Artemis glanced skyward. “Ah, you see, I might be able to help you there. Any second now.”
Several seconds passed by without any significant change in their situation.
Holly raised her palms. “Any second? Really?” Artemis couldn’t help being a little peeved. “Not literally. It might take a minute or so. Perhaps I should call him.”
Fifty-nine seconds later, something bonged against the pod’s hatch.
“Aha,” said Artemis, in a way that made Holly feel like punching him.
Over the Atlantic; Two Hours Earlier
“This is not a bad ship, as it happens,” said Mulch Diggums, pushing a couple of buttons on the stolen mercenaries’ ship just to see what they did. When one caused the contents of the sewage recycler to be dumped on an innocent Scottish deep-sea trawler below, the dwarf decided to stop pushing.
(One of the fishermen happened to be making a video of gulls for his university media course and caught the entire descending blob of waste matter on film. It seemed to anyone who saw the tape as though the ponging mass just appeared in the sky then dropped rapidly onto the unfortunate sailors. Sky News ran the video with the headline: Panic on the Poop Deck. The segment was largely dismissed as a student prank.)
“I should have guessed that one,” Mulch said, without a trace of guilt. “There’s a little picture of a toilet on the button.”
Juliet sat hunched over on one of the passenger benches that ran along one side of the cargo bay, her head tipping the ceiling, and Butler lay flat on the other one, as it was the most practical way for him to travel.
“So Artemis has been shutting you out?” she asked her brother.
“Yes,” replied Butler dejectedly. “I’d swear he doesn’t trust me anymore. I’d swear he doesn’t even trust his own mother.”
“Angeline? How could anyone not trust Mrs. Fowl? That’s ridiculous.”
“I know,” said Butler. “And I’ll go one better. Artemis doesn’t trust the twins.”
Juliet started, bumping her head on the metal ceiling. “Oww. Madre de dios. Artemis doesn’t trust Myles and Beckett? That’s just ridiculous. What terrible acts of sabotage are three-year-olds supposed to commit?”
Butler grimaced. “Unfortunately, Myles contaminated one of Artemis’s petri dishes when he wanted a sample for his own experiments.”
“That’s hardly industrial espionage. What did Beckett do?”
“He ate Artemis’s hamster.”
“What?”
“Well, he chewed on its leg for a bit.” Butler shifted in the cramped space. Fairy crafts were not built to accommodate giant, shaven-headed, human bodyguards. Not that the shaved head made much difference.
“Artemis was livid, claimed there was a conspiracy against him. He installed a combination lock on his lab door to keep his brothers out.”
Juliet grinned, though she knew she shouldn’t. “Did that work?”
“No. Myles stayed at the door for three days straight, tapping away until he came across the correct combination. He used several rolls of toilet paper writing down the possibilities.”
Juliet was almost afraid to ask. “What did Beckett do?”
Butler grinned back at his sister. “Beckett dug a bear trap in the garden, and when Myles fell in, he swapped him a ladder for the code.”
Juliet nodded appreciatively. “That’s what I would have done.”
“Me too,” said Butler. “Maybe Beckett will end up as Myles’s bodyguard.” The light moment didn’t last long. “Artemis isn’t taking my calls. Imagine that. I think he’s changed his SIM, so I can’t track him.”
“But we are tracking him, right?”
Butler checked his touch-screen phone. “Oh yes. Artemis isn’t the only one with Foaly’s phone number.”
“What did that sneaky centaur give you?”
“An isotope spray. You just spray it on a surface, then track it with one of Foaly’s mi-p’s.”
“Meepees?”
“Mini-programs. Foaly uses it to keep an eye on his kids.”
“Where did you spray it?”
“Artemis’s shoes.”
Juliet giggled. “He does like ’em shiny.”
“Yes, he does.”
“You’re starting to think like a Fowl, brother.”
Mulch Diggums called back from the cockpit. “Gods help us all. That’s what the world needs, more Fowls.”
They all shared a guilty laugh at that.
The mercenary gyro tracked the Gulf Stream north to the coast of Ireland, moving at slightly more than twice the speed ever achieved by the Concorde, then swung in a long northwesterly arc into the North Atlantic as its computer zeroed in on Artemis’s footwear.
“Artemis’s shoes are walking us right to him,” said Mulch, chortling at his own joke. The Butlers did not join in the mirth, not from any loyalty to their employer, who enjoyed the occasional joke, but because Mulch’s mouth was packed with the contents of the shuttle’s cooler box, and they had no idea what he had just said.
“Please yourselves,” said Mulch, spattering the inside of the windshield with chewed sweet corn. “I make the effort to speak in humanese, and you two joke snobs won’t even laugh at my efforts.”
The shuttle rocketed along, six feet above the wave tops, its anti-grav pulses burrowing periodic cylinders into the ocean’s surface. The engine noise was low and could have been mistaken for a whistling wind, and to any smart mammals below who could see through the shields, the shuttle could be mistaken for a very fast humpback with an extra-wide tail and a loading bay.
“We really lucked out with this bucket,” commented Mulch, his mouth mercifully empty. “She’s more or less flying herself. I just put your phone into the dock, opened the mi-p, and off she went.”
The craft behaved a little like a tracker dog, suddenly coming to a dead stop whenever it lost the scent, then casting its prow about furiously until the isotope showed up again. At one point it had plunged into the ocean, burrowing straight down until pressure cracked the fuselage plates, and they lost a square foot of shielding.
“Don’t worry, Mud Men,” Mulch had reassured them. “All fairy craft have sea engines. When you live underground, it makes sense to build watertight ships.”
Juliet had not ceased to worry: from what she remembered, reassurance from Mulch Diggums was about as reliable as a cocktail from the Pittsburgh Poisoner.
Fortunately, the underwater jaunt hadn’t lasted too long, and soon they were flitting across the wave tops once more without incident, except for the time when Mulch forgot his promise not to press mysterious buttons and almost crashed them into the sun-flecked seas by r
eleasing the emergency-brake mini-parachute cluster.
“It was calling me, that button,” he offered as his excuse. “I couldn’t resist.”
The jolting stop had shunted Butler along the bench. He slid the entire length of the fuselage into the cockpit divider. Only his lightning reactions stopped him from getting his head jammed in the railings.
Butler rubbed his crown, which he had clipped on a bar. “Take it easy, or there will be consequences. You said it yourself: we don’t need you to fly the ship.”
Mulch guffawed, giving a nasty view of his cavernous food pipe. “That’s true, Butler, my freakishly large friend. But you certainly need me to land it.”
Juliet’s laugh was high and sweet and seemed to ricochet off the curved metal walls.
“You too, Juliet?” said Butler reproachfully.
“Come on, brother. That was funny. You’ll laugh too when Mulch plays back the video.”
“There’s video?” said Butler, which just set the other two laughing again.
All of this laughing did nothing to delay Butler’s reunion with his principal, Artemis Fowl. A principal who no longer trusted him and who had probably lied to him, sending Butler to another continent and using Juliet to ensure that he would travel.
I believed that my own baby sister was in danger. Artemis, how could you?
There would be tough questions asked when he finally caught up with Artemis. And the answers had better be good or, for the first time in the history of their families’ centuries-long relationship, a Butler might just walk away from his duties.
Artemis is ill, Butler rationalized. He’s not responsible.
Maybe Artemis was not responsible. But he soon would be.
The mercenaries’ shuttle finally jerked to a halt over a spot of open ocean just above the sixtieth parallel. It was a spot that seemed no different than the square gray miles that stretched away on all sides, until the anti-grav pillar plowed through six feet of water below, revealing the arrowhead escape pod.
“I love this ship,” Mulch crowed. “It makes me look smarter-er than I am.”
The surrounding waters churned and boiled as the invisible pulses tested the surface and compacted the waves enough to keep the ship hovering in place. Down below, the pulses would sound like bell clappers on the pod’s skin.