“Wow,” said Holly, watching arrows thunk into the nose and wings. “You didn’t foresee a troll-riding dwarf pushing your plane down the runway. You must be losing your touch, Artemis.”
He tried to connect himself to the moment, but it was too surreal. Watching the Berserker soldiers grow larger through the double frames of windshield and barn doorway made the entire thing seem like a movie. A very realistic 3-D movie with vibro-chairs, but a movie all the same. This feeling of detachment coupled with the old Artemis Fowl slow reflexes almost cost him his life as he sat dreamily watching a Berserker long-arrow arcing toward his head.
Luckily Holly’s reactions were stellar, and she managed to punch Artemis in the shoulder with enough force to knock him sideways to the limit of his seat belt. The arrow punctured the windshield, making a surprisingly small hole, and thunked into the headrest exactly where Artemis’s vacant face would have been.
Suddenly, Artemis had no problem connecting to the moment.
“I can air-start the plane,” he said, flicking switches on the dash. “If we get off the ground at all.”
“Doesn’t that require coordination?” asked Holly.
“Yes, split-second timing.”
Holly paled. Relying on Artemis’s coordination was about as sensible as relying on Mulch’s powers of abstinence.
The plane battered its way through the Berserkers, decapitating a terra-cotta warrior. Solar panels tinkled and cracked, and the landing gear buckled. Gruff kept pushing, ignoring various wounds that now gushed with blood.
Bellico rallied her troops and hurried in pursuit, but none could match the troll’s pace except the hound, who latched on to Mulch’s back, trying to dislodge him.
Mulch was insulted that a dog would interfere in what was possibly the most valiant rescue attempt ever, so he locked its head in the crook of one elbow and shouted into the animal’s face.
“Give it up, Fido! I am invincible today. Look at me, riding a troll, for heaven’s sake. How often do you see that anymore? Never! That’s how often. Now, you have two seconds to back off, or I am going to have to eat you.”
Two seconds passed. The dog shook its head, refusing to back off, so Mulch ate him.
It was, he would later tell his fellow dwarf fugitive Barnet Riddles, proprietor of Miami’s Sozzled Parrot bar, a terrible waste to spit out half a dog, but it’s difficult to look heroic with a mutt’s hindquarters hanging out of yer mouth.
Seconds after the live hound disagreed with Mulch to his face, the dead dog disagreed with his stomach. It may have been the Berserker soul that caused the onset of indigestion, or it may have been something the dog ate before something ate him—either way, Mulch’s innards were suddenly cramped by a giant fist wearing a chain-mail glove.
“I gotta trim,” he said through gritted teeth.
If Gruff had realized what Mulch Diggums was about to do, he would have run screaming like a two-year-old pixette and buried himself underground till the storm had passed, but the troll did not speak grunted Dwarfish and so followed the last command given, which had been: Push downhill.
The solar plane picked up speed as it ran down the clay ramp with the Berserkers in quick pursuit.
“We are not going to make it,” said Artemis, checking the instruments. “The gear is shot.”
The runway’s end curved before them like the end of a gentle ski jump. If the plane went off with insufficient speed, it would simply plummet into the lake, and they would be sitting ducks alongside the actual ducks that were probably inhabited by Berserkers and would peck them to death. Artemis was almost reconciled to the fact that he was going to die in the immediate future, but he really did not want his skull to be fractured by the bill of a possessed mallard. In fact, Death by aggressive aquatic bird had just rocketed to number one on Artemis’s Least Favorite Ways to Die list, smashing the record-breaking dominance of Death by dwarf gas, which had haunted his dreams for years.
“Not ducks,” he said. “Please, not ducks. I was going to win the Nobel Prize.”
They could hear commotion from underneath the fuselage: animal grunting and buckling metal. If the plane did not take off soon, it was going to be shaken to pieces. This was not a strong craft, stripped back as it was to increase the power-to-weight ratio necessary for sustainable flight.
Outside the solar plane, Mulch’s entire body was twisted in a cramped treeroot of pain. He knew what was going to happen. His body was about to react to a combination of stress, bad diet, and gas buildup by instantaneously jettisoning up to a third of his own body weight. Some more disciplined dwarf yogis can invoke this procedure at will and refer to it as the Once a Decade Detox, but for ordinary dwarfs it goes by the name Trimming the Weight. And you do not want to be in the line of fire when the weight is being trimmed.
The plane reached the bottom of the slope with barely enough momentum to clear the ramp.
Water landing, thought Artemis. Death by ducks.
Then something occurred. A boost of power came from somewhere. It was as if a giant forefinger had flicked the plane forward into the air. The tail rose, and Artemis fought the pedals to keep it down.
How is this happening? Artemis wondered, staring befuddled at the controls, until Holly punched his shoulder for the second time in as many minutes.
“Air start!” she yelled.
Artemis sat bolt upright. Air start! Of course.
The solar plane had a small engine to get the craft off the ground, and after that the solar panels kicked in; but without a battery the engine could not even turn over, unless Artemis hit the throttle at the right time, before the plane began to lose momentum. This might buy them enough time to catch a thermal for a couple of hundred feet, enough to clear the lake and outfly the arrows.
Artemis waited until he sensed the plane was at the apex of its rise, then opened the throttle wide.
Bellico and her remaining troops ran hell-for-leather down the runway, hurling any missiles in their arsenal after the plane. It was a bizarre situation to be involved in, even for a resurrected spirit occupying a human body.
I am chasing a plane being pushed down a runway by a troll-riding dwarf, she thought. Unbelievable.
But nevertheless it was true, and she’d best believe it, or her quarry would escape.
They cannot go far.
Unless the vehicle flew as it was designed to.
It won’t fly. We have destroyed the battery.
This thing flies without power once it is airborne. My host has seen this with her own eyes.
Her good sense told her that she should stop and allow the plane to crash into the lake. If the passengers did not drown, then her archers could pick off the swimmers. But good sense was of little use on a night such as this, when ghost warriors roamed the earth and dwarfs rode once more on the backs of trolls, so Bellico decided she must do what she could to stop this plane from leaving the ground.
She increased her pace, outstripping the other Berserkers, using her long human legs to their full advantage, and hurled herself at the troll’s midsection, grabbing tufts of gray fur with one hand and the pirate sword with the other.
Gruff howled but kept pushing.
I am attacking a troll, she thought. I would never do this with my own body.
Bellico glanced upward through the tangle of limbs and saw the whole of the moon, gleaming above. Beneath that, she saw a dwarf in considerable discomfort, changing his grip to hold on to the plane’s body, flattening himself to the fuselage.
“Go,” the dwarf instructed the troll. “Back to your cave.” That is not good, thought Bellico. Not good at all.
The plane swept up the liftoff ramp into the air. At the same moment, Gruff obeyed his master and released his grip, sending himself and Bellico skipping across the lake like skimmed stones, which was a lot more painful than it sounds. Gruff had a coat of fur to protect his hide, but Bellico covered most of the distance on a face that would have water burns for several months.
/> Overhead, Mulch could hold on no longer. He released a jetstream of watery fat, wind, and half-digested foodstuff that gave the solar plane a few extra feet of lift, just enough to send it soaring out over the lake.
Bellico surfaced just in time to be clocked on the forehead by what could have been a dog’s skull.
I will not think about that, she thought, and swam back toward the shore.
Artemis pumped the throttle for a second time, and the plane’s engine caught. The single nose propeller chugged, jerked, then spun faster and faster until its blades formed a continuous transparent circle.
“What happened?” Artemis wondered aloud. “What was that noise?”
“Wonder later,” said Holly, “and fly the plane now.”
This was a good idea, as they were by no means out of the woods yet. The engine was running, it was true, but there was no power in the solar battery, and they could only glide for a limited time at this altitude.
Artemis pulled the stick back, climbing to a hundred feet, and as the wider world spread out below them, the magnitude of the devastation wrought by Opal’s plan became obvious.
The roads into Dublin were lit by engine fires fed by fuel tanks and combustible materials. Dublin itself was blacked out, except for patches of orange lighting where generators had been patched up or bonfires lit. Artemis saw two large ships that had collided in the harbor, and another beached like a whale on the strand. There were too many fires to count in the city itself, and smoke rose and gathered like a thundercloud.
Opal plans to inherit this new earth, Artemis thought. I will not let her.
And it was this thought that pulled Artemis’s mind back into focus and set him scheming on a plan that could stop Opal Koboi for the final time.
They flew over the lake, but it was not graceful flight—in fact, it was more like prolonged falling. Artemis wrestled with controls that seemed to fight back as he struggled to keep their descent as gradual as possible.