Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex (7 page)

“Crazy Bear really is crazy,” crowed Max. “He’s beating up the ring. Are you going to stand for that, ninjas? This man is defiling the very symbol of our sporting heritage.”

Apparently the Ninja Squad was prepared to accept a little defiling of their symbol if it meant not being attacked by the man mountain who had taken their pyramid apart with no more effort than a child knocking down a house of cards.

Butler hit the post again, this time smashing it right out of its socket. He hefted the metal pole, stepped underneath the ropes, and began to twist the ring in on itself.

This move was so unprecedented that it was several seconds before anyone could appreciate what they were seeing. In years to come the maneuver would become known as
the wringer
and would elevate the real Crazy Bear, who was passed out drunk in the back alley, to the status of
luchador
superstar.

Even Max Schetlin’s tirade dried up as his brain tried to process what was actually going on.

Butler took advantage of the stunned stillness to quickly spin the corner post half a dozen times, popping another two supports from their housings.

This is not as difficult as it looks, mused Butler, catching sight of himself on the giant screen. This entire ring is little more than an inverted tent. A well-fed teenager could pull it down
.

He gathered the three posts in his arms, twirling them deftly, drawing the ring tighter and tighter.

A couple of the ninjas had enough presence of mind to skip out while they could, but most stood slack-jawed, and a couple who believed themselves to be dreaming sat down and closed their eyes.

Butler nodded at Samsonetta. “Out you go, miss.”

Samsonetta actually curtsied, which was totally out of character, and ducked under the rope, along with one ninja who was sharp enough to recognize a reprieve when he saw one. The rest of the crew was pressed closer together as Butler wound the rope tight. Every twist brought groans from the coils of old rope and from the people trapped inside. The crowd was beginning to realize what was happening, and they began to cheer with every twist. Several were gleefully calling for Butler to squeeze the air from the ninjas’ lungs, but the bodyguard was content merely to crush them together like passengers on the London Tube at rush hour. And once they were powerless to move, he shuffled them to the side of the ring and planted the pole back in its housing.

“I’m going now,” he said. “And I advise you all to stay put until I am out of the country, at the very least, because if you don’t, I will be very unhappy.”

Butler did not have the magical power of the
mesmer
, but his voice was extremely persuasive nevertheless.

“Okay, Bear, take it easy,” said the only ninja sporting a white head scarf, possibly the leader. “You’re straying way off script. Max is going to go nuts.”

“You let me worry about Max,” Butler advised. “You worry about me worrying about you.”

The ninja’s frown was obvious through the folds of his scarf. “What? Who should I worry about?”

Butler ground his teeth. Dialoguing was not as easy as the movies would have a person believe.

“Just don’t move until I’m gone. Got it?”

“Yep. You should have said that.”

“I know.”

From a bodyguard’s perspective, there were so many things wrong with this situation that Butler almost despaired. He turned to his sister.

“Enough of this. I have to go somewhere and think. Somewhere with no Lycra.”

“Okay, Dom. Follow me.”

Butler stepped down from the platform. “If you could stop bandying my name about. It’s supposed to be a secret.”

“Not from me. I’m your sister.”

“That may be. But there are thousands of people here, and half as many cameras.”

“It’s not as if I said the whole name. It’s not as if I said Dom-o—”

“Don’t!” warned Butler. “I mean it.”

The stage door was a mere twenty yards away, and the familiar rhythms of family bickering warmed Butler’s heart.

I think we’re going to make it, he thought in a rare moment of optimism.

Which was when the picture on the big screen was replaced by a giant pair of glowing red eyes. And although red eyes are usually associated with nasty things like vampires, chlorine burn, and conjunctivitis, these particular red eyes seemed friendly and infinitely trustworthy. In fact, anyone who gazed into the fluid swirling depths of these eyes felt that all their problems were about to be solved, if they just did what the owner of those eyes told them to do.

Butler inadvertently caught sight of the eyes in his peripheral vision but quickly tucked his head low.

Fairy magic, he realized. This entire crowd is about to be
mesmerized.

“Look into my eyes,” said a voice from every speaker in the room. The voice even managed to invade the cameras and phones of the audience.

“Wow,” said Juliet in a monotone that did not suit the word. “I really need to look into those eyes.”

Juliet might have been reluctant to do what the silky voice commanded if she’d had any memory of her dealings with the Fairy People. Unfortunately, those memories had been wiped from her mind.

“Block the exits,” urged the voice. “Block all the exits. Use your bodies.”

Juliet whipped off her mask, which was impeding her view of the screen. “Brother, we need to block the exits with our bodies.”

Butler wondered how things could get much worse as hundreds of enraptured wrestling fans surged down the aisles to physically block the entrances and exits.

Block the exits with your bodies? This fairy is pretty specific.

Butler had no doubt that another command was forthcoming, and he doubted it would be
Now join hands and sing sea shanties.
No, he was certain that nothing benign would issue from that screen.

“Now kill the bear and the princess,” said the layered voice, a few of the layers taking a moment to catch up, lending a sibilant
sssss
to
princess
.

Kill the bear and the princess. Charming.

Butler noticed a glint of dark intent in his sister’s eyes as she realized that he was the bear. What would she do, he wondered, when she tumbled to the fact that
she
was the princess?

It doesn’t matter, he realized. We could both be dead long before that happens.

“Kill the bear and the princess,” droned Juliet in perfect unison with the
mesmerized
crowd.

“And take your time about it,” continued the magical voice, now infused with a merry note. “Drag it out a little. As you humans say: no pain no gain.”

A comedian, thought Butler. It’s not Opal Koboi, then
.

“Gotta kill you, brother,” said Juliet. “I’m sorry. Truly.”

Not likely, thought Butler. On a good day, if he was drugged and blindfolded, maybe Juliet could have inflicted a little damage, but in his experience the
mesmer
made people slow and stupid. A large part of their brains were switched off, and the parts left awake were not going to be winning any Nobel prizes.

Juliet tried a spinning kick but ended up twirling off balance and into Butler’s arms. Annoyingly, her jade ring spun around and clattered him on the ear.
Even
mesmerized
, my sister is irritating.

Butler hefted Juliet easily, then tensed his muscles for flight.

“Kill you,” muttered his sister. “Sorry. Gotta.” Then: “Fairies? You kidding me?”

Was she remembering the Fowl Manor siege? Butler wondered. Had the
mesmer
accidentally triggered recall?

He could investigate later, if there were a later for them. Butler had considerable faith in his own ability, but he doubted that he could take on a theater full of zombies, even if they weren’t fleet of foot.

“Go to work, my human lackeys,” said the voice that went along with the red eyes. “Dig deep into the darkest recesses of your brains, such as they are. Leave no evidence for the authorities.”

Leave no evidence? What are they supposed to do with the evidence?

That question really didn’t bear thinking about.

Bear? Ha-ha-ha, thought Butler, and then: Jokes? I have time for jokes? Is it possible that I am frazzled? Pull it together, man. You’ve been through worse
.

Although, looking at the dozens of stiff-limbed instapsychos lumbering down from the upper levels, Butler could not for the life of him remember when.

A pudgy forty-something man sporting an Undertaker T-shirt and a beer hat pointed at Butler from the aisle.

“Beaaaar!” he yowled. “Beaaaaar and princess!”

Butler borrowed a word from the fairy lexicon.

“D’Arvit,” he said.

Vatnajökull, Iceland; Now

Artemis was jumping between psychoses.

“Not real!” he shouted at the descending ship. “You are nothing but a delusion, my friend.”

And from there he hopped straight over into paranoia. “You planned this,” he shouted at Holly. “Who were your partners? Foaly without doubt. Butler? Did you turn my faithful bodyguard against me? Did you burgle his mind and plant your own truths in there?”

From the rooftop, the directional mike in Holly’s helmet picked up no more than every second word, but it was enough to tell her that Artemis was not the clinical logistician he used to be.

If the old Artemis could see the new Artemis, the old Artemis would die of embarrassment.

Like Butler, Holly was having a hard time controlling her rebellious sense of humor in this dire hour.

“Get down!” she called. “The ship is real!”

“That’s what you want me to think. That ship is nothing more than a cog in your conspiracy. . . .” Artemis paused. If the ship was a cog in the conspiracy, and the conspiracy was real, then the ship must be real. “Five!” he blurted suddenly, having forgotten all about it for a minute. “Five ten fifteen.”

He pointed all of his fingers at the ship, wiggling them furiously.

A ten-finger salute. Surely that will vaporize this vision.

And it seemed as though the fingers were having an effect. The four discus-shaped engines, which had been trailing behind the main body like helpless puppies tethered to their spooked master, suddenly flipped and began emitting anti-grav pulses that lolloped toward the ground in fat bubbles, slowing the ship’s descent faster than seemed possible for a craft of such inelegant dimensions.

“Hah!” crowed Artemis. “I control my own reality. Did you see that?”

Holly knew that, far from controlling anything, Artemis was actually witnessing a fairy probe’s landing sequence. She had never actually piloted a deep-space probe herself, but nevertheless knew that standing underneath such a behemoth while it was dropping anti-grav bubbles was more than enough to get a person killed, and wiggling fingers like a sideshow magician was not going to change that.

I have to get up, she thought.

But the injury in her legs held her down like a lead blanket.

I think my pelvis is broken, she realized. Maybe an ankle too
.

Holly’s magic had an unusual potency, thanks to a couple of boosts from her friend the demon N
^o
1 (who was turning out to be the most magical warlock the university had ever enrolled). The magic was setting to work on her injuries, but not fast enough. Artemis had a couple of seconds before one of those anti-grav blobs tore him apart or the ship itself actually landed on his head. And you didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what would happen then, which was just as well, as Artemis didn’t seem to be a genius anymore.

“Assistance,” she called weakly into her com set. “Someone. Anyone?”

There was no one. Anyone who had been inside the shuttle was beyond magic, and Foaly was still upended in the snowdrift.

Even if there were somebody, it’s too late.

Large crack patterns bloomed in the ice like hammer blows as the anti-grav pulses impacted on the surface. The cracks spread across the glacier with a noise like snapping branches, dropping large sinkholes through to the subterranean caverns below.

The ship was as big as a grain silo and seemed to be fighting against the pull of its tethered engines, throwing off waves of steam and jets of fluid. Rocket fuel drenched Artemis, making it difficult to ignore the fact that the rocket was real. But if there was one thing Artemis had not lost it was his stubbornness, and so he stood his ground, refusing to yield to his final squeak of good sense.

“Who cares?” he muttered.

Holly somehow heard the last two words and thought,

I care
.
Desperate situations call for desperate solutions.

Nothing to lose, thought Holly, flapping at the holster on her thigh.

She swept her pistol from its home in a slightly more erratic arc than usual. The gun was synced with her visor, but even so, Holly did not have time to check the settings. She simply held down the command sensor with her thumb, then spoke clearly into the microphone at the side of her mouth.

“Gun.” [Pause for beep.] “Non lethal. Wide-bore concussive.”

“Sorry, Artemis,” she muttered, then fired a good three-second blast at her human friend.

Artemis was ankle deep in slush and in full-rant mode when Holly pulled the trigger.

The beam hit him like a slap from a giant electric eel.

His body was lifted and tossed through the air a moment before the probe clattered to a bone-crushing landing, obliterating the spot where he had been standing.

Artemis dropped into a crater like a sack of kindling and disappeared from Holly’s sightline. That’s not good, thought Holly, then saw her own magical sparks hover before her eyes like inquisitive amber-tailed fireflies.

Shutdown, she realized. My magic is sending me to sleep so that I can heal
.

From the corner of her eye, Holly saw a door open in the probe’s belly and a gangplank swing down on hydraulics. Something was coming out.

Hope I get to wake up, Holly thought. I hate the ice and I don’t want to die cold.

Then she closed her eyes and did not feel her limp body roll from the rooftop and thump into a snowdrift below.

Barely a minute later, Holly’s eyes fluttered open. Waking up felt jagged and unreal, like documentary footage from a war zone. Holly could not remember standing, but suddenly she was on her feet, being dragged along by Foaly, who looked extremely disheveled, possibly because his beautiful quiff had been totally singed and sat balanced on top of his head like a bird’s nest. But mostly he seemed depressed.

“Come on, Captain!” Foaly shouted, his voice seeming a little out of sync with his mouth. “We need to move.” Holly coughed amber sparks, and her eyes watered.

Amber magic now? I’m getting old.

Foaly shook her shoulders. “Straighten up, Captain. We have work to do.”

The centaur was using trauma psychology. Holly knew this: she could remember the in-service course in Police Plaza.

In the event of battle stress, appeal to the soldiers’ professionalism. Remind them of their rank repeatedly. Insist that they perform their duty. This will not have a long-term healing effect on any psychological wounds, but it might be enough to get you back to base.

Commander Vinyáya had given that course.

Holly tried to pull herself together. Her legs felt brittle from the knees down, and her midsection buzzed from the post-healing pain known as magic burn.

“Is Artemis alive?”

“Don’t know,” said Foaly brusquely. “I built those things, you know. I
designed
them.”

“What things?”

Foaly dragged her to a glassy droop in the glacier, slicker than any ice rink.

“The things hunting us right now. The amorphobots. The things that came out of the probe.”

They slid to the bottom of the bank, leaning forward to keep their balance.

Holly seemed to have developed tunnel vision, though her visor was panoramic. The edges of her vision crackled with amber static.

I am still healing. I shouldn’t be moving. Gods know what damage I will do myself.

Foaly seemed to read her mind, but more likely it was fairy empathy.

“I had to get you out of there. One of my amorphobots was heading your way, sucking up everything in its path. The probe’s gone below, to gods know where. Try to lean on me.”

Holly nodded, then coughed again; the spray was instantly absorbed by her porous visor.

They hobbled across the ice toward the crater where Artemis lay. He was extremely pale and there was a speed drip of blood running from the corner of his mouth to his hairline. Foaly dropped to his forelegs and tried to encourage Artemis back into consciousness with a stiff talking to.

“Come on, Mud Boy,” he said, poking Artemis’s forearm. “No time for lollygagging.”

Artemis’s response to this chastising was a barely noticeable jerking of his arm. This was good—at least it told Holly that Artemis was still alive.

Holly tripped over the crater’s lip, and stumbled to the bottom.

“
Lollygagging
?” she gasped. “Is that even a word?”

Foaly poked Artemis one more time. “Yes. It is. And shouldn’t you be killing those robots with your pencil?”

Holly’s eyes seemed to light up. “Really? Can I do that?”

Foaly snorted. “Certainly. If your pencil has a super-duper demon magic beam inside it instead of graphite.”

Holly was still groggy, but even through a fugue of injury and battle stress, it was obvious that the situation was dire. They heard strange metallic clicks and animalistic whoops chittering through the air, softly at first then rising in tempo and intensity to a frenzy.

The noise grated against Holly’s forehead as though her skin were being yanked.

“What is that?”

“The amorphobots are communicating,” whispered Foaly. “Transferring terabytes of information wirelessly. Updating each other. What one knows, they all know.”

Holly scanned Artemis’s vitals through her visor. The glowing readouts informed her that he had a slight heart murmur and there was some unusual brain activity in the parietal lobe. Other than that, the best thing her helmet computer could conclude about Artemis was that he was basically not dead. If she could survive this latest misadventure, maybe Artemis would too.

“What are they looking for, Foaly?”

“What are they looking for?” repeated the centaur, smiling that particular hysterical smile that exposed too much gum.

Holly suddenly felt her senses snap into focus and knew that the magic had finished its overhaul of her injuries. Her pelvis still throbbed and probably would for a few months, but she was operational again, so maybe she could lead them back to fairy civilization.

“Foaly, pull yourself together. We need to know what those things can do.”

The centaur seemed put out that someone would choose this particular moment to ask him questions when he had so many vital issues to consider.

“Holly, really! Do we have time for explanations now?”

“Snap out of it, Foaly! Information, hand it over.”

Foaly sighed, lips flapping. “They are biospheres. Amorphobots. Dumb plasma-based machines. They collect samples of plant life and analyze them in their plasma. Simple as that. Harmless.”

“Harmless,” blurted Holly. “I think someone has reprogrammed your amorphobots, centaur.”

The blood disappeared from Foaly’s cheeks and his fingers twitched. “No. Not possible. That probe is supposed to be on its way to Mars to search for microorganisms.”

“I think we can be pretty sure that your probe has been hijacked.”

“There is another possibility,” suggested Foaly. “I could be dreaming all of this.”

Holly pressed on with her questions. “How do we stop them, Foaly?”

It was impossible to miss the fear that flickered across Foaly’s face, like a sun flash across a lake. “Stop them? The amorphobots are built to withstand prolonged exposure to open space. You could drop one of these onto the surface of a star and it would survive for long enough to transmit some information back to its mother probe. Obviously I have a kill code, but I suspect that has been overridden.”

“There must be a way. Can’t we shoot them?”

“Absolutely not. They love energy. It feeds their cells. If you shoot them, they’ll just get bigger and more powerful.”

Holly laid a palm on Artemis’s forehead, checking his temperature.

I wish you would wake up, she thought. We could really use one of your brilliant schemes right now
.

“Foaly,” she said urgently. “What are the amorphobots doing right now? What are they looking for?”

“Life,” replied Foaly simply. “They’re doing a grid search now, starting at the drop site and moving out. Any life forms they encounter will be absorbed into the sac, analyzed, then released.”

Holly peeped over the lip of the crater. “What are their scan criteria?”

“Thermal is the default. But they can use anything.”

Thermal, thought Holly. Heat signatures. That’s why they are spending so much time by the flaming shuttle.

The amorphobots were arranged on corners of invisible grid squares, slowly working their way outward from the shuttle’s smoking carcass. They seemed innocuous enough, rolling balls of gel with twin glowing red sensors at their cores. Like slime balloons from a children’s party.

Maybe the size of a crunchball.

They couldn’t be all that dangerous surely. Dozy little blebers.

Her opinion altered sharply when one of the amorphobots changed color from translucent green to angry electric blue and the color spread to the others. Their eerie chittering became a constant shrill whine.

They have found something, Holly realized.

The entire squad of twenty or so bots converged on a single spot, some merging so that they formed larger blobs, which flowed across the ice with a speed and grace heretofore concealed. The bot that had flashed the message to the others allowed a charge to crackle across its skin, which it then discharged into a hillock of snow. An unfortunate snow fox leaped from the steam, tail smoking like a fuse, and made a dart for freedom.

It’s almost comical. Almost.

The amorphobots jiggled as though laughing and sent a few bolts of crackling blue energy after the doomed fox, carving black rents in the ground, steering the terror-stricken mammal away from the shelter of the Great Skua. In spite of the fox’s natural speed and agility, the bots anticipated its movements with incredible accuracy, sending the animal running in circles, its eyes rolling, tongue dangling.

There was only one possible conclusion to this game of cat and mouse. The largest amorphobot droned an impatient bass command through the almost invisible gel speakers in its body and turned abruptly to continue its search. The others followed, leaving only the original bot to hunt the fox. It quickly tired of the sport and nailed the fox in mid-jump with a bolt of power, cast like a spear from its midsection.