فصل دوم

CHAPTER 2: CRUISIN’ FOR CHIX

WEST BANK, HAVEN CITY, THE LOWER ELEMENTS

THE traditional image of a leprechaun is one of a small, green-suited imp. Of course, this is the human image. Fairies have their own stereotypes. The People generally imagine officers of the Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance squad to be truculent gnomes or bulked-up elves, recruited straight from their college crunchball squads.

Captain Holly Short fits neither of these descriptions. In fact, she would probably be the last person you would pick as a member of the LEPrecon squad. If you had to guess her occupation, the catlike stance and the sinewy muscles might suggest a gymnast or perhaps a professional potholer. But take a closer look, past the pretty face, into the eyes, and you will see determination so fiery it could light a candle at ten paces, and a streetwise intelligence that made her one of Recon’s most respected officers.

Of course, technically, Holly was no longer attached to Recon. Ever since the Artemis Fowl Affair, when she had been captured and held to ransom, her position as Recon’s first female officer had been under review. The only reason she wasn’t at home watering her ferns right now was that Commander Root had threatened to turn in his own badge if Holly was suspended. Root knew, even if Internal Affairs wasn’t convinced, that the kidnapping had not been Holly’s fault, and only her quick thinking had prevented loss of life.

But the Council members weren’t particularly interested in loss of human life. They were more concerned with loss of fairy gold. And according to them, Holly had cost them a fair chunk from the Recon ransom fund. Holly was quite prepared to fly above ground and wring Artemis Fowl’s neck until he returned the gold, but that wasn’t the way it worked: the Book, the fairy bible, stated that once a human managed to separate a fairy from his gold, then that gold was his to keep.

So, instead of confiscating her badge, Internal Affairs had insisted Holly handle grunt work – somewhere that she couldn’t do any harm. Stakeout was the obvious choice. Holly was farmed out to Customs and Excise, stuck in a Cham pod and suckered to the rock face overlooking a pressure-elevator chute. Dead-end duty.

That said, smuggling was a serious concern for the Lower Elements Police. It wasn’t the contraband itself, which was generally harmless junk – designer sunglasses, DVDs, cappuccino machines and such. It was the method of acquiring these items.

The B’wa Kell goblin triad had cornered the smuggling market and was becoming increasingly brazen in its overground excursions. It was even rumoured that the goblins had constructed their own cargo shuttle to make their expeditions more economically viable.

The main problem was that goblins were dim-witted creatures. All it would take was for one of them to forget to shield and goblin photos would be bouncing from satellites to news stations around the world. Then the Lower Elements, the last Mud-Man-free zone on the planet, would be discovered. When that happened, human nature being what it was, pollution, strip-mining and exploitation were sure to follow.

This meant that whichever poor souls were in the Department’s bad books got to spend months at a time on surveillance duty, which is why Holly was now anchored to the rock face outside a little-used chute’s entrance.

E37 was a pressure elevator that emerged in downtown Paris, France. The European capital was redflagged as a high-risk area, so visas were rarely approved. LEP business only. No civilian had been in the chute for decades, but it still merited twenty-four seven surveillance – which meant six officers on eight-hour shifts.

Holly was saddled with Chix Verbil for a pod mate. Like most sprites, Chix believed himself God’s green-skinned gift to females, and spent more time trying to impress Holly than doing his job.

‘Lookin’ good tonight, Captain,’ was Chix’s opening line that particular night. ‘You do something with your hair?’ Holly adjusted the screen focus, wondering what you could do with an auburn crew cut.

‘Concentrate, Private. We could be up to our necks in a firefight at any second.’ ‘I doubt it, Captain. This place is quiet as the grave. I love assignments like this. Nice ‘n’ easy. Just cruisin’.’ Holly surveyed the scene below. Verbil was right. The once thriving suburb had become a ghost town with the chute’s closure to the public. Only the occasional foraging troll stumbled past their pod. When trolls began staking out territory in an area, you knew it was deserted.

‘It’s jus’ you an’ me, Cap. And the night’s still young.’

‘Stow it, Verbil. Keep your mind on the job. Or isn’t private a low-enough rank for you?’ ‘Yes, Holly, sorry, I mean, yes, sir.’

Sprites. They were all the same. Give him a pair of wings and he thought he was irresistible.

Holly chewed her lip. They’d wasted enough taxpayers’ gold on this stakeout. The brass should just call it a day, but they wouldn’t. Surveillance duty was ideal for keeping embarrassing officers out of the public eye.

In spite of this, Holly was determined to do the job to the best of her ability. The Internal Affairs tribunal wasn’t going to have any extra ammunition to throw at her if she could help it.

Holly called up their daily pod checklist on the plasma screen. The gauges for the pneumatic clamps were in the green. Plenty of gas to keep their pod hanging there for four long, boring weeks.

Next on the list was thermal imaging. ‘Chix, I want you to do a fly-by. We’ll run a thermal.’ Verbil grinned. Sprites loved to fly. ‘Roger, Captain,’ he said, strapping a thermoscan bar to his chest.

Holly opened a hole in the pod and Verbil swooped out, climbing quickly to the shadows. The bar on his chest bathed the area below with heat-sensitive rays. Holly punched up the thermoscan program on her computer. The view screen swam with fuzzy images in various shades of grey. Any living creature would show up, even behind a layer of solid rock. But there was nothing, just a few swear toads and the tail end of a troll shambling off the screen.

Verbil’s voice crackled over the speaker. ‘Hey, Captain. Should I take ‘er in for a closer look?’ That was the trouble with portable scanners. The further away you were, the weaker the rays became.

‘OK, Chix. One more sweep. Be careful.’

‘Don’t worry, Holly. The Chix man will keep himself in one piece for you.’

Holly drew a breath to make a threatening reply, but the retort died in her throat. On the screen. Something was moving.

‘Chix. You getting this?’

‘Affirmative, Cap. I’m getting it, but I dunno what I’m getting.’

Holly enhanced a section of the screen. Two beings were moving around on the second level. The beings were grey.

‘Chix. Hold your position. Continue scanning.’

Grey? How could grey things be moving? Grey was dead. No heat, cold as the grave. Nevertheless… ‘On your guard, Private Verbil. We have possible hostiles.’

Holly opened a channel to Police Plaza. Foaly, the LEP’s technical wizard, would undoubtedly have their video feed running in the Operations’ booth. ‘Foaly. You watching?’ ‘Yep, Holly,’ answered the centaur. ‘Just bringing you up on the main screen.’ ‘What do you make of these shapes? Moving grey? I’ve never seen anything like it.’ ‘Me neither.’ There followed a brief silence, punctuated by the clicking of a keyboard. ‘Two possible explanations. One, equipment malfunction. These could be phantom images from another system. Like interference on a radio.’ ‘The other explanation?’

‘It’s so ludicrous that I hardly like to mention it.’

‘Yeah, well do me a favour, Foaly, mention it.’

‘Well, ridiculous as it sounds, someone may have found a way to beat my system.’ Holly paled. If Foaly was even admitting the possibility, then it was almost definitely true. She cut the centaur off, switching her attention back to Private Verbil. ‘Chix! Get out of there. Pull up! Pull up!’ The sprite was far too busy trying to impress his pretty captain to realize the seriousness of his situation. ‘Relax, Holly. I’m a sprite. Nobody can hit a sprite.’ That was when a projectile erupted through a chute window, blowing a fist-sized hole in Verbil’s wing.

Holly tucked a Neutrino 2000 into its holster, issuing commands through her helmet’s corn-set. ‘Code Fourteen, repeat Code Fourteen. Fairy down. Fairy down. We are under fire. E37. Send warlock medics and back-up.’ Holly dropped through the hatch, rappelling to the tunnel floor. She ducked behind a statue of Frond, the first elfin king. Chix was lying on a mound of rubble across the avenue. It didn’t look good. The side of his helmet had been bashed in by the jagged remains of a low wall, rendering his corn-system completely useless.

She needed to reach him soon or he was a goner. Sprites only had limited healing powers.They could magic away a wart, but gaping wounds were beyond them.

‘I’m patching you through to the commander,’ said Foaly’s voice in her ear. ‘Standby.’ Commander Root’s gravelly tones barked across the airwaves. He did not sound in the best of moods. No surprises there.

‘Captain Short. I want you to hold your position until back-up gets there.’ ‘Negative, Commander. Chix is hit. I have to reach him.’

‘Holly. Captain Kelp is minutes away. Hold your position. Repeat. Hold your position.’ Behind the helmet’s visor, Holly gritted her teeth in frustration. She was one step away from being booted out of the LEP, and now this. To rescue Chix she would have to disobey a direct order.

Root sensed her indecision. ‘Holly, listen to me. Whatever they’re shooting at you, it punched straight through Verbil’s wing. Your LEP vest is no good. So sit tight and wait for Captain Kelp.’ Captain Kelp. Possibly the LEP’s most gung-ho officer, famous for choosing the name Trouble at his graduation ceremony. Still, there was no officer Holly would have preferred to have at her back going through a door.

‘Sorry, sir, I can’t wait. Chix took a hit in the wing. You know what that means.’ Shooting a sprite in the wing was not like shooting a bird. Wings were a sprite’s largest organ and contained seven major arteries. A hole like that would have ruptured at least three.

Commander Root sighed. Over the speakers it sounded like a rush of static.

‘OK, Holly. But stay low. I don’t want to lose any of my people today.’

Holly drew her Neutrino 2000 from its holster, flicking the setting up to three. She wasn’t taking any chances with the snipers. Presuming they were goblins from the B’wa Kell triad, on this setting the first shot would knock them unconscious for eight hours at the very least.

She gathered her legs beneath her and rocketed out from behind the statue. Immediately a hail of gunfire blew chunks from the structure.

Holly raced towards her fallen comrade, projectiles buzzing around her head like supersonic bees. Generally, in a situation of this kind, the last thing you do is move the victim, but with gunfire raining down on them, there was no choice. Holly grabbed the private by his epaulettes, hauling him behind a rusted-out delivery shuttle.

Chix had been out there a long time. He was grinning feebly. ‘You came for me, Cap. I knew you would.’ Holly tried to keep the worry from her voice. ‘Of course I came, Chix. Never leave a man behind.’ ‘I knew you couldn’t resist me,’ he breathed. ‘I knew it.’ Then he closed his eyes. There was a lot of damage done here. Maybe too much.

Holly concentrated on the wound. Heal, she thought, and the magic welled up inside her like a million pins and needles. It spread through her arms and ran down to her fingers. She placed her hands on Verbil’s wound. Blue sparks tingled from her fingers into the hole. The sparks played around the wound, repairing the scorched tissue and replicating spilt blood. The sprite’s breathing calmed, and a healthy green tinge started to return to his cheeks.

Holly sighed. Chix would be OK. He probably wouldn’t fly any more missions on that wing, but he would live. Holly laid the unconscious sprite on his side, careful not to put pressure on the injured wing. Now for the mysterious grey shapes. Holly upped the setting on her weapon to four and ran without hesitation towards the chute entrance.

On your very first day in the LEP Academy, a big hairy gnome, with a chest the size of a bull troll, pins each cadet to a wall and warns them never to run into an unsecured building during a firefight. He says this in a most insistent fashion. He repeats it every day until the maxim is etched on every cadet’s brain. Nevertheless, this was exactly what Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon Unit proceeded to do.

She blasted the terminal’s double doors, diving through to the shelter of a check-in desk. Less than four hundred years ago, this building had been a hive of activity, with tourists queuing for above-ground visas. Paris had once been a very popular tourist destination. But inevitably, it seemed, humans had claimed the European capital for themselves. The only place fairies felt safe was in Disneyland, Paris, where no one looked twice at diminutive creatures, even if they were green.

Holly activated a motion-sensor filter in her helmet and scanned the building through the desk’s quartz security panel. If anything moved, the helmet’s computer would automatically flag it with an orange corona. She looked up, just in time to see two figures loping along a viewing gallery towards the shuttle bay. They were goblins all right, reverting to all fours for extra speed, trailing a hover trolley behind them. They were wearing some kind of reflective foil suits, complete with headgear, obviously to fox the thermal sensors. Very clever.Too clever for goblins.

Holly ran parallel to the goblins, one floor down. All around her, ancient advertising hoardings sagged in their brackets. TWO-WEEK SOLSTICE TOUR. TWENTY GOLD GRAMS. CHILDREN UNDER TEN TRAVEL FREE.

She vaulted the turnstile gate, racing past the security zone and duty-free booths. The goblins were descending now, boots and gloves flapping on a frozen escalator. One lost his headgear in his haste. He was big for a goblin, over a metre. His lidless eyes rolled in panic, and his forked tongue flicked upwards to moisten his pupils.

Captain Short squeezed off a few bursts on the run. One clipped the backside of the nearest goblin. Holly groaned. Nowhere near a nerve centre. But it didn’t have to be. There was a disadvantage to these 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 two metres 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 bay 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. This chute was one of many of the natural vents that riddled the Earth’s mantle and crust. Magma streams from the planet’s molten core blasted up through these chutes towards the surface at irregular intervals. If it wasn’t for these pressure releases, the Earth would have shaken itself to fragments aeons ago. The LEP had harnessed this natural power for express surface shots. Recon officers rode the magma flares in titanium eggs in times of emergency. For a more leisurely trip, shuttles avoided the flares, ascending the chutes on hot-air currents 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 sub-atomic level.

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

Holly switched on the helmet’s PA. ‘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 non-nuclear 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 hefted the rifle in Holly’s direction. It was a terrible throw, landing five metres short. But it served its purpose as a distraction. The 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, two-metre-thick steel doors shut off the access tunnel from the rest of the terminal. They were trapped in there, with a column of magma on the way. Not that the magma would kill them – there wasn’t much overspill from the flares. But the super-heated 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 seven-metre-long 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 that wouldn’t be enough. In seconds, a wall of dry heat would roll in there, and raise the temperature enough to crack the walls.

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

The tanks buckled and split, belching out rancid air and a few trickles of coolant. Useless. They must have bled out over the centuries, and the goblins had never bothered replacing them. But there was one left, untouched. 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 on to her head at the very moment a heatwave came billowing in from the chute. It was a curious sensation being burnt and frozen 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 demister in her visor and got up off her knees. Water slid in sheets from her non-friction 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 manoeuvre, Captain.’

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

Holly’s first thought had been that somehow the B’wa Kell was manufacturing its 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 AAA 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 was trading with the Mud People. Humans and goblins working together to reactivate outlawed weapons. And if the weapons were here, how long could it be before the Mud People 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. The centaur was the main reason that humans hadn’t yet discovered the People’s underground lairs. 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 rumour 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 kebab.’ ‘That’s it, Foaly, draw attention away from the fact that the B’wa Kell foxed 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 arch-enemy, 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, OK?’

‘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 have 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 towards 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 grey hair was quivering with emotion. ‘This was supposed to be a surveillance mission. There were several back-up scjuads 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 anyway?’

For the first time, Holly’s gaze dropped. ‘I sent him out to do a thermal, sir. lust following regulations.’ Root nodded. ‘I’ve talked to the paramedic warlock. Verbil will be OK, 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 led them to the rear of the maintenance area, to the shuttle bay itself, where a restricted-access perspex dome had been erected. She pressed through the frosted flaps.

‘You see. This is serious.’

Root studied the evidence. In the shuttle’s cargo bay were crates of AAA 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? I hope you’re being melodramatic.’

‘No, chief,’ replied the centaur, sombre for once. ‘This is deadly serious. The B’wa Kell is 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 of less than a decade. Obviously somebody managed to sneak a few out of the recycling lock-up.’ ‘Quite a few by the look of all these batteries. That’s the last thing I need, goblins with Softnoses.’ The theory behind the Softnose technique involved placing an inhibitor on the blaster, which allowed the laser to travel at slower speeds so that it actually penetrated the target. Initially developed for mining purposes, they were quickly adapted by some greedy weapons manufacturer.

The Softnoses were just as quickly outlawed, for the obvious reason that these weapons were designed to kill and not incapacitate. Now and then one found its way into the hands of a gang member. But this did not look like small-scale, black-market trading. This looked like somebody was planning something big.

‘You know what the worrying thing about this is?’ said Foaly.

‘No,’ said Root, with deceptive calmness. ‘Do tell me what the worrying thing is.’ Foaly turned the gun around. ‘The way this weapon has been adapted to take a human battery. Very clever. There’s no way a goblin figured this out on his own.’ ‘But why adapt the Softnoses?’ asked the commander. ‘Why not just use the old solar cells?’ ‘Those solar cells are very rare. They’re worth their weight in gold. Antique dealers use them to power all sorts of old gadgets. And it would be impossible to build a power-cell factory of any kind without my sensors picking up emissions. Much simpler just to steal them from the humans.’ Root lit one of his trademark fungal cigars. ‘Tell me that’s it. Tell me there’s nothing else.’ Holly’s gaze flickered to the rear of the hangar. Root caught the glance and pressed past the crates to the makeshift shuttle in the docking bay. The commander climbed into the craft.

‘And what the hell is this, Foaly?’

The centaur ran a hand along the ship’s hull. ‘It’s amazing. Unbelievable. They put a shuttle together from junk. I’m surprised this thing gets off the ground.’ The commander bit down hard on his fungus cigar. ‘When you’re finished admiring the goblins, Foaly, maybe you can explain how the B’wa Kell got a hold of this stuff. I thought all outdated shuttle technology was supposed to be destroyed.’ ‘That’s what I thought. I retired some of this stuff myself. This starboard booster used to be in E1, until Captain Short blew it out last year. I remember signing the destruct order.’ Root spared a second to shoot Holly a withering glance.

‘So now we have shuttle parts escaping the recycling smelters as well as Softnose lasers. Find out how this shuttle got here. Take it apart, piece by piece. I want every strand of wire lasered for prints and DNA. Feed all the serial numbers into the mainframe. See if there are any common denominators.’ Foaly nodded. ‘Good idea. I’ll get someone on it.’

‘No, Foaly. You get on it. This is priority. So give your conspiracy theories a rest for a few days and find me the inside fairy who’s selling this junk.’ ‘But, Julius,’ protested Foaly. ‘That’s grunt work.’

Root took a step closer. ‘One, don’t call me Julius, civilian. And two, I’d say it was more like donkey work.’ Foaly noticed the vein pulsing in the commander’s temple. ‘Point taken,’ he said, removing a handheld computer from his belt. ‘I’ll get right on it.’ ‘You do that. Now, Captain Short, what is our B’wa Kell prisoner saying?’

Holly shrugged. ‘Nothing much, still unconscious. He’ll be coughing soot for a month when he wakes up. Anyway, you know how the B’wa Kell works. The soldiers aren’t told anything. This guy is just a grunt. It’s a pity the Book forbids using the mesmer on other fairies.’ ‘Hmm,’ said Root, his face glowing as red as a baboon’s behind. ‘An even greater pity the Atlantis Convention outlawed truth drugs. Otherwise we could pump this convict full of serum until he sang like a drunken Mud Man.’ The commander took several deep breaths, calming down before his heart popped. ‘Right now, we need to find out where these batteries came from, and if there are any more in the Lower Elements.’ Holly took a breath. ‘I have a theory, sir.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ groaned Root. ‘Artemis Fowl, right?’

‘Who else could it be? I knew he’d be back. I knew it.’

‘You know the rules, Holly. He beat us last year. Game over. That’s what the Book says.’ ‘Yes, sir, but that was a different game. New game, new rules. If Fowl is supplying power cells to the B’wa Kell, the least we can do is check it out.’ Root considered it. If Fowl was behind this, things could get very complicated, very fast.

‘I don’t like the idea of interrogating Fowl on his turf. But we can’t bring him down here. The pressure below ground would kill him.’ Holly disagreed. ‘Not if we keep him in a secure environment. The city is equalized. So are the shuttles.’ ‘OK, go,’ the commander said at last. ‘Bring him in for a little chat. Bring the big one too.’ ‘Butler?’

‘Yes, Butler.’ Root paused. ‘But remember, we’re going to run a few scans, Holly, that’s it. I don’t want you using this as an opportunity to settle a score.’ ‘No, sir. Strictly business.’

‘Do I have your word on that?’

‘Yes, sir. I guarantee it.’

Root ground the cigar butt beneath his heel. ‘I don’t want anyone else getting hurt today, not even Artemis Fowl.’ ‘Understood.’

‘Well,’ added the commander, ‘not unless it’s absolutely necessary.’