فصل چهارم

chapter-4-engineer-ozkopy-has-the-last-word

LUCKILY for Captain Holly Short and the passengers in the Silver Cupid, Foaly was so paranoid where Opal was concerned and so vain about his own inventions that he insisted nothing but branded Foaly-tech parts be used in the shuttle’s refit, going so far as to strip out any Koboi or generic components that he could not trace back to a parent company. But, even with all of his paranoia, Foaly still missed a patch of filler on the rear fender that contained an adhesive Killer Filler developed by Koboi Labs. Fortunately, when the adhesive fizzled and blew, it took the path of least resistance and spun away from the ship like a fiery swarm of bees. No operating systems were affected—though there was an unsightly patch of primer left visible on the spoiler, which everyone in the shuttle would surely have agreed was preferable to their being dead.

The shuttle soared on the thermals, borne aloft like a dandelion seed in the Grand Canyon—if you accept that there are dandelions in the Grand Canyon in spite of the arid conditions. Holly nudged them into the center of the vast chimney, though there was little chance of their striking a wall in the absence of a full-fledged magma flare. Artemis called to her from the rear, but she could not hear over the roar of core wind.

“Cans,” she mouthed, tapping the phones in her own helmet. “Put on your headphones.”

He pulled a pair of bulky cans from their clip on the ceiling and adjusted them over his ears.

“Do you have any kind of preliminary damage report from Foaly?” he asked.

Holly checked her coms. “Nothing. Everything is down. I’m not even getting static.”

“Very well, here is the situation as I see it. As our communications are down, I assume that young Opal’s murder has thrown the entire planet into disarray. There will be mayhem on a scale not seen since the last world war. Our Opal doubtless plans to emerge from the ashes of this global pyre as some form of pixie phoenix. How she intends to do this, I do not know; but there is some connection to my home, the Fowl Estate, so that is where we must go. How long will the journey take, Holly?” Holly considered what was under the hood. “I can shave fifteen minutes off the usual, but it’s still going to be a couple of hours.” Two hours, thought Artemis. One hundred and twenty minutes to concoct a workable strategy wherein we three tackle whatever Opal has planned.

Butler adjusted his headphones’ microphone. “Artemis. I know this has occurred to you, because it occurred to me.” “I predict, old friend,” said Artemis, “that you are about to point out that we are rushing headlong to the exact place where Opal is strongest.” “Exactly, Artemis,” confirmed the bodyguard. “Or, as we used to say in the Delta: we are running blindfolded into the kill box.” Artemis’s face fell. Kill box?

Holly shot Butler a withering glance. Nicely put, big guy. Artemis’s family lives in that kill box.

She flexed her fingers, then wrapped them tightly around the controls. “Maybe I can shave twenty minutes off the usual time,” she said, and set the shuttle’s sensors searching for the strongest thermals to bear them aloft toward whatever madness Opal Koboi had orchestrated for the world.

Atlantis

Opal took a few moments to congratulate herself on once again being absolutely correct in her theorizing and then lay absolutely still to see if she could feel the panic seeping through from above.

One does feel something, Opal concluded. Definitely a general wave of fear, with a dash of desolation.

It would have been nice to simply lie awhile and generate power; but with so much to do, that would have been an indulgence.

Work, work, work, she thought, turning her face to the tunnel mouth. I must away.

With barely a flick of her mind, Opal emitted a corona of intense light and heat, searing through the solidified anti-rad foam that encased her, and levitated to the tube hatch, which hindered her barely more than the foam. After all, she had the power now to change the molecular structure of whatever she concentrated on.

Already the power is fading, she realized. I am leaking magic, and my body will soon begin to disintegrate.

A dwarf stood in the chamber beyond the fizzled hatch, seeming most unperturbed by the wonders before him.

“This is Frondsday,” proclaimed Kolin Ozkopy, chin jutting. “I could be doing without all this bleeping nonsense on a Frondsday. First I lose reception on my phone so I have no idea who is winning the crunchball match, and now a golden pixie is floating in my chamber. So pray tell me, pixie lady, what is going on? And where are your nails?” Opal was amazed to find that she felt compelled to answer. “Nails are difficult, dwarf. I was prepared to forgo nails to save time.” “Yep, that makes a lot of sense,” said Ozkopy, displaying far too much lack of awe for Opal’s taste. “You want to know what’s difficult? Standing here getting blasted by your aura, that’s what. I should be covered in SPF one thousand.” In fairness to Ozkopy, he was not being psychotically blasé about this whole affair. He was actually in shock and had a pretty good idea who Opal was and that he was probably about to die, and he was trying to brazen it out.

Opal’s golden brow creased with a frown like rippling lava. “You, dwarf, should be honored that the final image seared into your worthless retinas is one of my glorious…glory.” Opal was not entirely happy with how that sentence had ended; but the dwarf would be dead momentarily, and the poor sentence construction forgotten. Ozkopy was not entirely happy with Opal insulting his retinas.

“Worthless retinas?!” he spluttered. “My dad gave me these retinas…not that he directly plucked ‘em out of his own head, you understand, but he passed ‘em down.” To his eternal cosmic credit, Ozkopy decided to go out with some flair. “And, seeing as we’re insulting each other, I always thought you’d be taller. Plus, your hips are wobbly.” Opal bristled angrily, which resulted in her radioactive corona expanding by a radius of three yards, totally atomizing anything within the sphere, including Kolin Ozkopy. But, even though the dwarf was gone, the sting of his parting comments would live on in Opal’s mind-drawer of unfinished business for the rest of her life. If Opal had one flaw that she would admit to, it was a tendency to rashly dispose of those who had offended her, letting them off the hook, as it were.

I mustn’t let that dwarf get me down, she told herself, ascending with blinding speed toward the surface. My hips are most definitely not wobbly.

Opal’s ascent was blinding and divine in appearance, like a supernova that shot toward the ocean’s surface, the fierce heat of her black magic repelling the walls of Atlantis and the crushing ocean with equal offhandedness, reorganizing the atomic structure of anything that stood in her way.

She rode her corona of black magic onward and upward toward the Fowl Estate. She did not need to think about her destination, as the lock called to her. The lock called, and she was the key.