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.
Murderer, thought Holly, more angry than horrified. Foaly didn’t design this.
Foaly suddenly moved in front of her. “You’ve got that look in your eyes, Captain.”
“What look?”
“The one Julius Root always talked about. The I’m-about-to-do-something-incredibly-stupid look.”
There was no time for debate. “I need to get to Artemis’s project.”
“You can’t go. What does the LEP manual suggest in these kinds of situations?”
Holly ground her teeth. Her two geniuses were useless; she would have to do this herself.
“The manual, which you helped to write, would advise me to retreat to a safe distance and construct a bivouac, but, with respect, those guidelines are a pile of troll weevils.”
“Wow. Nice respect. Do you know what the word respect actually means? I’m no book professor, but I’m pretty sure comparing my manual to a steaming pile of troll weevils does not constitute respect.”
“I never said steaming,” said Holly, then decided that time was short and she could apologize later. “Listen, Foaly. I don’t have a downlink to Police Plaza. There are murdering blobby robots on our trail, and the only people who might be able to come up with a solution are either fast asleep dreaming or, in your case, wide awake dreaming. So I need you to cover me while I make a run for Artemis’s crate. Do you think you can do that?”
Holly handed the centaur her backup weapon. Foaly held the gun gingerly, as though it were radioactive, which to a certain degree it was.
“Okay. I know how this thing works, in theory.”
“Good,” said Holly, and slithered on her belly up and onto the ice field before she could change her mind.
Holly felt her torso numb and stiffen as she slid across the glacier. The ice stretched in front of her, carved by the prevailing wind into elegant swoops and whorls, a wind that was to her rear, making progress relatively easy considering she had until recently been suffering from several broken bones.
Saved by magic once more.
But now she had not a spark left in her.
The fox’s carcass lay smoking on a bed of snow, melting a grave for itself.
Holly tore her gaze from the pathetic mammal’s eyes, still rolled back in its blackened head, and looked instead at Artemis’s crate, which stood disregarded by the bots, but past their search line.
I need to breach the line unnoticed. Their default sensor is heat. I’ll give them a little heat to think about.
Holly switched on the air-conditioning in her suit, which had about five minutes left in it according to her visor readout, then selected the flare package on her Neutrino handgun. She also accidentally activated the tunes player in her helmet with a series of shivery winks. Luckily, the volume was muted and she managed to switch off Grazen McTortoor’s metal epic “Troll Sundown” before the amorphobots detected the vibration.
Grazen McTortoor’s music never killed anyone before. He’d probably be thrilled.
Holly flipped onto her back, looking up at a sky of pitch and granite, the bowed cloud bellies licked by flame.
Heat.
Holly steadied her hand and removed the detachable trigger finger section of her glove. She pointed her weapon skyward and sent a wide-arced spray of flares into the air.
Flares. If only someone could see them and come to help.
The amorphobots’ relaxed chittering amped up to a whine, and Holly realized that it was time to move.
She was up on her feet and running before her good sense had time to kick in. She raced full pelt for Artemis’s crate, taking as straight a tack as possible, weapon held along her sightline.
I don’t care what Foaly says. If one of those red-eyed monsters comes anywhere near me, I’m going to find out what a plasma grenade does to its innards.
The bots had without exception pointed their sensors toward the descending flares, which fizzled like the sputterings of an oxyacetylene torch cutting through the clouds. The amorphobots’ malleable bodies sprouted gel periscopes and they stood, following the flares’ progress like ill-defined meerkats. They may have noticed an inconsistent heat source jiggling across the glacier, but they were programmed to prioritize.
Not so smart after all.
Holly ran as fast as her brittle bones would carry her.
The terrain was flat but treacherous. The light September snow had dusted the grooves, and Holly almost lost her footing in a tractor trail. Her ankle grated but did not crack. Lucky.
Lucky little elf
Sat on the shelf
And the silly human boy
Mistook her for a toy
A nursery rhyme used to teach children to sit still if they saw a human.
Think like a little tree and that’s what the Mud Men will see.
I’m a tree, thought Holly, without much conviction. A little tree.
So far, so good: the bots were glued to the flares and were showing no interest in her heat signature. She skirted the wreckage of the shuttle, trying not to hear the groan of the chassis or notice the front panel of a flight suit melded with the windscreen. Beyond the shuttle lay Artemis’s great experiment. An oversized refrigerator cannon.
Great. More ice.
Holly knelt at the base of what Artemis had called his Ice Cube and quickly located the control panel, which luckily had an omnisensor, so it was a simple matter to sync it with her own helmet. Now the refrigerator cannon would fire when she wanted, and at whatever target she chose. She set a timer running and set herself running seconds afterward, straight back the way she had come.
It occurred to her that the flares were lasting well, and she really should congratulate Foaly on the new models, at which point they inevitably began to wink out.
With no more pretty lights in the sky, the amorphobots returned to their methodical searching of the site for signs of life. One was dispatched to check the erratic blob of heat crossing their grid. It rolled across the surface, scanning the ground as it went, sending out gel tendrils to scoop up debris and even whipping out a tongue like a bullfrog’s to snag a low-flying black-headed gull. If there had been a sound track to its movements it would have been tum-ti-tum-ti-tum. Business as usual, no worries. Then its vector crossed Holly’s, and they virtually collided. The bot’s scanner eyes flashed, and lightning bolts jittered inside its globulous body.
All I need is a few seconds, thought Holly, and blasted the bot with a narrow beam right in its gut.
The beam sliced through the center of the blobby body, but was diffused before reaching the hardware nerve center at the core. The bot bounced backward like a kicked ball, whining as it did so, updating its friends.
Holly did not slow down to see what the response might be; she did not need to—her keen elfin hearing gave her all the information she needed: they were coming for her. They were all coming. Their semisolid forms pummeled the ice as they moved like quick bongo rolls, along with that dreadful chittering.
A bot in her path skittered to one side, a temporary Neutrino hole drilled in its top quadrant. Apparently Foaly was taking his job as cover provider seriously, even though he knew his weapon could not kill these things.
Thanks, Mr. Consultant.
The bots were converging on her now, trundling from all sides, burping and squeaking as they came.
Like kiddie-cartoon characters.
Which did not stop Holly from blasting as many of the cute critters as she could. She vaguely heard Foaly shouting at her to kindly only shoot when necessary, or to quote him verbatim:
Holly. In the name of all the gods, stop shooting energy into all-energy beings. Just how stupid are you?
The bots quivered and meshed, growing larger and more aggressive.
“D’Arvit,” huffed Holly, her breath coming hard now. Her helmet informed her cheerily that her heart rate was over 240 bpm, which would be fine for a sprite but not for an elf. Normally a flat-out sprint would not inconvenience Holly, nor indeed any fairy who had passed the LEP physical, but this was a desperate dash immediately after a major healing. She should be in a hospital sipping rejuvenation sludge through a straw.
“Two minutes to cardiac arrest,” said her helmet breezily. “Ceasing all physical activity would be a really great idea.”
Holly spared a nanosecond to despise the voice of her helmet. Corporal Frond, the glamorous face of the LEP, all blond hair and tight jumpsuits, who’d recently had her bloodline traced back to Frond the Elfin King, now insisted on referring to herself as Princess.
Foaly emerged from the crater and grabbed his friend’s elbow. “Come on, Holly. We have seconds of life left before those critters that you led right to our hidey-hole kill us all like rodents.”
Holly ran as fast as she could, bones creaking. “I have a plan.”
They stumbled over the frozen glacier, back to the depression where Artemis Fowl lay unconscious. The amorphobots flowed after them like marbles rolling down the side of a bowl.