” she called. “Have a look at this.”

“D’Arvit,” breathed Kelp, reaching immediately for the radio controls on his helmet.

“Get me a priority channel to Commander Root. We have
Class A
contraband. Yes,
Class A
. I need a full team of techies. Get Foaly, too. I want this entire quadrant shut down. . . .”

Trouble continued spouting orders but they faded to a distant buzz in Holly’s ears. The B’wa Kell were trading with the Mud Men. Humans and goblins working together to reactivate outlawed weapons. And if the weapons were here, how long could it be before the Mud Men followed?

Help arrived just after the nick of time. In thirty minutes there were so many halogen spotlights buzzing around E37 that it looked like a GolemWorld movie premiere.

Foaly was down on his knees examining the unconscious goblin by the escalator. Foaly was the main reason that humans hadn’t yet discovered the People’s underground lairs. He was a technical genius who had pioneered every major development from flare prediction to mind-wiping technology. Every discovery made him less respectful and more annoying. But rumor had it that he had a soft spot for a certain female Recon officer. Actually, the
only
female Recon officer.

“Good job, Holly,” he said rubbing the goblin’s reflective suit. “You just had a firefight with a kabob.”

“That’s it, Foaly, draw attention away from the fact that the B’wa Kell fooled your sensors.”

Foaly tried on one of the helmets. “Not the B’wa Kell. No way. Too dumb. Goblins just don’t have the cranial capacity. These are human manufacture.”

Holly snorted. “And how do you know that? Recognize the stitching?”

“Nope,” replied Foaly, tossing the helmet to Holly.

Holly read the label. “Made in Germany.”

“I’d guess that this is a fire suit. The material keeps the heat out as well as in. This is serious, Holly. We’re not talking a couple of designer shirts and a case of chocolate bars here. Some human is doing some serious smuggling with the B’wa Kell.”

Foaly stepped out of the way to allow the technical crew access to their prisoner. The techies would tag the unconscious goblin with a
subcutaneous sleeper
. The sleeper contained microcapsules of a sedative agent and a tiny detonator. Once tagged, a criminal could be knocked out by computer if the LEP realized he was involved in an illegal situation.

“You know who’s probably behind this, don’t you?” said Holly.

Foaly rolled his eyes. “Oh let me guess. Captain Short’s archenemy, Master Artemis Fowl.”

“Well, who else could it be?”

“Take your pick. The People have been in contact with thousands of Mud Men over the years.”

“Is that so?” retorted Holly. “And how many that haven’t been mind-wiped?”

Foaly pretended to think about it, adjusting the foil hat jammed on his head to deflect any brain-probing signals that could be focused his way.

“Three,” he muttered eventually.

“Pardon?”

“Three, okay.”

“Exactly. Fowl and his pet gorillas. Artemis is behind this. Mark my words.”

“You’d just love that to be the case now, wouldn’t you? You’d finally get the chance to get your own back. You do remember what happened the last time the LEP went up against Artemis Fowl?”

“I remember. But that was last time.”

Foaly smirked. “I would remind you that he’ll be thirteen, now.”

Holly’s hand dropped to her buzz baton.

“I don’t care how old he is. One zap with this, and he’ll be sleeping like a baby.”

Foaly nodded toward the entrance. “I’d save my charges if I were you. You’re going to need them.”

Holly followed his gaze. Commander Julius Root was sweeping across the secured zone. The more he saw, the redder his face grew, hence the nickname
Beetroot
.

“Commander,” began Holly. “You need to see this.”

Root’s gaze silenced her. “What were you thinking?”

“Pardon me, sir?”

“Don’t give me that. I was in Ops for the whole thing. I was watching the video feed from your helmet.”

“Oh.”

“
Oh
hardly covers it, Captain!” Root’s buzz-cut gray hair was quivering with emotion. “This was supposed to be a surveillance mission. There were several backup squads sitting on their well-trained behinds only waiting for you to call. But no, Captain Short decides to take on the B’wa Kell on her own.”

“I had a man down, sir. There was no choice.”

“What was Verbil doing out there in the first place?”

For the first time, Holly’s gaze dropped. “I sent him out to do a thermal, sir. Just following regulations.”

Root nodded. “I just talked to the paramedic warlock. Verbil will be okay, but his flying days are over. There’ll be a tribunal of course.”

“Yes, sir. Understood.”

“A formality, I’m sure, but you know the Council.”

Holly knew the Council all too well. She would be the first LEP officer in history to be the subject of two simultaneous investigations.

“So what’s this I hear about a Class A?”

All contraband was classed.
Class A
was code for dangerous human technology. Power sources for instance.

“This way, sir.”

Holly lead them to the rear of the maintenance area, to the shuttle bay itself.

A translucent restricted-access Perspex dome had been erected in the shuttle bay. Holly pressed through the frosted entrance flaps.

“You see? This is serious.”

Root studied the evidence. In the shuttle’s cargo bay were crates of AA batteries. Holly selected a pack.

“Pencil batteries,” she said. “A common human power source. Crude, inefficient, and an environmental disaster. Twelve crates of them right here. Who knows how many are in the tunnels already?”

Root was unimpressed. “Forgive me for not quaking in my boots. So a few goblins get to play human video games. So what?”

Foaly had spotted the goblin’s softnose laser. “Oh no!” he said, checking the weapon.

“Exactly,” agreed Holly.

The commander did not appreciate being left out of the conversation. “Oh no!” he mimicked them. “I hope you’re just being melodramatic.”

“No, chief,” replied the centaur, somber for once. “This is deadly serious. The B’wa Kell are using human batteries to power the old softnose lasers. They’d only get about six shots per battery. But you give every goblin a pocketful of power cells, and that’s a lot of shots.”

“Softnose lasers? They were outlawed decades ago. Weren’t they all recycled?”

Foaly nodded. “Supposedly. My division supervised the meltdowns. Not that we considered it priority, they were originally powered by a single solar cell, with a life span of less than a decade. Obviously, somebody managed to sneak a few out of the recycling lockup.”

“Quite a few by the looks of all these batteries. That’s the last thing I need, goblins with softnoses.”