Eoin Colfer - Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex

Mulch did not reply: breathing was too difficult inside the gel to go wasting any precious energy trading insults with Bobb Ragby. Instead he wrapped his forearms around his shins and bore down on his colon, which was inflated like a very long balloon snake.

“Go, Mulch!” whooped Ragby. “Make your people proud. Just so you know, this will be up on the Ethernet in about five minutes.”

The first bubble to emerge was cantaloupe sized. These big bubbles were known among dwarf tunnelers as corkers , from back in the days when corks were used to cap bottles. Often a corker had to be cleared before the main flow could begin.

“Good-sized corker,” Bobb Ragby admitted.

Once the corker was out of his system, Mulch followed it with a flurry of smaller squibs, which emerged into the gel with an initial speed that was quickly arrested by the bot’s gel.

“Is that it?” called Bobb, a little disappointed, truth be known. “Is that all you got?”

That was not all Mulch had got. A hundred more assorted squibs quickly followed, some spheres, some ellipsoids, and Ragby swore he saw a cube.

“Now you’re just showing off!” he said.

The bubbles just kept on coming in various sizes and shapes. Some were transparent, some suspiciously opaque, and a few had wisps of gas inside that crackled when they hit the gel.

The bot chittered nervously, the metal hardware heart flashing orange as its built-in spectrometer struggled to analyze the gas’s components.

“Now that I have never seen,” said Bobb, his finger hovering over the shocker button.

Still the bubbles flowed, inflating the amorphobot to twice its original size. Its chitterings climbed the octaves until eventually they shattered nearby medical beakers and climbed to ultrasonic wavelengths, too high for the humans and fairies to hear.

The shrieking has stopped, thought Bobb. That must mean the danger is past.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Mulch was virtually invisible now behind the bubbles, his image twisted and refracted by their curved surfaces. More and more bubbles were produced. Mulch seemed to be the dwarf equivalent of a clown’s car that could hold more passengers than would seem to be allowed by the laws of physics. The amorphobot was stretched to its limits, and its surface was dappled by the pressure. It began bouncing on the spot, venting bursts of the mysterious smoky gas.

“Well, Mulch, it’s been fun,” said Bobb Ragby, and reluctantly pressed the shocker button, which, as it turned out, was the wrong thing to do. Even the amorphobot tried to refuse the order, but Ragby insisted, jabbing the button again and again until the familiar crackling sparked from two nodes on its metallic heart. Any first-day chemistry student could have told Ragby never to put sparks near a mystery gas.

Unfortunately, Ragby had never met any first-day chemistry students, and so it came as a total surprise to him when the gas passed by Mulch Diggums ignited, bubble after bubble, in a chain reaction of mini explosions.

The bot expanded and ruptured, gel jets erupting from its surface. It bounced from floor to ceiling then pinballed across the cell, running Ragby over like a giant tire. It was a testament to Foaly’s design and standards that the amorphobot held its integrity even under such extreme circumstances. It transferred gel from unscorched sections and grafted them onto ruined areas.

Ragby lay stunned on the deck while the bot came to rest across the hatch, shuddering and heaving. In cases like this, it had a deep-rooted self-preservation order that Turnball had not thought to override. In the event that a sample collected by one of the amorphobots proved dangerous to the bot’s systems, then that subject was to be immediately ejected. And this pungent dwarf was definitely dangerous, and so the damaged amorphobot hawked Mulch Diggums onto the blackened deck, where he lay, smoking.

“I should never have had all that vole curry,” he mumbled, then passed out.

Bobb Ragby was the first dwarf to recover.

“That was something,” he said, then spat out a lump of charred gel. “You got out, darn it if you didn’t, so I suppose by rights I should present my behind for a kicking.”

Ragby lowered his wide bottom toward Mulch’s unconscious face, but got no reaction.

“No takers?” he said. “Well, you can’t say I didn’t offer.”

“Here,” said a voice behind him. “Let me kick that for you.”

He twisted his neck around just in time to see an enormous boot heading for his behind, and behind that boot there was an angry head, which, in spite of being a little out of focus because of Bobb’s perspective, unmistakably belonged to the human Butler.

Mulch had never believed he would actually get out of the amorphobot’s belly, but he had hoped to distract Bobb Ragby for a few moments so that Foaly could come up with one of his genius techy plans.

And that was exactly what had happened. While Ragby had been occupied watching the gastrobatics of his fellow dwarf, Foaly had been busy syncing the bot core Artemis had picked up at the impact site with the core in his own amorphobot. In a laboratory it would have taken him about ten seconds to connect and send a string of code to shut out the instructions from the stolen control orb, but, suspended inside an amorphobot, it took the centaur at least half a minute. As soon as the readout flashed green, Foaly networked with the remaining bots and instructed them to dissolve.

Half a second later, Juliet and Foaly flopped to the floor, tears in their eyes, gel in their windpipes. Artemis lay unmoving, still unconscious from his electrocution.

Butler landed on his feet, spat and attacked.

Poor Bobb Ragby never had a chance, not that Butler did much to him. All it took was one kick, then the dwarf’s terror took hold and jetted him straight into the lip of a metal bunk. He collapsed with a surprisingly childlike moan.

Butler turned quickly to Artemis and checked his pulse.

“How’s Artemis’s heart?” asked Juliet, bending to check on Mulch.

“It’s beating,” replied her brother. “That’s about all I can tell you. We need to get him over to that hospital ship. Mulch too.” The dwarf coughed then muttered something about beer and cheese pies.

“Do you mean beer, and cheese pies? Or beer-and-cheese pies?” Juliet glanced at her brother. “Mulch may be delirious-it’s hard to tell.”

Butler took Bobb Ragby’s gun from his belt, then tossed him bodily onto Foaly’s broad back.

“Okay. Here’s the strategy. We take Artemis and Mulch across to the Nostremius ’s sick bay, then I retrieve Holly if necessary.”

Juliet’s head snapped back. “But Foaly can do-”

“Get moving,” thundered Butler. “Go immediately. I do not want to talk about it.”

“Okay. But if you’re not with us in five minutes, I’m coming after you.”

“I would appreciate that,” said Butler, propping Mulch on Foaly’s back, then the unconscious Artemis. “And if you could bring any troops you find along the way, that would be great.”

“Troops on a hospital ship?” said Foaly, trying his best not to smell what was on his back. “You’ll be lucky.”

Mulch’s tongue lolled out, resting on the centaur’s neck. “Mmm,” he mumbled around his tongue. “Horse. Tasty.”

“Let’s go,” said Foaly nervously. “Let’s go right now.”

The ambulance was a small ship compared to the massive aquanaut that loomed over them. The little craft had two levels: a sick bay and cell downstairs and on top of the spiral staircase a bridge with a small trucker’s cabin, and apart from a couple of nooks for storage and recycling, and the room in which they’d been imprisoned, that was it. Luckily for Butler and the others, the umbilical across to the Nostremius was on the bottom level.