“Away from here,” echoed the troubled boy.
“Then we can talk about the project.”
The shuttle’s pilot fluffed his approach, carving a shallow trench in the surface
with his rear stabilizer. The cacophonous splintering of sugar-glass-thin ice plates
was enough to sharpen Artemis’s pupils.
“No!” he shouted, his voice shrill for once. “No magic. One two three four five.
Stay where you are.”
A second craft introduced itself to the melodrama, appearing suddenly in the
distant skyscape as though crashing through from an alternate dimension. Huge
and sleek like a spiraling ice-cream cone, trailing tethered boosters, one errant
engine detaching and spinning off into the heavy gray clouds. For such a huge
ship, it made very little noise.
Artemis was shocked by the sight.
Aliens? was his first thought; then, Wait, not aliens. I
have seen this before. A schematic at least.
Foaly was having the same thought. “You know, that looks familiar.”
Entire sections of the giant ship were flickering out of sight as it cooled down
from its steep atmospheric entry, or re-entry, as it turned out.
“That’s one from your space program,” said Artemis accusingly.
“It’s possible,” Foaly admitted, a guilty tinge blossoming on his rear cheeks,
another reason he lost at poker. “Difficult to tell with all the erratic movements
and so forth.”
The LEP shuttle finally touched down, popping a hatch on its port side.
“Everyone in,” ordered Vinyáya. “We need to put a little distance between us
and that ship.”
Foaly was three or four steps ahead. “No. No, this is one of ours. It shouldn’t
be here, but we can still control it.”
Holly snorted. “Sure. You’re doing a great job of it so far.”
This comment was one more than the centaur could bear. He finally snapped,
rearing majestically on his hind legs, then bringing his front hooves smashing
down on the thin ice.
“Enough!” he roared. “There is a deep-space probe bearing down on us. And
even if its nuclear generator does not explode, the impact blast wave alone will
be enough to destroy everything in a fifteen-mile radius, so unless that shuttle of
yours can travel to another dimension, boarding will be about as much use as you
would be at a scientific convention.”
Holly shrugged. “Fair enough. What do you suggest?”
“I suggest you shut up and let me deal with this problem.”
The term probe generally brings to mind a small, spare craft, with perhaps a
few sample jars in its hold and maybe a rack of super-efficient solar cells clamped
to its back, but this machine was the polar opposite of such an image. It was
huge and violent in its movement, jarring the air as it bludgeoned through,
jumping in lurching leaps, dragging tethered engines behind like captured slaves.
“This thing,” muttered Foaly, blinking to activate his monocle, “seemed
friendlier when I designed it.”
The soldiers were ordered to hold their positions, and the entire group could
only watch as the giant ship bore down on them, screaming ever louder as its
soundproofing waffling was scored. Atmospheric friction tore at the probe with
jagged fingers, tearing huge octagonal plates from the hull. And all the while
Foaly tried to gain control of it.
“What I’m doing is going through the shuttle’s antennae to get a good fix on
the probe’s computer, see if I can find the malfunction and then maybe I can
program in a nice friendly hover at thirty yards. A little more shield would be nice
too.”
“Less explaining,” said Vinyáya through gritted teeth, “and more fixing.”
Foaly kept up his line of drivel as he worked. “Come on, Commander. I know
you military types thrive on these tense situations.”
Throughout this exchange, Artemis stood still as a statue, aware that should
he release the tremors, they would engulf him perhaps forever, and he would be
lost.
What has happened? he wondered. Am I not Artemis Fowl?
Then he noticed something.
That ship has four engines. Four.
Death.
As if to confirm this thought, or indeed prompted by the thought, an orange
bolt of energy appeared at the very tip of the descending craft, roiling nastily,
looking very much like a bringer of death.
“Orange energy,” noted Holly, shooting it with a finger gun. “You’re the
explainer guy, Foaly, explain that.”
“Worry not, lesser intellect,” said Foaly, fingers a blur across his keyboard.
“This ship is unarmed. It’s a scientific probe, for gods’ sake. That plasma bolt is
an ice cutter, no more than that.”
Artemis could hold in the tremors no longer, and they wracked his slim frame.
“Four engines,” he said, teeth chattering. “F-f-four is death.”
Vinyáya paused on her way to the shuttle gangway. She turned, a sheaf of
steel hair escaping her hood. “Death? What’s he talking about?”
Before Holly could answer, the orange plasma beam bubbled merrily for a
moment, then blasted directly into the shuttle’s engine.
“No, no, no,” said Foaly, speaking as one would to an errant student. “That’s
not right at all.”
They watched horrified as the shuttle collapsed in a ball of turgid heat,
rendering the metal shell transparent for just long enough to reveal the writhing
marines inside.
Holly dropped low and dived toward Vinyáya, who was searching for a pathway
through the flames to her men inside.
“Commander!”
Holly Short was fast, actually getting a grip on Vinyáya’s glove before one of
the shuttle’s engines exploded and sent Holly pinwheeling through the
superheated air onto the roof of the Great Skua restaurant. She flapped on the
slate like a butterfly on a pin, staring stupidly at the glove in her hand. Her visor’s
recognition software had locked onto Commander Vinyáya’s face, and a warning
icon flashed gently.
Fatal injury to central nervous system, read a text on her screen. Holly knew
that the computer was saying the same thing in her ear, but she couldn’t hear it.
Please seal off the area and call emergency services.
Fatal injury? This couldn’t be happening again. In that nanosecond she flashed
back to her former commander Julius Root’s death. Reality returned in a fiery
heatwave, turning the ice to steam and popping the heat sensors in her suit.
Holly dug her fingers into the roof slush and hauled her upper body higher.
The scene played around her like a silent movie, as her helmet noise filters had
expanded and ruptured in the nanosecond between the flash and the bang.
Everyone in the shuttle was gone . . . that much was clear.
Don’t say gone, say dead—that’s what they are.
“Focus!” she said aloud, pounding a fist into the roof to emphasize each
syllable. There would be time to grieve later; this crisis was not yet past.
Who is not dead?
She was not dead. Bleeding but alive, smoke drifting from the soles of her
boots.
Vinyáya. Oh gods.
Forget Vinyáya for now.
And in a snowdrift underneath the eaves, she spotted Foaly’s legs doing an
inverted gallop.
Is that funny now? Should I be laughing?
But where was Artemis? Suddenly Holly’s heartbeat was loud in her ears, and
her blood roared like the surf.
Artemis.
Holly’s journey to a crouch was harder than it was supposed to be, and no
sooner had her knees found purchase than her elbows gave way, and she ended
up almost back where she’d started.
Artemis. Where are you?
Then from the corner of her eye, Holly saw her friend loping across the ice.
Artemis was apparently unharmed, apart from a slight drag in his left leg. He was
moving slowly but determinedly away from the burning shuttle. Away from the
crank and blackening of contracting metal and the mercury drip of stealth ore
finally reaching its melting point.
Where are you going?
Not running away, that was for sure. If anything, Artemis was moving directly
into the path of the still-falling space probe.
Holly tried to scream a warning. She opened her mouth but could only cough
smoke. She tasted smoke and battle.
“Artemis,” she managed to hack after several attempts.
Artemis glanced up at her. “I know,” he shouted, a ragged edge to his voice.
“The sky appears to be falling, but it isn’t. None of this is real, the ship, those
soldiers, none of it. I realize that now. I’ve been . . . I’ve been having delusions,
you see.”
“Get clear, Artemis,” cried Holly, her voice not her own, feeling like her brain
was sending signals to someone else’s mouth. “That ship is real. It will crush
you.”
“No it won’t, you’ll see.” Artemis was actually smiling benignly. “Delusional
disorder, that’s all this craft is. I simply constructed this vision from an old
memory, one of Foaly’s blueprints I sneaked a look at. I need to face my
dementia. Once I can prove to myself that this is all in my head, then I can keep
it there.”
Holly crawled across the roof, feeling her insides buzz as magic went to work
on her organs. Strength was returning, but slowly, and her legs felt like lead
pipes. “Listen to me, Artemis. Trust me.”
“No,” Artemis barked. “I don’t trust any of you. Not Butler, not even my own
mother.” Artemis hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know what to believe, or who to
trust. But I do know that there cannot be a space probe crash-landing here at this
precise moment. The odds against it are just too astronomical. My mind is playing
tricks on me, and I have to show it who’s boss.”
Holly registered about half of that speech, but she’d heard enough to realize
that Artemis was referring to his own mind in the third person, which was a
warning sign no matter which head doctor’s theories you subscribed to.
The spaceship continued to bear down on them, unaffected by Artemis’s lack
of belief in its existence, shunting shock waves before it. For a memory, it
certainly seemed very real, each panel richly textured by the tribulations of space
travel. Long jagged striations were etched into the nose cone like scars from
lightning bolts, and buckshot dents peppered the fuselage. A ragged semicircular
chunk was missing from one of the three fins, as though a deep-space creature
had taken a bite from the passing craft, and strangely colored lichen was
crayoned in the square patch vacated by a hull plate.
Even Artemis had to admit it. “That doesn’t seem particularly ethereal. I must
have a more vivid imagination than I had thought.”
Two of the ship’s silencers blew out in rapid succession, and engine roar filled
the bowl of gray sky.
Artemis pointed a rigid finger at the craft. “You are not real!” he shouted,
though even he did not hear the words. The ship was low enough now for Artemis
to read the message written in several scripts and pictograms across the nose
cone.
“‘I come in peace,’” he mumbled, and thought: Four words. Death.
Holly was thinking too, images of tragedy and destruction flashing past like the
lights of a train carriage, but there was one other notion holding steady through
the chaos.
I can’t reach him from this rooftop. Artemis is going to die, and there’s nothing
I can do but watch.
And then a hysterical afterthought.
Butler is going to kill me.
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