Artemis Fowl 08 - The Last Guardian (15 page)

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 organisms 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?”

It irritated Foaly immensely that a centaur of his genius was being forced to justify himself to an assistant for the sake of relations with his sister.

“I got permission just now, from Commander Kelp. It’s all on video.”

“Wow,” said Mayne. “In that case, let’s see those little fellows in action.”

Maybe he’s not so bad, thought Foaly, keying in the activation code on an old-fashioned manual keyboard in the case.

Once the code was punched in, the case synched with the lab’s wall screen, splitting it into a dozen blank boxes. This was nothing particularly special, and would have absolutely no one clapping their hands and saying
Ooooh
. What
would
have people applauding and gushing was the swarm of miniature genetically modified dragonflies waking up inside the case. The insects shook their sleepy heads and set their wings buzzing, then lifted off in perfect synchronized formation to hover at Foaly’s eye level.

“Oooh,” said Mayne, clapping his hands.

“Just wait,” said Foaly, activating the little dragonflies’ sensors. “Prepare to be amazed.”

The cloud of dragonflies jittered as though suddenly charged, and their tiny eyes glowed green. Eleven of the twelve onscreen boxes displayed composite 3-D views of Foaly, stitched together from the viewpoint of each insect. Not only did the insects read the visible spectrum, but also infrared, UV, and thermal. A constantly updating stream of data scrolled down the side of the screens, displaying reams of information on Foaly’s heart rate, blood pressure, pulse, and gas emissions.

“These little beauties can go anywhere and see everything. They can glean information from every microbe. And all anyone can see is a swarm of dragonflies. My little ARClights could fly through the X-ray in an airport, and no one could tell they are stuffed with bio-tech. They go where I send them, and spy on who I tell them to.”

Mayne pointed at a corner of the screen. “That section is blank.”

Foaly harrumphed. “I did a trial in Fowl Manor. And Artemis somehow detected the virtually undetectable. I imagine my beauties are lying in pieces under an electron microscope in his laboratory.”

“I didn’t read that in any report.”

“No. I forgot to mention it. That trial wasn’t exactly an unqualified success, but this one will be.”

Foaly’s fingers were clicking blurs on the keyboard. “Once I program in the mission parameters, then my ARClights will have citywide surveillance restored in minutes.” Foaly instructed a single bug to land on his index finger. “You, my little fellow, are special, because you will be going to my home, just to make sure my beloved Caballine is all right.”

Mayne leaned in, peering at the little bug. “You can do that?”

Foaly wiggled his finger, and the bug flew off, winding sideways through a vent.

“I can do whatever I like. They are even coded to my voice. Watch.” Foaly leaned back in his chair and cleared his throat. “ARClight activation code alpha alpha one. I am Foaly. Foaly is my name. Immediate deployment to downtown Haven. Scenario three. All sections. Citywide disaster. Fly, my pretties, fly.”

The ARClights moved like a shoal of silver fish through water, gliding through the air in perfect synchronized flight, then forming into a tight cylinder and shooting through the vent. Their wings skittered against the chute wall, sending back data from every inch covered.

The theatricality appealed to Mayne’s graphic novel–loving sensibility.

“‘Fly, my pretties, fly.’ Cool. Did you make that up yourself?”

Foaly began analyzing the data that was already flooding in from his ARClights.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Every word a Foaly original.”

The ARClights could be steered manually; or, if that function was off-line, they would fly to preordained irradiated spots on the cavern roof. The tiny bio-tech insects performed perfectly, and within minutes Foaly had a functioning network suspended above Haven that could be manipulated with a word or gesture.

“Now, Mayne,” he said to his nephew. “I want you to take over here and feed information to Commander Kelp over the”—he shuddered—“radio. I am going to take a minute to check on your Aunty Caballine.”

“Mak dak jiball, Oncle,”
said Mayne, saluting. Something else actual unicorns could not do.

Humans have a saying that
beauty is in the eye of the beholder
, which basically means if you
think
it’s beautiful, then it
is
beautiful. The elfin version of this saying was composed by the great poet B.O. Selecta, who said:
Even the plainest of the plain shall deign to reign,
which critics have always thought was a bit rhymey. The dwarf version of the maxim is:
If it don’t stink, marry it,
which is slightly less romantic, but the general gist is the same.

Foaly had no need of these sayings, for in his mind beauty was personified by his wife, Caballine. If anyone had ever asked him for a definition of beauty, he would simply have directed their gaze to his wrist, and then activated the hologram crystal built into his wrist computer, projecting a revolving CG rendering of his wife into midair.

Foaly was so in love with his wife that he sighed whenever Caballine crossed his mind, which was several times an hour. As far as the centaur was concerned, he had found his soul mate.

Love had tugged Foaly’s fetlock relatively late in life. When all the other centaurs had been galloping around the sim-pasture, pawing the dirt, texting the fillies, and sending their chosen ones candied carrots, Foaly had been up to his armpits in laboratory equipment, trying to get his radical inventions out of his head and into the real world. By the time he realized that love might be passing him by, it had already disappeared over the horizon. So the centaur convinced himself that he didn’t need companionship and was content to live for his job and work friends.

Then, when Holly Short was missing in another dimension, he met Caballine at Police Plaza. At least that was what he told everyone.
Met
might be a slightly misleading verb, as it implies that the situation was pleasant, or at least nonviolent. What actually happened was that one of Foaly’s face-recognition software programs malfunctioned in a bank camera and identified Caballine as a goblin bank robber. She was immediately pounced on by the security guard jumbo pixies and
ridden
to Police Plaza. The ultimate ignominy for a centaur.