CHAPTER 3
ORION RISING
Vatnajökull, Iceland; Now
Artemis was jumping between psychoses.
“Not real!” he shouted at the descending ship. “You are nothing but a delusion,
my friend.”
And from there he hopped straight over into paranoia. “You planned this,” he
shouted at Holly. “Who were your partners? Foaly without doubt. Butler? Did you
turn my faithful bodyguard against me? Did you burgle his mind and plant your
own truths in there?”
From the rooftop, the directional mike in Holly’s helmet picked up no more
than every second word, but it was enough to tell her that Artemis was not the
clinical logistician he used to be.
If the old Artemis could see the new Artemis, the old Artemis would die of
embarrassment.
Like Butler, Holly was having a hard time controlling her rebellious sense of
humor in this dire hour.
“Get down!” she called. “The ship is real!”
“That’s what you want me to think. That ship is nothing more than a cog in
your conspiracy. . . .” Artemis paused. If the ship was a cog in the conspiracy,
and the conspiracy was real, then the ship must be real. “Five!” he blurted
suddenly, having forgotten all about it for a minute. “Five ten fifteen.”
He pointed all of his fingers at the ship, wiggling them furiously.
A ten-finger salute. Surely that will vaporize this vision.
And it seemed as though the fingers were having an effect. The four discusshaped
engines, which had been trailing behind the main body like helpless
puppies tethered to their spooked master, suddenly flipped and began emitting
anti-grav pulses that lolloped toward the ground in fat bubbles, slowing the ship’s
descent faster than seemed possible for a craft of such inelegant dimensions.
“Hah!” crowed Artemis. “I control my own reality. Did you see that?”
Holly knew that, far from controlling anything, Artemis was actually witnessing
a fairy probe’s landing sequence. She had never actually piloted a deep-space
probe herself, but nevertheless knew that standing underneath such a behemoth
while it was dropping anti-grav bubbles was more than enough to get a person
killed, and wiggling fingers like a sideshow magician was not going to change
that.
I have to get up, she thought.
But the injury in her legs held her down like a lead blanket.
I think my pelvis is broken, she realized. Maybe an ankle too.
Holly’s magic had an unusual potency, thanks to a couple of boosts from her
friend the demon No1 (who was turning out to be the most magical warlock the
university had ever enrolled). The magic was setting to work on her injuries, but
not fast enough. Artemis had a couple of seconds before one of those anti-grav
blobs tore him apart or the ship itself actually landed on his head. And you didn’t
have to be a genius to figure out what would happen then, which was just as
well, as Artemis didn’t seem to be a genius anymore.
“Assistance,” she called weakly into her com set. “Someone. Anyone?”
There was no one. Anyone who had been inside the shuttle was beyond magic,
and Foaly was still upended in the snowdrift.
Even if there were somebody, it’s too late.
Large crack patterns bloomed in the ice like hammer blows as the anti-grav
pulses impacted on the surface. The cracks spread across the glacier with a noise
like snapping branches, dropping large sinkholes through to the subterranean
caverns below.
The ship was as big as a grain silo and seemed to be fighting against the pull
of its tethered engines, throwing off waves of steam and jets of fluid. Rocket fuel
drenched Artemis, making it difficult to ignore the fact that the rocket was real.
But if there was one thing Artemis had not lost it was his stubbornness, and so he
stood his ground, refusing to yield to his final squeak of good sense.
“Who cares?” he muttered.
Holly somehow heard the last two words and thought,
I care. Desperate situations call for desperate solutions.
Nothing to lose, thought Holly, flapping at the holster on her thigh.
She swept her pistol from its home in a slightly more erratic arc than usual.
The gun was synced with her visor, but even so, Holly did not have time to check
the settings. She simply held down the command sensor with her thumb, then
spoke clearly into the microphone at the side of her mouth.
“Gun.” [Pause for beep.] “Non lethal. Wide-bore concussive.”
“Sorry, Artemis,” she muttered, then fired a good three-second blast at her
human friend.
Artemis was ankle deep in slush and in full-rant mode when Holly pulled the
trigger.
The beam hit him like a slap from a giant electric eel.
His body was lifted and tossed through the air a moment before the probe
clattered to a bone-crushing landing, obliterating the spot where he had been
standing.
Artemis dropped into a crater like a sack of kindling and disappeared from
Holly’s sightline. That’s not good, thought Holly, then saw her own magical sparks
hover before her eyes like inquisitive amber-tailed fireflies.
Shutdown, she realized. My magic is sending me to sleep so that I can heal.
From the corner of her eye, Holly saw a door open in the probe’s belly and a
gangplank swing down on hydraulics. Something was coming out.
Hope I get to wake up, Holly thought. I hate the ice and I don’t want to die
cold.
Then she closed her eyes and did not feel her limp body roll from the rooftop
and thump into a snowdrift below.
Barely a minute later, Holly’s eyes fluttered open. Waking up felt jagged and
unreal, like documentary footage from a war zone. Holly could not remember
standing, but suddenly she was on her feet, being dragged along by Foaly, who
looked extremely disheveled, possibly because his beautiful quiff had been totally
singed and sat balanced on top of his head like a bird’s nest. But mostly he
seemed depressed.
“Come on, Captain!” Foaly shouted, his voice seeming a little out of sync with
his mouth. “We need to move.” Holly coughed amber sparks, and her eyes
watered.
Amber magic now? I’m getting old.
Foaly shook her shoulders. “Straighten up, Captain. We have work to do.”
The centaur was using trauma psychology. Holly knew this: she could
remember the in-service course in Police Plaza.
In the event of battle stress, appeal to the soldiers’ professionalism. Remind
them of their rank repeatedly. Insist that they perform their duty. This will not
have a long-term healing effect on any psychological wounds, but it might be
enough to get you back to base.
Commander Vinyáya had given that course.
Holly tried to pull herself together. Her legs felt brittle from the knees down,
and her midsection buzzed from the post-healing pain known as magic burn.
“Is Artemis alive?”
“Don’t know,” said Foaly brusquely. “I built those things, you know. I designed
them.”
“What things?”
Foaly dragged her to a glassy droop in the glacier, slicker than any ice rink.
“The things hunting us right now. The amorphobots. The things that came out
of the probe.”
They slid to the bottom of the bank, leaning forward to keep their balance.
Holly seemed to have developed tunnel vision, though her visor was
panoramic. The edges of her vision crackled with amber static.
I am still healing. I shouldn’t be moving. Gods know what damage I will do
myself.
Foaly seemed to read her mind, but more likely it was fairy empathy.
“I had to get you out of there. One of my amorphobots was heading your way,
sucking up everything in its path. The probe’s gone below, to gods know where.
Try to lean on me.”
Holly nodded, then coughed again; the spray was instantly absorbed by her
porous visor.
They hobbled across the ice toward the crater where Artemis lay. He was
extremely pale and there was a speed drip of blood running from the corner of his
mouth to his hairline. Foaly dropped to his forelegs and tried to encourage
Artemis back into consciousness with a stiff talking to.
“Come on, Mud Boy,” he said, poking Artemis’s forearm. “No time for
lollygagging.”
Artemis’s response to this chastising was a barely noticeable jerking of his
arm. This was good—at least it told Holly that Artemis was still alive.
Holly tripped over the crater’s lip, and stumbled to the bottom.
“Lollygagging?” she gasped. “Is that even a word?”
Foaly poked Artemis one more time. “Yes. It is. And shouldn’t you be killing
those robots with your pencil?”
Holly’s eyes seemed to light up. “Really? Can I do that?”
Foaly snorted. “Certainly. If your pencil has a super-duper demon magic beam
inside it instead of graphite.”
Holly was still groggy, but even through a fugue of injury and battle stress, it
was obvious that the situation was dire. They heard strange metallic clicks and
animalistic whoops chittering through the air, softly at first then rising in tempo
and intensity to a frenzy.
The noise grated against Holly’s forehead as though her skin were being
yanked.
“What is that?”
“The amorphobots are communicating,” whispered Foaly. “Transferring
terabytes of information wirelessly. Updating each other. What one knows, they
all know.”
Holly scanned Artemis’s vitals through her visor. The glowing readouts
informed her that he had a slight heart murmur and there was some unusual
brain activity in the parietal lobe. Other than that, the best thing her helmet
computer could conclude about Artemis was that he was basically not dead. If she
could survive this latest misadventure, maybe Artemis would too.
“What are they looking for, Foaly?”
“What are they looking for?” repeated the centaur, smiling that particular
hysterical smile that exposed too much gum.
Holly suddenly felt her senses snap into focus and knew that the magic had
finished its overhaul of her injuries. Her pelvis still throbbed and probably would
for a few months, but she was operational again, so maybe she could lead them
back to fairy civilization.
“Foaly, pull yourself together. We need to know what those things can do.”
The centaur seemed put out that someone would choose this particular
moment to ask him questions when he had so many vital issues to consider.
“Holly, really! Do we have time for explanations now?”
“Snap out of it, Foaly! Information, hand it over.”
Foaly sighed, lips flapping. “They are biospheres. Amorphobots. Dumb plasmabased
machines. They collect samples of plant life and analyze them in their
plasma. Simple as that. Harmless.”
“Harmless,” blurted Holly. “I think someone has reprogrammed your
amorphobots, centaur.”
The blood disappeared from Foaly’s cheeks and his fingers twitched. “No. Not
possible. That probe is supposed to be on its way to Mars to search for
microorganisms.”
“I think we can be pretty sure that your probe has been hijacked.”
“There is another possibility,” suggested Foaly. “I could be dreaming all of
this.”
Holly pressed on with her questions. “How do we stop them, Foaly?”
It was impossible to miss the fear that flickered across Foaly’s face, like a sun
flash across a lake. “Stop them? The amorphobots are built to withstand
prolonged exposure to open space. You could drop one of these onto the surface
of a star and it would survive for long enough to transmit some information back
to its mother probe. Obviously I have a kill code, but I suspect that has been
overridden.”
“There must be a way. Can’t we shoot them?”
“Absolutely not. They love energy. It feeds their cells. If you shoot them,
they’ll just get bigger and more powerful.”
Holly laid a palm on Artemis’s forehead, checking his temperature.
I wish you would wake up, she thought. We could really use one of your
brilliant schemes right now.
“Foaly,” she said urgently. “What are the amorphobots doing right now? What
are they looking for?”
“Life,” replied Foaly simply. “They’re doing a grid search now, starting at the
drop site and moving out. Any life forms they encounter will be absorbed into the
sac, analyzed, then released.”
Holly peeped over the lip of the crater. “What are their scan criteria?”
“Thermal is the default. But they can use anything.”
Thermal, thought Holly. Heat signatures. That’s why they are spending so
much time by the flaming shuttle.
The amorphobots were arranged on corners of invisible grid squares, slowly
working their way outward from the shuttle’s smoking carcass. They seemed
innocuous enough, rolling balls of gel with twin glowing red sensors at their cores.
Like slime balloons from a children’s party.
Maybe the size of a crunchball.
They couldn’t be all that dangerous surely. Dozy little blebers.
Her opinion altered sharply when one of the amorphobots changed color from
translucent green to angry electric blue and the color spread to the others. Their
eerie chittering became a constant shrill whine.
They have found something, Holly realized.
The entire squad of twenty or so bots converged on a single spot, some
merging so that they formed larger blobs, which flowed across the ice with a
speed and grace heretofore concealed. The bot that had flashed the message to
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