“No!” shouted Oro. “I need my diggers. Gather ’round.”
A dozen rabbits hopped quickly to bunch at his feet. Their little whiskers quivered with anticipation of finally seeing some action.
“Get the dwarf,” Oro ordered. “I would say bring him back alive, but you do not really have the skills for parlay.”
The rabbits thumped their hind legs in agreement.
“So the order is simple,” said Oro, with a touch of regret. “Kill him.”
The rabbits piled en masse into the hole, eagerly scrabbling toward the injured dwarf.
Death by bunny, thought Oro. Not a nice way to go.
Oro did not wish to look. Dwarfs were part of the fairy world, and in other circumstances they could have been allies. From behind him he heard the crunch of bone and the rattled whoosh of earth collapsing.
Oro shuddered. He would face a troll any day before a bunch of carnivorous rabbits.
On the dais, Opal felt a load lift from her heart as another enemy suffered.
Soon it will be your turn to suffer, Foaly, she thought. But death would be too easy for you. Perhaps you are already suffering. Perhaps your lovely wife has already opened the gift my little gnomes sent to her.
Opal sang a little ditty as she worked on the second lock.
“Hey, hey, hey,
This is the day,
Things are gonna go my way.”
Opal was not consciously aware of it, but this was a popular song from the Pip and Kip show.
Haven City, the Lower Elements
Things were as grim as they had ever been in Haven City. Even the groups of empath elves, who could clearly perceive residual images from bygone millennia, and who liked to lecture school fairies on how life was a bucket of sweet chilies compared to how it used to be in the prospecting days, had to admit that this was the darkest day in Haven’s history.
The citizens of Haven were weathering their darkest night, made darker still by the absence of main power, which meant the only lights were the emergency lamps powered by the old geothermal generators. Dwarf spit had suddenly become a very valuable commodity, and many of Mulch’s relatives could be seen roving the refugee camp that had sprung up around the statue of Frond, selling jars of luminous spit for an ingot or two.
The LEP were coping the best they could, working in most cases with limited equipment. The main problem was coordination. The net of cameras and wireless hubs suspended on gossamer wire from the cavern ceiling had been upgraded three years previously with lenses from Koboi Labs. The entire network had caught fire and rained down on the citizens of Haven, branding many of them with a lattice of scars. This meant that the LEP were operating without intelligence, and relying on old radios for audio communication. Some of the younger police officers had never been in the field without full support from their precious helmets and were feeling a little exposed without constant updates of information from Police Plaza.
Fifty percent of the force was currently committed to fighting a huge fire at Koboi Labs, which had been taken over by the Krom automobile company. The explosion and subsequent fire had collapsed a large section of the underground cavern, and a pressure leak was barely being contained by plasti-gel cannons. The LEP had bulldozed through the rubble and bolstered the roof with pneumatic columns, but the fire was still liquefying the metal struts, and several types of toxic gas were jetting from cylinders around the compound.
Another ten percent of the officers were rounding up escaped prisoners from Howler’s Peak, which had, until its containment field flickered out, housed most of the criminal goblin kingpins behind Haven’s organized crime syndicates, as well as their enforcers and racketeers. These goblins were now scurrying around the backstreets of goblin town with their subcutaneous sleeper tags not responding to the frantic signals being repeatedly sent from headquarters. A few more-recently tagged goblins were unfortunate enough to have second-generation tags, which exploded inside their scalps, blowing holes in their skulls small enough to plug with a penny but large enough to be fatal to the cold-blooded creatures.
More of the officers were up to their eyeballs in the miscellaneous rescues, crowd control, and pursuit of opportunistic felons that went with a catastrophe of this magnitude.
And the rest of the LEP fairies had been put out of action by the explosion of the free cell phones they had recently won in a competition that they couldn’t remember entering—sent, no doubt, by Opal’s minions. In this manner, the evil pixie had managed to take out most of the Council, effectively crippling the People’s government in this time of emergency.
Foaly and his brainiacs were left in Police Plaza, trying to somehow revive a network that had literally been fried. Commander Kelp had barely paused on his way out the door to issue instructions to the centaur.
“Just get the tech working,” he said, strapping on a fourth holster. “Quick as you can.”
“You don’t understand!” Foaly objected.
Trouble cut him off with a chop of his hand through the air. “I never understand. That’s why we pay you and your dork posse.”
Foaly objected again. “They are not dorks!”
Trouble found space for yet another holster. “Really? That guy brings a Beanie Baby to work every day. And your nephew, Mayne, speaks fluent Unicorn.”
“They’re not all dorks,” said Foaly, correcting himself.
“Just get this city working again,” said Trouble. “Lives depend on it.”
Foaly blocked the commander’s way. “You do understand that the old network is vaporized? Are you giving me free rein, to coin an offensive phrase, to do whatever I need to do?”
Trouble brushed him aside. “Do whatever you need to do.”
Foaly almost grinned.
Whatever I need to do.
Foaly knew that the secret of a successful product launch was often in the name. A catchy name is more likely to pique investors’ curiosity and help the new invention take off, whereas some plodding series of letters and numbers will put everyone to sleep and ensure the product crashes and burns.
The lab name for Foaly’s latest pet project was Aerial Radiation-Coded Light-Sensitive Surveillance Pterygota 2.0, which the centaur knew had far too many syllables for potential investors. Rich people liked to feel cool, and embarrassing themselves by mispronouncing that mouthful was never going to help them to achieve that; so Foaly nicknamed the little guys ARClights.
The ARClights were the latest in a series of experimental bio-mech organi
sms that Foaly was convinced were the future of technology. The centaur had met considerable resistance from the Council on ethical grounds because he was marrying technology to living beings, even though he argued that most of the LEP officers now had little chips implanted in their cerebellums to help them control their helmets. The Council’s counter-argument was that the officers could choose whether or not to have the implants, whereas Foaly’s little experiments were grown that way.
And so, Foaly had not been given the go-ahead for public trials. Which is not to say that he hadn’t conducted any. He just hadn’t released his precious ARClights in public, not in the fairy public, at any rate. On the Fowl Estate—now, that was another matter.
The entire ARClight project was contained in a single battered field kit case hidden in plain view on top of a locker in the lab. Foaly reared up on his hind legs to snag the case and plonked it down on his workstation.
His nephew, Mayne, clopped up behind him to see what was going on.
“Dung navarr, Oncle?” he said.
“No unicorn-speak today, Mayne,” said Foaly, settling into his modified office harness. “I don’t have time.”
Mayne folded his arms. “The unicorns are our cousins, Uncle. We should respect their tongue.”
Foaly moved closer to the case so the scanner could identify him and pop the locks.
“I do respect the unicorns, Mayne. But real unicorns cannot talk. That gibberish you’re spouting came from a miniseries.”
“Written by an empath,” said Mayne pointedly.
Foaly opened the case. “Listen, nephew, if you want to strap a horn to your forehead and go to conventions on the weekends, that’s completely fine. But today I need you in this universe. Understood?”
“Understood,” said Mayne, grumpily. His mood lifted when he saw what was in the case. “Are those Critters?”
“No,” said Foaly. “Critters are microorganisms. These are ARClights. The next generation.”
Mayne remembered something. “You were refused permission for trials with those, weren’t you?”