“. . . is barely out of the Stone Age,” murmured Artemis, then chuckled ruefully.
“Another joke, Mud Boy? You’re really in fine form today. What is it this time? Did you tell some poor trusting fool that they caused a plague?”
Artemis hung his head wearily. This could go on for years.
Mulch had stumbled across the shuttle when he’d tunneled to the port wall and wind-blasted a sheet of metal cladding from a service tunnel wall. He knew the panel would be loose because he had utilized this point of entry on previous visits. The shuttle had been up on blocks and under a lube tent, and so Mulch could not resist a little peek. Lo and behold, a tunnel scraper in for refitting. Just the thing for hopping around the People’s network of subterranean access tunnels.
It had been a simple matter for Holly to reverse the clunky shuttle back down the monorail to the tunnel access hatch.
Meanwhile, Artemis had been covering their tracks, removing all traces of their visit to the shuttleport. Wiping video crystals and replacing the lost time with loops. There wasn’t much he could do about the unconscious sprite or the loader-worth of LEP hardware they had helped themselves to from the lockup, but Mulch had no problem taking credit for those.
“Hey, I’m already public enemy number one,” he had said. “It’s not as if I can go any higher on the list.”
So now they were seated inside the tunnel scraper, which was slotted into a launching bracket, drawing a few minutes’ charge from the coupling dock before they dropped into the abyss. Holly spent the time falsifying a report for the tunnel authorities.
“I’m telling them that the shuttle paddle has been upgraded as per the service order, and the ship has been requested by the North African shuttleport to do a supply artery de-clogging. It’s a drone flight, so they won’t be looking for any personnel on board.”
Artemis was determined to give the mission every chance of success, in spite of the bridges he had burned. So if a question had to be asked, he would ask it.
“Will that work?”
Holly shrugged. “I doubt it. There’s probably a smart missile waiting for us on the other side of that door.”
“Really?”
“No. I’m lying. Not nice, is it?”
Artemis shook his head miserably. He would have to think of some way to make it up to Holly. At least partially.
“Of course it will work. For now, at least. By the time Police Plaza puts all of this together, we should have returned to the future.”
“And we can fly without a paddle?”
Holly and Mulch shared a guffaw and a few words in Gnommish that were too fast for Artemis to catch. He did think he heard the word
cowpóg
which translated as
moron
.
“Yes, Mud Boy. We can fly without a paddle, unless you’re planning to scrape some residue from the tunnel walls. Usually we leave that to the robots.”
Artemis had forgotten how cutting Holly could be with people she wasn’t fond of.
Mulch sang a few bars of the old human song “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” He crooned at Holly, clutching an imaginary microphone in his fist.
Holly was not smiling now. “You’re about to lose all feeling in your legs, Diggums, if you don’t shut it.”
Mulch noticed Holly’s expression and realized that now was not the best time to be needling her.
Holly decided that it
was
time to terminate the conversation. She remote-opened the access hatch and withdrew the docking clamps.
“Buckle up, boys,” she said, and dropped the small craft into a steep dive, down an enormous hole, like dropping a peanut into the mouth of a hungry hippo.
CHAPTER 10
Ten-year-old Artemis was about as miserable as Butler could remember seeing him, except for perhaps the time he had lost a science prize to an Australian postgraduate. The bodyguard glanced in the mirror of the rented Land Rover and saw that his young charge was sitting in a puddle of perspiration, his expensive suit virtually dissolving on his spare frame.
He’s in a Fowl mood, thought Butler, in a rare moment of wit.
A perforated box sat belted on the seat beside Artemis. Three black fingers poked from one of the holes, as the captured lemur explored his prison.
Artemis has barely looked at the creature. He is trying to objectify it. It is no small thing to cause the extinction of a species, even to save one’s father.
Artemis, meanwhile, was cataloging the causes of his misery. A missing father and a mother teetering on the brink of nervous collapse were numbers one and two. Followed by a team of Arctic explorers running up expenses in a Moscow hotel room, doubtless living on room service—caviar with everything. Damon Kronski figured high on the list too. A repulsive man with repellant ideals.
The local airport, Fez Saïss, had been closed, and so Butler had been forced to detour the Lear to Mohammed V International in Casablanca and rent a Land Rover there. And not a modern Land Rover either. This one belonged in the last millennium and had more holes than a block of Gruyère cheese. The air-conditioning had spluttered its last more than a hundred miles ago, and the seat padding had worn so thin that Artemis felt like he was sitting on a jackhammer. If the heat didn’t bake him, the vibration would shake him to death.
Still, in spite of all these things, a thought struck Artemis, causing the corner of his mouth to twitch into a half smile.
That strange creature and her human companion were utterly fascinating.
They were desperate to have this lemur, and they would not give up. He was certain of it.
Artemis turned his attention to the city suburbs bouncing past his window. The desert highway was suddenly thick with traffic as they neared the city center. Giant trucks thundered past, tires taller than a grown man, their flatbeds stuffed with sullen human cargo. Harried donkey hooves clicked on the broken asphalt, their backs piled high with sticks, laundry, or even furniture. Thousands of dusty mopeds slalomed through the lanes, often bearing entire families on their rusting frames. The roadside buildings shimmered in the late-afternoon sun like mirages. Ghost houses with tea-drinking specters seated out at the front.
Closer to the town center the buildings were denser with no tracts of desert in between. Dwellings were interspersed with garages and video stores, tea shops and pizza parlors. All were the same sandblasted orange color, with patches of original paint poking through below the lintels.
Artemis felt, as he always did when visiting developing nations, mild surprise at the coexistence of ancient and modern. Goat herders toted iPods on spangled chains and wore Manchester United shirts. Shacks had satellite dishes bolted to their corrugated roofs.
Until recent times, Fez had been a place of real importance, being the depot for the caravan trade from the south and east. It was known as a center of Arab wisdom, a holy city, and a place of pilgrimage when the route to Mecca was closed by weather conditions or overrun with bandits.
Now it had become a place where outlawed Extinctionists did deals with desperate Irish criminals.
The world is changing more rapidly now than it ever has before, thought Artemis. And I am helping to change it for the worse.
Not a comforting thought, but comfort was not a luxury he expected to enjoy in the near future.
Artemis’s cell phone buzzed as an incoming text message arrived, having made its way from Fez to Ireland and back to Morocco.
He checked the screen, and a mirthless smile exposed his incisors.
The leather souk. Two hours
, read the message.
Kronski wished to make the exchange in a public place.
Apparently the doctor trusts me about as much as I trust him.
Smart man.
Holly piloted the shuttle as though she were angry with it, slamming the mining craft around bends until its air brakes screamed and its readout needles shot into the red. She wore a flight helmet hardwired directly into the shuttle’s cameras, so a wraparound view of the shuttle was available to her at all times; she could even choose a remote view beamed to the shuttle from the tunnel’s various cameras. This particular stretch of tunnel saw little traffic, and so the motion-sensitive lights would pop on barely ten yards before the shuttle entered a stretch.
Holly tried hard to enjoy the experience of flying and forget everything else. Being a pilot for the LEP was what she had dreamed of since childhood. As she cut yet another corner with inches to spare, and she felt the shuttle strain to its limits in her hands, the tension drained from her body as though absorbed by the craft.
Artemis lied to me and blackmailed me, but he did it for his mother. A good reason. Who’s to say that Iwould not have done the same thing myself? If I could have saved my mother, I would have done whatever I needed to do, including manipulate my friends.
She could understand what Artemis had done—even though she felt it was unnecessary—but that did not mean she could forgive him just yet.
And how could she forget it? It felt as though she had completely misjudged their friendship.
That won’t happen again.
One thing that Holly was certain of—the most she and Artemis could ever have now was what they had always had: grudging respect.
Holly patched into the passenger-seat bubble-cam on the shuttle ceiling and was gratified to see Artemis clutching the armrests on his seat. Perhaps it was the camera feed, perhaps his face was actually green.
You blew it, Mud Boy, thought Holly, and then:
I hope it’s your face and not the feed.
There was a natural vent in the Moroccan desert south of Agadir, where tunnel gas filtered up through a foot of sand. The only evidence of this was a slight coloration of the sand above the vent, which was quickly dispersed by the winds as soon as the sand reached the surface. Nevertheless, a thousand years of the process had left the dunes with curious red streaks, which the local villagers swore was blood from the victims of Raisuli, a famous twentieth-century bandit. It was highly unlikely that anyone swallowed these claims, least of all the villagers themselves, but it made good reading in the guidebooks and drew visitors to the otherwise unremarkable area.
Holly drilled the craft through the vent, sealing the shuttle’s own air filters against the tiny sand particles. She was flying virtually blind with only a three-dimensional model of the vent to navigate by. Luckily it was a short leg of the trip and it took mere seconds for the shuttle to punch through to the African sky. In spite of the craft’s insulated skin, its passengers soon began to feel the heat. Especially Mulch Diggums. Unlike the other fairy families, dwarfs were not surface creatures and did not dream of golden sun on their upturned faces. Anything higher than sea level gave them vertigo.
Mulch burped wetly. “This is too high. I don’t like this. Hot, too darned hot. I need to go to the bathroom. For what, I’m not sure exactly. Just don’t follow me in there. Whatever you hear, don’t come in.”
When a dwarf gave this sort of advice, it was wise not to ignore it.
Holly sent a charge through the windshield to clear it, then pointed the shuttle’s nose northeast toward Fez. With a bit of luck, they could still beat little Artemis to the rendezvous point.
She set the autopilot and swiveled her seat to face Artemis, whose face was just returning to its normal pallor.
“You’re sure about the rendezvous point?” she asked.
Artemis wasn’t sure about anything, and this uncertainty fogged his brain.
“Not sure, Holly. But I clearly remember making the exchange at the souk in Fez. At the very least it is a place to start. If Kronski and my younger self do not show up, then we proceed to the Extinctionists’ compound.”
Holly frowned. “Hmm. This scheme is not up to your usual standards, and our time is running out. We don’t have a couple of days to play around with. Time is the enemy.”
“Yes,” agreed Artemis. “Time is the crux of this entire misadventure.”
Holly took a nutri-bar from the tiny refrigerator and returned to her controls.
Artemis studied his friend’s back, trying to read her body language. Hunched, rounded shoulders, and arms crossed in front of her body. She was cutting herself off, hostile to communication. He needed to produce some masterstroke to get himself back into her good books.
Artemis pressed his nose to the porthole, watching the Moroccan desert flash past in streaks of ocher and gold. There must be something that Holly wanted. Something she regretted not doing, that in some way he could facilitate.
After a moment’s concentrated thought, it came to him. Hadn’t he seen a field holograph pack on one of the storage rails? And wasn’t there someone to whom Holly had never said good-bye?
Commander Julius Root was up to the quivering tip of his fungus cigar in paperwork. Not that it was actual paperwork. There hadn’t been any LEP files written on real paper in a centaur’s age. It was all saved on a crystal and kept in a central core somewhere in info-space, and apparently now Foaly’s people were trying to grow memory plants, which meant that someday information could be stored in plants or dung heaps, or even the cigar sticking out of Root’s mouth. The commander did not understand any of this, nor did he want to. Let Foaly have the worlds of nano and cyber technologies. He would take the world of everyday LEP problems. And there were plenty of those.
First, his old enemy Mulch Diggums was running riot aboveground. It was almost as if the dwarf were taunting him. His latest crime spree involved breaking into shuttleports, then selling his booty to exiled fairies living among the humans. At each site he would leave a nice pyramid of recycled earth in the middle of the floor, like a calling card.
Then there were those blasted swear toads. A couple of college graduate warlocks had granted the power of speech to the common bloated tunnel toad. Naturally, being college graduates, they had only granted the toads the power of bad language. Now, thanks to an unforeseen side effect, namely fertility, there was a virtual epidemic of these toads running around Haven, offending every citizen they hopped into.
The goblin gangs were growing in strength and audacity. Only last week they had fireballed a patrol car on its route through a goblin town.
Julius Root leaned back in his swivel chair, allowing the smoke from his cigar to form a cloud around his head. There were days when he felt like hanging up his holster for good. Days when it felt as though there was nothing to keep him in the job.
The hologram ring buzzed on the ceiling like a disco ball. Incoming call. Root checked the caller ID.
Captain Holly Short.
Root allowed himself a rare grin.
Then there were days when he knew exactly what he had to do.
I have to groom the best people to take over when I am gone.
People like Captain Kelp, Foaly—gods help me—and Captain Holly Short.
Root had handpicked Holly from the ranks. Promoted her to captain, the first woman in the LEP’s history. And she had done him proud. Every recon so far had been successful, without a single mind-wipe or time stop.
She’s the one, Julius
, said Root’s inner voice.
Smart, fearless, compassionate. Holly Short will make a splendid captain. Who knows, maybe a great commander.
Root wiped the smile from his face. Captain Short did not need to see him smiling proudly like a doting grandfather. She needed discipline, order, and a healthy dollop of respect/fear for her commanding officer.
He tapped the accept pad on his desktop screen, and the hologram ring blasted a Milky Way of stars from its projectors, which swirled and solidified into the flickering form of Captain Holly Short wearing a human suit. Undercover, obviously. He could see her exactly as she was, but she could not see him until he stepped into the footprint of the holographic ring, which he did.
“Captain Short, all is well in Hamburg, I trust?”
Holly seemed speechless for a moment; her mouth hung open and her hands reached out as if to touch the commander. In her time he was dead, murdered by Opal Koboi, but here and now Julius Root was as vital as she remembered.
Root cleared his throat. “All
is
well, Captain?”
“Yes. Of course, Commander. All is well, for the moment. Though it might be an idea to have Retrieval on standby.”
Root dismissed this idea with a wave of his cigar. “Nonsense. Your record so far speaks for itself. You have never needed backup before.”
Holly smiled. “Always a first time.”
Root blinked. Something on the hologram ring’s floating gaseous readout had caught his eye.
“Are you calling me from Africa? What are you doing in Africa?”
Holly slapped her palm against the instrument panel on her end. “No, I’m in Hamburg, in the observation hide. Stupid machine. The projectors are all wrong too. I look about ten years old on the monitor. I’m going to strangle Foaly when I get back.”
Root couldn’t help but smile at that, but he tucked it away quickly.
“Why the hologram, Short? What’s wrong with a plain old communicator? Do you know how expensive it is to beam sound and vision through the earth’s crust?”
Holly’s image flickered and stared at its feet, then up again.
“I . . . I just wanted to thank you, Jul . . . Commander.”
Root was surprised.
Thank him.
For months of impossible tasks and double shifts.
“Thank me, Captain? This is most irregular. I’m not sure I’m doing my job right if fairies are thanking me.”
“Yes, yes you are,” blurted Holly’s image. “You do a fine job, more than fine. No one appreciated . . . appreciates you enough. But I do now. I know what you were . . . are trying to do for me. So thank you, and I won’t let you down.”