Eoin Colfer: Artemis Fowl. The Arctic Incident

‘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?