فصل دوم

CHAPTER 2: THE WORLD’S BIGGEST

HELSINKI HARBOUR, THE BALTIC SEA

THE giant sea monster that is the kraken sent its finned tentacles spiralling towards the ocean’s surface, pulling its bloated body behind. Its single eye rolled manically in its socket and its curved beak, the size of a schooner’s prow, was open wide, filtering the rushing water through to its rippling gills.

The kraken was hungry and there was room for only one thought in its tiny brain as it sped towards the holiday ferry above.

Kill… Kill… KILL …

‘That is such dwarf manure,’ said Lower Elements Police Captain Holly Short, muting the sound file in her helmet. ‘For one thing, the kraken doesn’t have tentacles, and as for kill… kill… kill …’ ‘I know,’ said Foaly, the voice of mission control in her communicator. ‘I thought you might enjoy that passage. You know, have a laugh. Remember laughing?’ Holly was not amused. ‘It’s so typical of humans, Foaly, to take something perfectly natural and demonize it. Krakens are gentle creatures, and the humans turn them into some kind of murderous giant squid. Kill… kill… kill. Give me a break.’ ‘Come on, Holly, it’s just sensational fiction. You know those humans and their imaginations. Relax.’ Foaly was right. If she got worked up every time the human media misrepresented a mythical creature, she would spend half her life in a rage. Over the centuries Mud Men had caught glimpses of the fairy folk, and had twisted the truth of these glimpses almost beyond recognition.

Let it go. There are decent humans. Remember Artemis and Butler.

‘Did you see that human movie with the centaurs?’ she asked the centaur on the other end of her helmet communicator. ‘They were noble and sporty. My sword for thee, Majesty, then off for a spot of hunting. Fit centaurs, now that did make me laugh.’ Thousands of miles away, somewhere in the Earth’s mantle below Ireland, Foaly, the Lower Elements Police technical adviser, rubbed his paunch.

‘Holly, that hurts. Caballine likes my belly.’

Foaly had got married, or hitched as centaurs called the ceremony, while Holly had been away with Artemis Fowl rescuing demons in Limbo. A lot had changed in the three years she had been away, and sometimes Holly found it difficult to keep up. Foaly had a new bride to occupy his time. Her old friend Trouble Kelp had been promoted to LEP Commander, and she was back working at Recon with the Kraken Watch task force.

‘Apologies, friend. That was mean,’ said Holly. ‘I like your belly too. I’m sorry that I wasn’t there to see a hitching sash round it.’ ‘Me too. Next time.’

Holly smiled. ‘Sure. That’s going to happen.’

Traditionally, male centaurs were expected to take more than one bride, but Caballine was a modern fairy and Holly doubted if she would stand for a new filly in the household.

‘Don’t worry, I’m joking.’

‘You’d better be, because I’m meeting Caballine at the spa this weekend.’ ‘How’s the new gear?’ said Foaly, hurriedly changing the subject.

Holly spread her arms wide, feeling the wind ripple her fingers, seeing the Baltic Sea flash past below in shards of blue and white.

‘It’s wonderful,’ she said. ‘Absolutely wonderful.’

Captain Holly Short of LEPrecon flew in wide, lazy circles above Helsinki, enjoying the brisk Scandinavian air filtering through her helmet. It was just after 5 a.m. local time and the rising sun had set the Uspenski Cathedral’s golden onion dome shimmering. Already the city’s famed marketplace was strobed with headlights as vendors arrived to open up for the morning trade, or eager politicians’ aides made their way towards the blue-grey façade of City Hall.

Holly’s target lay away from what would shortly be a bustling centre of commerce. She adjusted her fingers, and the sensors in her armoured gloves translated the movements to commands for the mechanical wings on her back, sending her spiralling down towards the small island of Uunisaari, half a mile from the port.

‘The body sensors are nice,’ she said. ‘Very intuitive.’

‘It’s as close as it gets to being a bird,’ said Foaly. ‘Unless you want to integrate?’ ‘No thank you,’ said Holly vehemently. She loved flying, but not enough to have an LEP surgeon sew a few implants into her cerebellum.

‘Very well, Captain Short,’ said Foaly, switching to business mode. ‘Pre-op check. Three Ws please.’ The three Ws were every Reconnaissance officer’s checklist before approaching an operation’s zone. Wings, weapon and a way home.

Holly checked the transparent readouts on her helmet visor.

‘Power cell charged. Weapon on green. Wings and suit fully functional. No red lights.’ ‘Excellent,’ said Foaly. ‘Check, check and check. Our screens agree.’

Holly heard keys clicking as Foaly recorded this information in the mission log. The centaur was known for his fondness for old-school keyboards, even though he himself had patented an extremely efficient virtual keyboard – the v-board.

‘Remember, Holly, this is just reconnaissance. Go down and check the sensor. Those things are two hundred years old, and the problem is more than likely a simple overheat. All you need to do is go where I tell you and fix what I tell you. No indiscriminate blasting involved. Understand?’ Holly snorted. ‘I can see why Caballine fell for you, Foaly. You’re such a charmer.’ Foaly snickered. ‘I don’t rise to jibes any more, Holly. Marriage has mellowed me.’ ‘Mellow? I’ll believe that when you last ten minutes in a room with Mulch without throwing a hoof.’ The dwarf, Mulch Diggums, had been at various times enemy, partner and friend to Holly and Foaly. His greatest pleasure in life was stuffing his face, and not far behind that was irritating his various enemies, partners and friends.

‘Perhaps I need a few more years of marriage before I get that mellow. A few more centuries, in fact.’ The island was large in Holly’s visor now, surrounded by a monk’s fringe of foam. Time to stop the chit-chat and proceed with the mission, though Holly was tempted to circle in a holding pattern so she could talk some more with her friend. It seemed as though this was the first real conversation they’d had since her return from Limbo. Foaly had moved on with life in the past three years, but for Holly her absence had only lasted a few hours and, though she had not aged, Holly felt cheated of those years. The LEP psychiatrist would have told her she was suffering from Post-time-travel-displacement Depression, and offered to prescribe a nice shot to cheer her up. Holly trusted happy-shots just about as much as she trusted brain implants.

‘I’m going in,’ she said tersely. This was her first solo mission since debriefing and she did not want anything less than a perfect report, even if it was only Kraken Watch.

‘Copy,’ said Foaly. ‘You see the sensor?’

There were four bio-sensors on the island relaying information back to Police Plaza. Three pulsed a gentle green in Holly’s visor display unit. The fourth sensor was red. Red could mean many things. In this case every reading had risen above normal levels. Temperature, heartbeat, brain activity. All on the danger line.

‘It must be a malfunction,’ Foaly had explained. ‘If not, the other sensors would show something.’ ‘I have it. Strong signal.’

‘OK. Shield and approach.’

Holly twisted her chin sharply left until her neck bone clicked, which was her way of summoning the magic. It wasn’t a necessary movement, since the magic was mostly a brain function, but fairies developed their own tics. She let a dribble of power into her limbs and vibrated out of the visible spectrum. Her shimmer suit picked up her frequency and amplified it so that a tiny spark of magic went a long way.

‘I’m out of sight and going in,’ she confirmed.

‘Understood,’ said the centaur. ‘Be careful, Holly. Commander Kelp will be reviewing this video, so stick to your orders.’ ‘Are you suggesting that I occasionally stray from the rule book?’ said Holly, apparently horrified by the very notion.

Foaly sniggered. ‘I am suggesting that you may not own a copy of the rule book, and, if you do possess one, you certainly have never opened it.’ Fair point, thought Holly, swooping down towards the surface of Uunisaari.

Whales are thought to be the world’s largest mammals. They are not. The kraken can stretch to five kilometres in length and have been a staple of Scandinavian legend since the thirteenth century, when they appeared in the Orvar Odd saga as the fearsome lyngbakr. Early descriptions of the kraken are the most accurate, describing the sea creature as an animal the size of a floating island whose real danger to ships was not the creature itself, but the whirlpool it created when it sank into the ocean. But by the Middle Ages the legend of the kraken had been confused with that of the giant squid, and each was credited with the most fearsome attributes of the other. The squid was pictured big as a mountain, while the peaceful kraken grew tentacles and developed a bloodlust to rival that of the deadliest shark.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The kraken is a docile creature whose main defences are its sheer size and the bulk of shell, gas and fat cells enclosing a melon-sized brain which provides it with just enough intelligence to feed itself and shed its shell. Underneath the crust of rock, weed and coral, the kraken resembles nothing more than the common acorn barnacle, albeit a barnacle that could easily house an Olympic stadium or two.

The kraken enjoy a lifespan of several thousand years, thanks to an incredibly slow metabolism and a huge network of support systems surrounding their soft centres. They tend to settle in a food-rich or magical environment and remain there until the food or energy residue runs out. Nestling in the middle of an archipelago near a human port provides not only camouflage but an abundant source of edible material. And so this is where the kraken are found, anchored to the seabed like gigantic limpets, vacuuming city waste through their gills and fermenting it to methane in their vast stomachs. But, if human garbage is their salvation, it is also their damnation, for increasingly high toxin levels have rendered the kraken sterile, and now there are only half a dozen or so of the ancient creatures left in the oceans.

This particular kraken was the oldest of the bunch. According to shell scrapings, old Shelly, as the small, dedicated Kraken Watch referred to it, was over ten thousand years old, and had been masquerading as an island in Helsinki harbour since the sixteenth century, when the town was known as Helsingfors.

In all that time, Shelly had done little but feed and sleep, feeling no urge to migrate. Any need he may have felt to move on was dulled by the seepings of a paint factory built on his back more than a hundred years previously. To all intents and purposes, Shelly was catatonic, having emitted no more than a couple of methane flashes in over fifty years, so there was no reason to believe that this red light on his sensor was anything more than a crossed wire, and it was Holly’s job to uncross it. It was a standard first day back on the job kind of mission. No danger, no deadline and little chance of discovery.

Holly turned her palms into the wind, descending till her boots scraped the roof of the island’s small restaurant. Actually, there were two islands, separated by a small bridge. One was a genuine island, and the other, larger section was Shelly nestled into the rock. Holly ran a quick thermal sweep, finding nothing but a few rodents and a blotch of heat from the sauna, which was probably on a timer.

She consulted her visor for the sensor’s exact location. It was four metres underwater, tucked below a rocky ledge.

Underwater. Of course.

She stowed her wings mid-air, then plunged feet first into the Baltic Sea, corkscrewing to minimize the splash. Not that there were any humans close enough to hear. The sauna and restaurant did not open until eight, and the nearest fishermen were on the mainland, their rods swaying gently like rows of bare flagpoles.

Holly vented the gas bags in her helmet to reduce buoyancy and sank below the waves. Her visor informed her that the water temperature was a little over ten degrees, but the shimmer suit insulated her from cold shock and even flexed to compensate for the slight pressure increase.

‘Use the Critters,’ said Foaly, his voice crystal clear through the vibration nodes over her ears.

‘Get out of my head, centaur.’

‘Go on. Use the Critters.’

‘I don’t need a tracer. It’s right there.’

Foaly sighed. ‘Then they shall die unfulfilled.’

The Coded Radiation Tracers were micro-organisms bathed in radiation of the same frequency as the object being located. If you knew what you were looking for before leaving Foaly’s workshop, then the Critters would bring you right to it. Though they were a little redundant when the sensor was a few metres away and beeping on your screen.

‘OK,’ moaned Holly. ‘I wish you would stop using me as a guinea pig.’

She pulled back a watertight flap on her glove, releasing a cloud of glowing orange mites into the water. They bunched for a moment, then sped off in a ragged arrow towards the sensor.

‘They swim, they fly, they burrow,’ said Foaly, awed by his own achievement. ‘God bless their tiny hearts.’ The Critters left a glowing orange wake for Holly to follow. She pulled herself below a sharp ledge to find the Critters already excavating the growths covering the sensor.

‘Now, come on. That is handy. Tell me that’s not useful to a field officer.’ It was very useful, especially since Holly only had ten minutes of air left, but Foaly’s head was big enough as it was.

‘A gill helmet would have been more useful, especially since you knew the sensor was underwater.’ ‘You have more than enough air,’ argued Foaly. ‘Especially since the Critters are clearing the surrounding area.’ The Critters ate away the rock and moss covering the sensor until it gleamed like the day it had come off the assembly line. Once their mission was completed, the Critters flickered and died, dissolving in the water with a gentle fizz. Holly switched on her helmet lights, focusing both beams on the alloy instrument. The sensor was the size and shape of a banana and covered with an electrolytic gel.

‘The water is pretty clean, thanks to Shelly. I’m getting a decent picture.’ Holly topped up her suit buoyancy a few notches until she was at neutral, and hung in the water as still as she could.

‘Well, what do you see?’

‘The same as you,’ replied the centaur. ‘A sensor with a flashing red light. I need to take a few readings, if you wouldn’t mind touching the screen.’ Holly laid her palm on the gel so that the omni-sensor on her glove could sync with the ancient instrument.

‘Nine and a half minutes, Foaly, don’t forget.’

‘Please,’ snickered the centaur. ‘I could recalibrate a fleet of satellites in nine and a half minutes.’ It was probably true, thought Holly as her helmet ran a systems check on the sensor.

‘Hmm,’ sighed Foaly, thirty seconds later.

‘Hmm?’ repeated Holly nervously. ‘Don’t hmm, Foaly. Dazzle me with science, but don’t hmm.’ ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with this sensor. It is remarkably functional. Which means …’ ‘That the other three sensors are malfunctioning,’ concluded Holly. ‘So much for your genius.’ ‘I did not design these sensors,’ said Foaly, wounded. ‘They’re old Koboi gear.’ Holly shuddered, her body jerking in the water. Her old enemy Opal Koboi had been one of the People’s leading innovators, until she’d decided that she would prefer to pursue all criminal avenues to crown herself queen of the world instead. Now she was housed in a specially constructed isolation prison cube suspended in Atlantis, and spent her time shooting off mails to politicians pleading for early release.

‘Apologies, old friend, for doubting your wonderful-ness. I suppose I should check the other sensors. Above sea level, I do hope.’ ‘Hmm,’ said Foaly again.

‘Please stop that. Surely, now I am here, I should check the remaining sensors?’ Silence for a moment while Foaly accessed a few files, then he spoke in hitched phrases as the information opened before him. ‘The other sensors… are not the pressing issue… right now. What we really need to know… is why would Shelly be red-lining on this sensor. Let me just see… if we have ever had these kinds of readings before.’ Holly had no choice but to maintain contact with the sensor, legs swaying underneath her, watching the air clock on her visor run down.

‘OK,’ said Foaly finally. ‘Two reasons for a kraken’s readings to red-line. One, Shelly is having a baby kraken, which is impossible since he’s a sterile male.’ ‘That leaves two,’ said Holly, who was certain that she would not like the second reason.

‘And two, he’s shedding.’

Holly rolled her eyes in relief. ‘Shedding. That doesn’t sound so bad.’ ‘Weeeellll, it’s a little worse than it sounds.’

‘What do you mean, a little?’

‘Why don’t I explain as you fly away, as fast as you can.’

Holly did not need to be told twice. When Foaly advised an officer to leave before he delivered one of his beloved lectures, then the situation was serious. She spread her arms wide and the action was mimicked by the wings on her back.

‘Engage,’ she said, pointing both arms to the surface, and the engines ignited, blasting her clear of the Baltic, boiling the water wake as it hung in the air. Her suit was instantly dry as moisture slipped from its non-stick material and air resistance tugged at any remaining drops. In seconds she had climbed to a hundred metres, the anxiety in Foaly’s voice hurrying her along.

‘A kraken sheds its shell once, and records show that Shelly dumped his three thousand years ago, so we presumed that was that.’ ‘But now?’

‘Now it seems as though Shelly has lived long enough to do it again.’

‘And why are we concerned about this?’

‘We are concerned about this because kraken shed very explosively. The new shell has already grown and Shelly will get rid of the old one by igniting a layer of methane cells and blasting it off’’ Holly wanted to be sure she understood what was being said. ‘So you’re saying that Shelly is going to light a fart?’ ‘No, Shelly is going to light the fart. He has stored enough methane to power Haven for a year. There hasn’t been a fart like this since the last dwarf tribal gathering.’ A computer representation of the explosion appeared in her visor. To most fairies the image would be little more than a blur, but LEP officers were forced to develop the double focus necessary to read their screens and watch where they were going at the same time.

When the simulation put Holly clear of the projected blast radius, she dropped her boots, swinging in a loose ascending arc to face the kraken.

‘Isn’t there something we can do?’

‘Besides take a couple of pictures, nope. Too late for that. Only a few minutes to go. Shelly’s inner shell is already at ignition temperature, so put your glare filter down and watch the show.’ Holly lowered her shade. ‘This is going to make the news all over the world. Islands don’t just explode.’ ‘Yes, they do. Volcanic activity, gas leaks, chemical accidents. Believe me, if there’s one thing the Mud Men do know, it’s how to explain away an explosion. The Americans invented Area Fifty-one just because a senator crashed a jet into a mountain.’ ‘The mainland is safe?’

‘Should be. A little shrapnel maybe.’

Holly relaxed, hanging from her wings. There was nothing she could do, nothing she should do. This was a natural process and the kraken had every right to shed its shell.

Methane explosions. Mulch would love this.

Mulch Diggums was currently running a private investigations office in Haven with the pixie wheel-fairy, Doodah Day. Mulch had, in his time, caused some methane disturbances himself.

Something pulsed gently in Holly’s visor. A plasma splodge of red in the thermal-sweep windows. There was life on the island, and not just insect or rodent. Multiple humans.

‘Foaly. I have something.’

Holly resized the window with a series of blink commands to track down the source. There were four hot bodies inside the sauna.

‘Inside the sauna, Foaly. How did we miss them?’

‘Their bodies were at the same temperature as the brick walls,’ replied the centaur. ‘I’m guessing that one of the Mud Men opened the door.’ Holly magnified her visor to plus six and saw that the sauna door was open a crack, a wedge of steam pushing through the gap. The building was cooling faster than the humans, and so now they showed up separately on her scanner.

‘What are those Mud Men doing here? You said nothing opens until eight.’ ‘I don’t know, Holly. How would I know? They’re humans. About as reliable as moon-mad demons.’ It didn’t matter why the humans were there – and wondering about it was a waste of time.

‘I have to go back, Foaly.’

Foaly put a camera on himself, broadcasting his live image to Holly’s helmet.

‘Look at my face, Holly. Do you see this expression? That’s my stern face. Do not do it, Holly. Do not return to the island. Humans die every day and we do not interfere. The LEP never interferes.’ ‘I know the rules,’ said Holly, muting the growling centaur.

There goes my career – again, she thought, angling her wings for a steep dive.

Four men sat in the sauna’s outer room, feeling very smug that they had once again outwitted island authorities and managed to sneak a free sauna before work. It did help that one of the men was Uunisaari’s security guard and had access to the keys and a little five-horsepower punt that accommodated the four friends and a bucket of Karjala beer.

‘Good temperature in the sauna today,’ said one.

A second wiped the steam from his glasses. ‘A little hot, I thought. In fact, even here it feels hot underfoot.’ ‘Go jump in the Baltic, then,’ said the guard, miffed at this lack of appreciation for his efforts. ‘That will cool down your poor pinkies.’ ‘Don’t pay any attention to him,’ said the fourth man, fastening his watch. ‘He has sensitive feet. Always some temperature problem.’ The men, friends since childhood, laughed and swigged their beers. The laughing and swigging ceased abruptly when a section of the roof suddenly caught fire and disintegrated.

The guard coughed out a mouthful of beer. ‘Was someone smoking? I said no smoking!’ Even if one of his sauna buddies had answered, the guard would not have heard, as he had somehow managed to fly through the hole in the roof.

‘My toes are really hot,’ said the bespectacled man, as if hanging on to old topics of conversation might make new ones go away.

The others ignored him, busy doing what men generally do in dangerous times – putting on their trousers.

There was no time for introductions or doors, so Holly drew her Neutrino sidearm, carved a two-metre hole in the roof and was treated to the sight of four pale, semi-dressed Mud Men quivering in sudden fright.

I’m not surprised they’re quivering, she thought. And that’s only the beginning.

As she flew, she worked on her problem: how to get four humans out of the blast zone in as many minutes.

Until recently she would have had a second problem: the building itself. According to the fairy Book, fairies were forbidden to enter human buildings without an invitation. This was a ten-thousand-year-old hex that still had a little sting, causing nausea and loss of power to anyone who defied it. The law was an anachronism and a serious impediment to LEP operations, so after a series of public debates and a referendum the hex had been lifted by demon warlock No1. It had taken the little demon five minutes to unravel a hex that had stumped elfin warlocks for centuries.

Back to the original problem. Four large humans. Big explosion imminent.

The first one was easy enough and the obvious choice. He was blocking the others and wore nothing but a towel and a tiny security guard’s cap, which perched on top of his skull like a nut shell on the head of a bear.

Holly grimaced. I have to get him out of my sight as soon as possible, or I may never forget this image. That Mud Man has more muscles than a troll.

Troll! Of course.

There had been several additions to the Recon kit while Holly had been in Limbo, most invented and patented by Foaly, naturally. One such addition was a new clip of darts for her Neutrino. The centaur called them anti-gravity darts, but the officers called them Floaters.

The darts were based on Foaly’s own Moonbelt, which generated a field around whatever was attached to it, reducing the Earth’s gravitational pull to one-fifth of normal. The Moonbelt was useful for transporting heavy equipment. Field officers quickly adapted the belt to their own specialized needs, attaching their prisoners to the pitons, which made them much easier to handle.

Foaly had then developed a dart that had the same effect as his Moonbelt. The dart used the fugitive’s own flesh to conduct the charge that rendered him almost weightless. Even a troll seems less threatening when it is bobbing in the breeze like a balloon.

Holly slipped the clip from her belt, using the heel of one hand to ram it into the Neutrino.

Darts, she thought. Back to the Stone Age.

The big security guard was square in her sights, his lip wobbling petulantly.

No need for laser sights with this Mud Man, she thought. I could hardly miss.

And she didn’t. The tiny dart pricked the man’s shoulder and he quivered for a moment until the anti-gravity field encircled him.

‘Ooh,’ he said. ‘That’s a little–’

Then Holly had landed beside him, grasped his pale thigh and hurled him into the sky. He went, faster than a popped balloon, leaving a trail of surprised o’s in his wake.

The remaining men hurriedly finished pulling on their trousers. Two tripped in their haste, banging heads before crashing to the ground. Plates of tomato-and-mozzarella rolls were batted aside; bottles of beer went spinning across the tiles.

‘My sandwiches,’ said one man, even as he struggled with his purple jeans.

No time for panic, thought Holly, silent and invisible among them. She ducked low, avoiding pale swinging limbs, and quickly loosed off three more darts.

A strange calm descended on the sauna as three grown men found themselves floating towards a hole in the roof.

‘My feet are–’ began the bespectacled man.

‘Shut up about your feet!’ shouted sandwich man, swiping at him with a fist. The motion sent him spinning and bouncing like a pinball.

Foaly overrode Holly’s mute.

‘D’Arvit, Holly. You have seconds. Seconds! Get out of there now! Even your suit armour will not stop an explosion of this magnitude.’ Holly’s face was red and sweating in spite of her helmet’s climate control.

Seconds left. How many times have I heard that?

No time for subtleties. She lay flat on her back, tapping the readout on her Neutrino to select concussion beams, and fired a wide pattern blast straight up.

The beam bore the men aloft, as a fast-flowing river would bear bubbles, bouncing them off the walls and each other before finally popping them through the still-sparking circle in the roof.

∗

The last man out looked down as he left, wondering absently why he was not gibbering in panic. Surely flying was grounds for hysteria?

That will probably come later, he decided. If there is a later for me.

In the steam of the sauna, it seemed to him that there was a small humanoid shape lying on the floor. A diminutive figure with wings that leaped to its feet, then sped towards the flying men.

It’s all true, thought the man. Just like Lord of the Rings. Fantasy creatures. All true.

Then the island exploded, and the man stopped worrying about fantasy creatures and began worrying about his trousers, which had just caught fire.

With all four men in the air, Holly decided that it was time to get herself as far from the supposed island as possible. She jumped from a squatting position, engaged her wings in the air and shot into the morning sky.

‘Very nice,’ said Foaly. ‘You know they’re calling that move the Hollycopter, don’t you?’ Holly drew her weapon, urging the weightless men further away from the island with short bursts.

‘Busy staying alive, Foaly. Talk later.’

Foaly said, ‘Sorry, friend. I’m worried. I talk when I’m worried. Caballine thinks it’s a defence mechanism. Anyway, the Hollycopter. You did the same take-off during that rooftop shoot-out in Darmstadt. Major – I mean, Commander Kelp caught it on video. They’re using the footage in the Academy now. You wouldn’t believe how many cadets have broken their ankles trying the same trick.’ Holly was about to insist that her friend please shut up, when Shelly ignited his methane cells, decimating his old shell and sending tons of debris hurtling skywards. The shock-wave took Holly from below, like a giant’s punch, sending her pinwheeling. She felt her suit flex to avoid the shock, the tiny scales closing ranks against the impact like the shields of a demon battalion. There was a slight hiss as her helmet plumped the safety bags protecting her brain and spinal cord. The screens in her visor flickered, jumped, then settled.

The world spun by her visor in a series of blues and greys. The artificial horizon in her helmet did several revolutions, end over end, though Holly realized that in actuality she was the one revolving and not the display.

Alive. Still alive. My odds must be getting short.

Foaly broke in on her thoughts.’… heart rate is up, though I don’t know why. One would think you’d be used to these situations by now. The four humans made it, you will be delighted to know, since you risked your life and my technology to save them. What if one of my Floaters had fallen into human hands?’ Holly used a combination of gestures and blinks to fire short bursts from several of her wings’ twelve engines, wrestling back control of her rig.

She opened her visor to cough and spit, then answered his accusation.

‘I’m fine, thanks for asking. And all LEP equipment is fitted with remote destruct. Even me! So the only way your precious Floaters were ever going to fall into human hands was if your technology failed.’ ‘Which reminds me,’ said Foaly. ‘I need to get rid of those darts.’

Below was pandemonium. It seemed as though half of Helsinki’s inhabitants had already managed to launch themselves in various crafts, and a veritable flotilla was heading towards the explosion site, led by a coastguard vessel, two powerful outboards churning at its stern, nose up for speed. The kraken itself was obscured by smoke and dust, but charred fragments of its shell rained down like volcanic ash, coating the decks of the boats below and draping a dark blanket over the Baltic Sea.

Twenty metres to Holly’s left, the floating men bobbed happily through the air, riding the last ripples of explosive shock, trousers hanging in tattered ruins from their waists.

‘I am surprised,’ said Holly, zooming in on the men. ‘No screaming or wetting themselves.’ ‘A little drop of relaxant in the dart,’ chuckled Foaly. ‘Well, I say a little drop. Enough to have a troll missing his mummy.’ ‘Trolls occasionally eat their mothers,’ commented Holly.

‘Exactly.’

Foaly waited until the men had dropped to within three metres of the ocean’s surface, then remote detonated the tiny charge in each dart. Four small pops were followed by four loud splashes. The men were in the water no more than a few seconds before the coastguard reached them.

‘OK,’ said the centaur, obviously relieved. ‘Potential disaster averted and our good deed done for the day. Kick up your boots and head back for the shuttle station. I have no doubt that Commander Kelp will want a detailed report.’ ‘Just a second – I have mail.’

‘Mail! Mail! Do you really think this is the time? Your power levels are down, and the rear panels of your suit have taken a severe pasting. You need to get out of there, before your shield fails altogether.’ ‘I have to read this one, Foaly. It’s important.’

The mail icon flashing in Holly’s visor was tagged with Artemis’s signature. Artemis and Holly colour-coded their mail icons. Green was social, blue was business and red was urgent. The mail icon in Holly’s visor pulsed a bright red. She blinked at the icon, opening the short message.

Mother dying, it read. Please come at once. Bring No1.

Holly felt a cold dread in her stomach and the world seemed to lurch before her eyes.

Mother dying. Bring No1.

The situation must be desperate if Artemis was asking her to bring the powerful demon warlock.

She flashed back to the day, eighteen years ago, when her own mother had passed away. Almost two decades now, and the loss was still as painful as a raw wound. A thought struck her.

It’s not eighteen years. It’s twenty-one. I’ve been away for three.

Coral Short had been a doctor with LEPmarine, which patrolled the Atlantic, cleaning up after humans, protecting endangered species. She had been mortally injured when a particularly rancid-looking tanker they were shadowing accidentally doused their submarine with radioactive waste. Dirty radiation is poison to fairies and it had taken her mother a week to die.

‘I will make them pay,’ Holly had vowed, crying at her mother’s bedside in Haven Clinic. ‘I will hunt down every last one of those Mud Men.’ ‘No,’ her mother had said with surprising force. ‘I spent my career saving creatures. You must do the same. Destruction cannot be my legacy.’ It was one of the last things she would ever say. Three days later, Holly stood stony-faced at her mother’s recycling ceremony, her green dress uniform buttoned to the chin. The Omnitool that her mother had given her as a graduation present in its holster on her belt.

Saving creatures. So Holly applied to Recon.

And now Artemis’s mother was dying. Holly realized that she didn’t think of Artemis as a human any more, just as a friend.

‘I need to go to Ireland,’ she said.

Foaly did not bother to argue: he had sneaked a peek at the urgent mail on Holly’s screen.

‘Go. I can cover for you here for a few hours. I could say you’re completing the Ritual. As it happens there’s a full moon tonight and we still have a few magical sites near Dublin. I’ll send a message to Section Eight. Maybe Qwan will let Number One out of the magi-lab for a few hours.’ ‘Thanks, old friend.’

‘You’re welcome. Now go. I’m going to get out of your head for a while and monitor the chatter here. Maybe I can plant a few ideas in the human media. I like the idea of an underground natural gas pocket. It’s almost the truth.’ Almost the truth.

Holly couldn’t help applying the phrase to Artemis’s mail. So often the Irish boy manipulated people by telling them almost the truth.

She chided herself silently. Surely not. Even Artemis Fowl would not lie about something this serious.

Everyone had their limits.

Didn’t they?