Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex (10 page)

Stu “Cheeze” Toppin, a semiprofessional bowler from Las Vegas, woke up to find his mouth somehow stuffed with a foul-smelling nappy and the words kill bear kill written across his shirtfront in lipstick. This rather confused Stu, as his last memory was of the succulent hot dog he had been just about to bite into. Now, with the nappy aftertaste lingering on his tongue, Stu decided that he might just forget about the hot dog for the time being.

Though Stu had no way of knowing, the nappy in question belonged to little André Price, a baby from Portland who suddenly developed a speed and grace unheard of in eight-month-old limbs. Most victims of the
mesmer
move in a sluggish fashion, but André skipped over the heads of mob members and executed a perfect triple somersault from the ringside commentator’s table, managing to sink his only tooth into Butler’s thumb before the bodyguard was completely submerged. André Price began speaking a few months later—unfortunately it was in a language that his parents had no way of knowing was actually Gnommish. To their relief, he quickly picked up English too, though he never forgot his strange first language and found that he could sometimes make twigs burst into flame if he thought about it hard enough.

A huge cacophonous moan almost lifted the roof from the theater as thousands of people realized they were not where they were supposed to be. Though there were miraculously no fatalities, by the time the last cut had been swabbed with antiseptic, there was a final count of 348 broken bones, more than 11,000 lacerations, and 89 cases of hysteria that had to be treated with sedatives, which, luckily for the patients, were a lot cheaper in Mexico than they would have been in the U.S.

And even though this was the age of amateur video, where most of those attending the event were in possession of at least one camera, there was not a single frame of evidence to prove that the mass
mesmerization
had ever taken place. In fact, when police flicked through the files on the confiscated cameras and phones, they found that every single instrument had been reset to factory conditions. No photos. In time, the Cancún Event, as it came to be known, would be mentioned in the same breath as Area 51 or the Yeti Migration.

Butler did not suffer from hysteria, possibly because he did not have enough air in his lungs for screaming, but probably because he had been in tighter spots (Butler had once shared a chimney in a Hindu temple with a tiger for several hours), but he had suffered over a dozen lacerations of his own, though he did not wait around long enough to have them added to the count.

As for Juliet, she was relatively unmarked in spite of her tumble. The moment she had recovered her breath, she began rolling bodies away from the spot where she had seen her brother submerged.

“Butler!” she called. “Brother! Are you under here?”

The top of her brother’s head appeared, smooth as a lollipop. Juliet knew immediately that her brother was alive because of the vein pulsing at his temple.

There was a chubby seminaked infant wrapped around Butler’s face and chewing on his thumb. Juliet dislodged the boy gently, noticing that he seemed very sweaty for a baby.

Butler drew a deep breath. “Thank you, sister. Not only did that child bite my thumb, but it tried to get a fist up one of my nostrils.”

The baby gurgled happily, wiped its fingers in Juliet’s ponytail, then crawled across the piles of humanity toward a crying lady who was waiting with open arms.

“I know you’re supposed to like babies,” said Juliet, huffing as she grabbed a banker type by his braces and sprung him from his perch on Butler’s shoulders, “but that guy stank and he was a biter.” She took a firm grip on a middle-aged lady whose blond hair had been sprayed till it shone like a buttercup. “Come on, missus. Get off my big brother.”

“Oh,” said the lady, eyelids fluttering as she tried to make sense of everything. “I was supposed to catch the bear. Or something like that. And I had popcorn, a large popcorn that I just paid for. Who’s going to compensate me for that?”

Juliet rolled the lady across the bellies of four identically dressed cowboys who all wore
FLOYD’S STAG NIGHT
T-shirts under their rhinestoned waistcoats.

“This is ridiculous,” she grunted. “I am a glamorous young lady. I can’t be dealing with all this body odor and squidginess.”

There was indeed a lot of body odor and squidginess about, much of it related to Floyd and his stag night, which smelled like it had been going on for about two weeks.

This was confirmed when the cowboy wearing a floyd badge awoke from his stupor with the words: “Dang. I stink worse than a dead skunk wearing a suit of bananer skins.”

Bananer? thought Juliet.

Butler rolled his head, clearing space to breathe.

“We’ve been set up,” he said. “Have you made any enemies down here?”

Juliet felt sudden tears plop over her bottom lids. She had been so worried.
So
worried. Big brothers can only be indestructible for so long.

“You big galoot,” she said, sounding very Floyd-like. “For your information, I am fine. I saved you and everyone else.”

Butler elbowed himself gently from between two
luchadores
dressed in garish Lycra and leather masks.

“Time for patting yourself on the back later, sister.” He climbed from the tangle of limbs and stood tall in the center of the stage. “Do you see all of this?”

Juliet clambered along her brother’s frame and stood lightly on his shoulders, and then to show off she stepped with easy balance onto his head. One foot only, the other tucked behind her knee.

Now that she had a second to appreciate the enormity of what had happened, it took her breath away. A sea of confusion spread out all around them, groaning and twisting. Blood ran, bones cracked, and tears flowed. It was a disaster area. People pawed at their mobile phones for comfort, and sprinklers sent down a fine mist that dusted Juliet’s face.

“All this to kill us,” she breathed.

Butler held out his massive palms, and, as she had done so many times in the Fowl dojo, Juliet stepped onto her brother’s hands.

“Not just to kill us,” he said. “Two bolts from a Neutrino could have done that. This was entertainment for someone.”

Juliet somersaulted to the stage. “Entertainment for who?”

At the rear of the conference hall, a section of the stand collapsed, sending up a fresh round of shrieks and misery.

“I don’t know,” said the bodyguard grimly. “But whoever tried to kill us wanted Artemis unguarded. First I change into my own clothes, and then we find out who Artemis has annoyed this time.”

The Deeps Maximum Security Prison, Atlantis; Now

Turnball Root took his entertainment wherever he could get it. Maximum security prisons didn’t tend to be brimming with fun and flighty distractions. The guards were gruff and unobliging. The beds were unyielding and not enjoyable to bounce on, and the color scheme was simply ghastly. Olive green throughout. Disgusting. In surroundings like this, one had to enjoy every modicum of light relief that came one’s way.

For months after his arrest by his brother, Commander Julius Root, and that naive, straight-arrow Holly Short, Turnball had simply fumed. He had actually spent weeks on end pacing his cell, bouncing his hatred off the walls. Sometimes he ranted, and occasionally he threw fits, smashing his furniture to smithereens. He realized eventually that the only person he was hurting with these displays was himself. This point had been driven home when he’d developed an ulcer, and because he had long since forfeited his magic through abuse and neglect, he had been forced to call in a medical warlock to put his organs right. The young whelp didn’t seem much older than Turnball’s prison uniform and had been extremely patronizing. Called him
grandpa.
Grandpa! Didn’t they remember, these whelps? Who he was? What he had accomplished?

I am Turnball Root
, he would have thundered, had the healing not totally sapped his strength.
Captain Turnball Root, nemesis of the LEP. I stripped every ingot of gold from the First Pixie Prudential Bank. I was the one who rigged the Centenary Crunchball Final. How dare you refer to me as grandpa!

“Youngsters today, Leonor,” muttered Turnball to his absent, beloved wife. “No respect.”

Then he shuddered as he considered this statement.

“Ye gods, darling. I do sound old.”

And using phrases like
ye gods
wasn’t helping any.

Once he’d had enough of self-pity, Turnball had decided to make the best of the situation.

My chance will come eventually to be with you again, Leonor. Until then, why not make myself as comfortable as possible?

It hadn’t been too difficult. After months of incarceration, Turnball had opened a dialogue with the warden, Tarpon Vinyáya, a malleable university graduate who had never washed blood from under his manicured nails, and had offered Tarpon tidbits of information to send to his sister Raine in the LEP in return for some harmless comforts. It hadn’t bothered Turnball a whit to sell out his old underworld contacts, and for his trouble he was allowed to wear whatever he liked. He chose his old LEP dress uniform, complete with ruffled shirt and three-corner hat, but without insignias. Betraying two visa forgers working out of Cuba got him a computer limited to the prison network. And the address of a rogue dwarf operating as a house breaker in Los Angeles got him a simdown quilt for his plank of a bed. The warden would not be moved on the bed, however. Something for which his sister would one day pay the price.

Turnball had often passed many a happy hour thinking how he would one day kill the warden in revenge for this slight. But, truth be told, Turnball was not too concerned about the fate of Tarpon Vinyáya. He was far more interested in securing his own freedom, in looking deep into his wife’s eyes once more. And to achieve these goals, Turnball would have to play the soft, doddery reprobate for a while longer. He had been toadying up to the warden for more than six years now; what did a few more days matter?

Then I will be transformed into my true self, he thought, squeezing his fingers into tight fists. And this time, my baby brother won’t be around to apprehend me, unless that young rascal Artemis Fowl has come up with a way to bring the dead back to life.

The door to Turnball’s cell fizzled and dissolved as a nuclear-powered charge precipitated a phase change. In the doorway stood Mr. Vishby, Turnball’s regular guard for the past four years and the one that he had finally managed to turn. Turnball did not like Vishby, in fact he detested all Atlantean elves with their fishlike heads, slobbering gills, and thick tongues, but Vishby had the seeds of discontent in his heart, and so had unknowingly become Turnball’s slave. Turnball was prepared to tolerate anybody who could help him escape from this prison before it was too late.

Before I lose you, my darling.

“Ah, Mr. Vishby,” he gushed, rising from his non-regulation office chair (three mackerel-smuggling sprites). “You’re looking well. That gill rot is really clearing up.”

Vishby’s hand flew to the triple stripes below his tiny left ear.

“Do you think so, Turnball?” he gurgled, his voice thick and labored. “Leeta says she can’t stand to look at me.”

I know how Leeta feels, thought Turnball, and: There was a day when I would have had you flogged for addressing me by my first name. Captain Root, if you please. Instead of voicing these less than complimentary thoughts, he took Vishby by his slick elbow with barely a flinch of revulsion. “Leeta does not know how lucky she is,” he said smoothly. “You, my friend, are a catch.”

Vishby did not try to conceal his flinch. “A c-catch?”

Turnball drew a sharp, guilty breath. “Ah yes, excuse me, Vishby. Atlantean water elves do not like to think of themselves as catches, or being caught, for that matter. What I meant to say was that you are a fine specimen of an elf and any female in her right mind would consider herself fortunate indeed to have you as a mate.”

“Thanks, Turnball,” muttered Vishby, mollified. “How’s it been going, then? The
plan
?”

Turnball squeezed the water elf’s elbow to remind him that there were eyes and ears everywhere.

“Oh, my plan to construct a model of the
Nostremius
aquanaut? That plan? It’s going rather well. Warden Tarpon Vinyáya is being most cooperative. We’re negotiating over
glue
.” He led Vishby to his computer screen. “Let me show you my latest blueprint, and can I say how much I appreciate your taking an interest? My rehabilitation depends on interaction with decent individuals like yourself.”

“Uh . . . okay,” said Vishby, uncertain whether or not he had just been complimented.

Turnball Root waved his hand in front of the screen, awakening a V-board on the desk (real wood: identity thieves, Nigeria).

“Here, look. I’ve solved the problem with the ballast tanks, see?”

Then with a smooth three-finger combination, he activated the scrambler that Vishby had smuggled in for him. The scrambler was an organic wafer, which had been grown in the Atlantis branch of the now defunct Koboi Labs. The scrambler was a reject lifted from the trash, which had merely needed a dab of silicon to get it operational.

There is so much waste in industry
, Turnball had sighed to Vishby.
Is it any wonder we’re in the middle of a resource crisis?

The tiny scrambler was vital to Turnball because it made everything else possible. Without it he would have no link to the off-site computer; without it, the authorities here in the Deeps would be able to record every stroke of his keyboard and see exactly what he was really working on.

Turnball tapped the screen. It was split into two sections. One showed a recording from a few hours ago: an arena packed with
mesmerized
humans crawling all over each other. The second a real-time bot’s-eye view of a burning shuttle craft on an icy tundra.

“One tank is gone and the other is an indulgence, so I will outsource rather than waste any more time on it.”

“Good thinking,” said Vishby, who for the first time was beginning to understand that land dwellers’ phrase
in over one’s head.

Turnball Root rested his chin on one hand in the fashion of an elderly actor posing for his headshot. “Yes, Mr. Vishby. Very soon now my
model
shall be complete. Already one of the major parts is on its way down here, and when that arrives, there won’t be a fairy left in Atlantis . . . Eh, that is, there won’t be a fairy left undazzled by my model.”

It was a feeble cover-up, he knew. Was
undazzled
even a word? But no need for panic, as nobody watched him anymore. They hadn’t for years. He was no longer seen as a threat. The world in general had forgotten the disgraced Captain Turnball Root. Those who knew him now found it difficult to believe that this shabby old-timer could really be as dangerous as his file said he was.

It’s Opal Koboi this, and Opal Koboi that, Turnball often thought bitterly. Well, we’ll see who breaks out of this place first
.

Turnball banished the screen with a click of his fingers. “Onward and outward, Vishby. Onward and outward.”

Vishby smiled suddenly, which with sea elves was accompanied by a slurping noise as they pulled their tongue back to make way for teeth. In fact, smiling was an unnatural expression for sea elves, and they only did it to let others know how they were feeling.

“Oh, good news, Turnball. I got my pilot’s licence back finally after the Mulch Diggums escape.”

“Good for you, sir.”

Vishby had been one of Mulch Diggums’s escorts when he escaped from the LEP. All sub-shuttle crew were required to hold a pilot’s qualification, in case the primary pilot became incapacitated.

“Just for emergency trips. But in a year or two I’ll be back in rotation.”

“Well, much as I know how you long to pilot a submarine again, let’s hope there are no emergency evacuations, eh?”

Vishby approximated a wink, which was difficult, as he didn’t have any eyelids and would have to give himself a spray soon to wash off the accumulated grit on his lower lid. His version of a wink was to tilt his head jauntily to one side.

“Emergency evacuations. No, we wouldn’t want that.”

Eye grit, thought Turnball. Disgusting. And: This fish boy is about as subtle as a steamroller with a siren on top. I’d better change the subject in case someone does happen to glance at the security monitors. It would be just my luck
.

“So, Mr. Vishby. No mail for me today, I assume?”

“Nope. No mail for the umpteenth day in a row.”

Turnball rubbed his hands in the manner of one with urgent business. “Well, then. I must not keep you from your duties, and I myself have some modeling to do. I impose a schedule on myself, you see, and that must be adhered to.”

“Right you are, Turnball,” said Vishby, who had long since forgotten that he should be the one doing the dismissing, not the other way around. “Just wanted to let you know I had my licence back. Because that was in
my
schedule.”

Turnball’s smile never wavered, and he kept it bright by promising himself that he would dispose of this fool the second he was no longer of any use.

“Good. Thanks for coming by.”

Vishby was almost fully through the hatch before he turned to drop another clanger.

“Here’s hoping we don’t have an emergency evacuation, eh, Captain Root?”

Turnball moaned internally.

Captain. Now he calls me Captain.

Vatnajökull; Now

The new guy, Orion Fowl, was checking his hosiery.

“No compression socks,” he declared. “I have been on several plane journeys over the past few weeks, yet Artemis never wears compression socks. And I know he is aware of deep-vein thrombosis; he simply chooses to ignore the risks.”

This was Orion’s second rant in as many minutes, the last one detailing Artemis’s use of nonhypoallergenic deodorant, and Holly was growing tired of listening.

“I could sedate you,” she said brightly, as if this were the most reasonable course of action. “We slap a pad on your neck and leave you at the restaurant for the humans. End of hosiery discussion.”

Orion smiled kindly. “You wouldn’t do that, Captain Short. I could freeze to death before help arrived. I am an innocent. Also, you have feelings for me.”

“An innocent!” spluttered Holly, and it took an especially outlandish statement to make her splutter. “You are Artemis Fowl! For years, you were public enemy number one.”

“I am not Artemis Fowl,” protested Orion. “I share his body and his knowledge of the Gnommish tongue, among other things, but I have a completely different personality. I am what is known as an alter ego.”

Holly snorted. “I don’t think that defense will stand up in front of a tribunal.”

“Oh, it does,” said Orion happily. “All the time.”

Holly wormed up the slide of wafer slop to the lip of the crater in which the small band sheltered.

“No signs of hostiles. They appear to have descended into the underground craters.”

“
Appear
?” said Foaly. “Can’t you be a little more specific?”

Holly shook her head. “No. I’m on eyes only. All our instruments are out. We have no link outside our own local network. I would guess that the probe is blocking communications.”

Foaly was busy grooming himself, peeling long strings of gluey nano-wafers from his flank. “It’s designed to emit a broad-spectrum jammer if it’s under attack, knocking out communications and weapons. I’m surprised Artemis’s cannon fired, and I would imagine your guns have been isolated by now, and shut down.”

Holly checked her Neutrino. Dead as a doornail. There was nothing on her helmet readout either except a slowly revolving red skull icon, which signaled catastrophic systems failure.

“D’Arvit,” she hissed. “No weapons, no communications. How are we supposed to stop this thing?”

The centaur shrugged. “It’s a probe, not a battleship. It should be easy enough to destroy once radar picks it up. If this is some mastermind’s plot to destroy the fairy world, then he’s not much of a mastermind.”

Orion raised a finger. “I feel I should point out, correct me if Artemis is misremembering, but didn’t your instruments dismally fail to pick up this probe in the first place?”

Foaly scowled. “I was just starting to like you a little better than the other one.”

Holly stood erect. “We need to follow the probe. Work out where it’s going and somehow get word through to Haven.”

Orion smiled. “You know, Miss Holly, you look very dramatic like that, backlit by the fire. Very attractive, if I may say so. I know you shared a
moment passionné
with Artemis, which he subsequently fouled up with his typical boorish behavior. Let me just throw something out there for you to consider while we’re chasing the probe: I share Artemis’s passion but not his boorishness. No pressure; just think about it.”