“We’re a little on the outside at the moment,” admitted Holly. “I’m supposed to be detaining Artemis.”
Juliet clapped her hands. “Have you ever actually obeyed an order?”
“It was kind of a non-order, and anyway I only obey orders when they are sound. In this case, it would be ridiculous to sit around for an hour in a burned-out pod while our enemy, whoever it is, gets on with phase two.”
“I agree,” said Artemis, keeping his voice level.
“How can we be sure there is a phase two?” Butler asked.
Artemis smiled grimly. “Of course there is phase two. Our opponent is fiendish and clever—there will never be a better time to drive home his advantage. It’s what I would have done, a few years ago.” His normal calm shattered for a moment, and he snapped at Foaly. “I need that list, Foaly. Who was on that prison shuttle?”
“Okay, okay, Mud Boy. I’m working on it. I need to go the long way around so my enquiries don’t land on Trouble’s desk. This is technical, complicated stuff.”
What the centaur would never admit was that he was actually asking his gifted nephew Mayne to hack into the police live site and text him the list in return for an extra-large ice-cream cone when he returned home.
“Okay. I have it, from my . . . eh . . . source.”
“Just tell me, Foaly.”
Foaly projected a screen from his phone to the wall. Beside each name there was a link to a data charge that would tell you everything about the prisoner right down to the color of his underpants, if that’s what you really wanted to know, and fairy psychologists were becoming more and more convinced that undergarment coloring was a vital part of a person’s development. Mulch spotted a name he knew, and it wasn’t a criminal.
“Hey, look. Old Vishby was piloting. They must have given him his license back.”
“Do you know him, Mulch?” asked Holly sharply.
For such a hardened ex-criminal, Mulch had a soft center. “Hey, why so crabby? I’m trying to help out here. Of course I know him. It would be pretty weird me saying ‘Hey, look, old Vishby, they gave him his license back’ if I didn’t know him.”
Holly took a breath, reminding herself how Mulch had to be handled. “You’re right, of course. So how do you know old Vishby?”
“Funny story, really,” replied Mulch, smacking his lips, wishing he had a chicken leg to go along with the story. “I escaped from him a few years ago when you were in the frame for murdering Julius. He never got over it. He still hates me, hates the LEP too for taking his licence. Sends me abusive mails occasionally. I send him back little vid boxes of myself laughing. Drives him crazy.”
“Someone with a grudge,” said Artemis. “Interesting. The perfect inside man. But who’s running him?”
Holly turned to study the projected list.
“This sprite, Unix. I took him in. He’s one of Turnball Root’s boys. A cold-blooded killer.” Holly paled. “Bobb Ragby is on here too. And Turnball himself. All these guys are Turnball’s. How in the name of the gods did he get his entire gang on one shuttle? This would have raised a dozen flags on the computer.”
“Unless . . .” said Artemis, scrolling down the list on Foaly’s screen. He tapped the data charge beside Bobb Ragby. His picture and file opened on a separate window, and Artemis quickly scanned it. “Look, there’s no mention of Turnball Root. According to this, Ragby was arrested for mail fraud and has no known affiliations or accomplices.” He tapped another link and read aloud. “‘File updated by . . . Mr. Vishby.’”
Holly was in shock. “It’s Turnball Root. He set this up.”
Holly herself had been responsible for the capture of Julius’s brother during her Recon initiation exercise. It was a story she had told Foaly many times.
“It would appear that Turnball is our adversary, which is not good news. But even taking his intellect and his hold over this Vishby person into account, we still don’t know how he commandeered a space probe.”
“It’s just not possible,” said Foaly, adding an equine harrumph to lend weight to a statement that even he did not believe.
“Possible or not, we’ll have to talk about it later,” said Holly, leveling the craft to just off horizontal. “We’re at the crash site.”
Everyone was relieved that the stolen ship had made it down in one piece. The mercenaries had probably stripped out much of what they didn’t need, to save weight, and, more than likely, they had been a little reckless with the crowbars as they’d gone about it. One loose rivet or cracked weld line would have been enough to allow a few atmospheres to squirt out, and the ship would have been crushed like a soda can in the hand of a giant who was immensely strong and didn’t like soda cans.
But the ship held its integrity in spite of an ominous rippling along the fuselage, which appeared suddenly.
“Who cares?” said Mulch, as usual failing to see the big picture. “It’s not even our ship. What are those mercenaries going to do, sue?” But even as he spoke, Mulch’s humor was tinged with loss.
I can never go back to The Sozzled Parrot again, he realized. And they served great curry. Real meat too.
Outside and below, Atlantis rescue ships buzzed around the distressed shuttles, working hard to build a pressure dome so the crews could get some magic to the injured. Sea workers in pressure exo-armor hammered through rocks and debris on the seabed to lay a foam seal to build the dome upon. Nobody was too concerned about the crash site itself, for the time being. The living came first.
“I should call in this Turnball Root theory,” said Holly. “Commander Kelp will act on it.”
“We have to act first,” said Artemis. “Haven won’t have its ships here for at least an hour. By then it will be too late. We need to find evidence so that Trouble can make a case to the Council.”
Holly’s fingers hesitated over Foaly’s phone. There wasn’t time to get into a strategy discussion with the commander. She knew Trouble’s mind well: it didn’t take that long to get to know. If she called him now, he would suggest a strategy that involved them waiting until he arrived, and possibly some form of bivouac.
So instead of making a vid-call, she sent a brief text highlighting Turnball Root’s name on the passenger list they weren’t supposed to have, and switched off the phone.
“He’s bound to call back,” she explained. “I’ll switch it on again when we have something to tell him.”
Foaly glowered at her. “I’m going to miss my crunchball league updates,” he said; then, “I know that sounds petty, but I pay a subscription.”
Artemis was concentrating on a problem to take his mind off the wall of sparkling fours that had followed him from his mind-screen and seemed to be hovering all around.
Not there, he told himself. Focus on the Houdini act.
“How did Turnball get out of the ship alive?” he wondered aloud. “Foaly, can we access local CCTV?”
“Not with this ship. This was once a beautiful emergency vehicle. I helped design the model. Talk about high spec—you could run an entire disaster-site cleanup from this beauty, once upon a time. Now there’s barely enough tech in here to stop us from crashing into a wall.”
“So there’s no way of telling if any ships rendezvoused with the prison shuttle?”
“Not from here,” said Foaly.
“I need to know how Turnball escaped,” shouted Artemis, losing his cool again. “How else am I supposed to find him? Doesn’t anyone else see this? Am I alone in the universe?”
Butler shifted until he sat hunched over Artemis, almost enfolding him with his bulk. “You’re the one who sees, Artemis. That’s your gift. We’re
the ones who get there eventually.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Mulch. “I usually never get there. And when I do, I never like it, especially when Artemis is involved.”
A bead of sweat lodged in the frown wrinkle between Artemis’s eyes. “I know, old friend. I just need to work— that is the only thing that can save me.” He thought hard for a moment. “Can we run a scan to detect the ion trail of another ship?”
“Of course,” said Foaly. “Even this stripped-back tub can’t do without an omni-sensor.” He opened a program on the screen, and a dark blue filter dropped over their view. The ion trails of the rescue ships showed up as spectral beams following behind their engines like glowworms. One such beam led to the impact site from the direction of Atlantis, and another far more substantial column of light had plowed down from above.
“There’s the prison shuttle and there’s the probe. Nothing else. How did he do it?”
“Maybe he didn’t do it,” suggested Juliet. “Maybe his plan went wrong. A lot of geniuses have been totally screwing up lately, if you see what I am trying to say, Artemis.”
Artemis half-smiled. “I see what you are trying to say, Juliet. Mainly because you are saying it clearly and bluntly with no attempt to spare my feelings.”
“In fairness, Artemis,” said Juliet, “we were almost crushed to death by mesmerized wrestling fans, so I feel you can put up with a little ribbing. Also, I don’t work for you, so you can’t order me to shut up. You could dock Butler’s salary, I suppose, but I can live with that.”
Artemis nodded at Holly. “I don’t suppose you two could be related?” Then he jumped to his feet, almost bashing his head on the ship’s low ceiling. “Foaly, I need to go down there.”
Holly tapped the depth gauge. “No problem. I can come around behind that ridge and keep us hidden from the rescue ships. Even if they do see us, they’ll assume we’ve been sent by Haven. Worst-case scenario, they order us to back away from the crime scene.”
“I meant I need to go outside,” clarified Artemis.
“There’s a pressure suit in that cubby, and I need to take Foaly’s phone and search for clues the old-fashioned way.”