Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex (24 page)

“Look here,” he said to Unix, who stood at his shoulder, grim as ever. “The finest fairy and human minds all gathered together in one cell.”

They hung before him suspended in smart gel, unable to do much besides take shallow breaths and move like sleepy swimmers.

“Don’t even bother making the effort to call for help or shoot your way out,” Turnball continued. “I am jamming your phones and weapons.” He leaned close to the bot’s shimmering surface. “Here’s one of Julius’s little pups. Didn’t we shoot her already, Unix?”

A leery smile tightened the sprite’s jaw, though it did not make him seem like a nicer person.

“And the great Foaly. Savior of the People. Not anymore, my little pony. Soon you will be my thrall, and delighted to be so.” Turnball wiggled his thumbs at the captives, and they could see the red runes painted there.

“And what have we here?” Turnball stopped in front of the Butlers. “Crazy Bear and the Jade Princess. I missed you once before, but it won’t happen a second time.”

“What about me?” Mulch managed to say, and the bot translated the vibrations of his larynx into sound.

“What about you?”

“Don’t I get a description? I’m dangerous too.”

Turnball laughed, but softly so the noise would not awaken Leonor, who slept in the berth upstairs. “I like you, dwarf. You have spirit, but nonetheless I shall kill you, as you are of no use to me, unless you fancy a position as jester. A fat, smelly jester. Obviously I am assuming that you smell bad. You certainly look as though you might.”

Turnball moved on to Artemis. “And, of course, Artemis Fowl. Ex-criminal mastermind and current psychotic. How is the Complex going, Artemis? I bet you have a
bad
number. What is it, five? Four?” Artemis must have flinched because Turnball knew he had guessed correctly. “Four, then. And how do I know you suffer from Atlantis? You should ask your
friend
Foaly. He’s the one who supplies me with pictures.”

Artemis was not at all surprised to find that some of his paranoia was actually justified.

Turnball paced along the line like a general delivering a prebattle pep talk. “I am delighted that you are all here, genuinely delighted. Because you can be useful to me. You see, my wife is very old, and to save her life and bring her youth back, I need a very powerful magician.”

Artemis’s eyes widened. He got it straight away. All of this to lure N
^o
1 out of Haven.

“Your friend N
^o
1 will be helping out with the injured on the
Nostremius
, and we were going to go in there, masquerading as patients, and bring him out with my super-duper modified lasers, but there was always going to be the niggly problem of the little fellow perhaps getting a magical bolt off before I enthralled him. But now, Holly Short, one of his best friends in the whole world, is going to fetch him for me.”

Turnball turned to Unix. “Tell the bot to spit out Captain Short.”

Unix consulted a computer rendering of the bot and its contents on a wall screen. With a flick of his finger, he dragged Holly from the gel. Almost instantaneously, the bot did the same. Holly felt as though she were being vomited from the belly of a beast onto the cold metal floor. She lay there gasping as her lungs accustomed themselves to breathing pure air once more. She opened her eyes to see a grinning Turnball looming over her.

“I’m remembering more and more about you as time goes by,” he said, and kicked her hard in the ribs with one black boot. “And I remember that you put me in prison. But never mind, eh. Now you can make up for it by doing me a good turn.”

Holly spat a blob of gel onto the deck. “Not likely, Turnball.”

Turnball kicked her again. “You will address me by my rank.”

Holly spoke through gritted teeth. “I doubt it.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said Turnball, and put his boot on her throat. From his pocket he pulled what looked like a penlight.

“This looks like a penlight, doesn’t it?”

Holly could not speak, but she was guessing the slim cylinder was something more sinister than a light.

“Yet it is quite a bit more than that. You may have guessed that black-magic runes are something of a hobby of mine. Illegal, yes, but almost everything I do is illegal, so why start worrying now? What this little laser does is burn the rune directly into the skin of the person I wish to enslave. No magic necessary. So long as I have the corresponding rune on my person, then you are in my thrall forever.”

Turnball showed his thumb to Holly, the one with Vishby’s rune still inscribed on the pad, the magic of which could be transferred to her now that Vishby was dead. “And guess what, my dear? A free slot just opened up in my organization.”

Root activated the laser and hummed for a moment until the tip turned red, then he jammed it into Holly’s neck, branding her with his binding rune. Holly bucked and screamed in a black-magic fit. “Not so gentle as the touch,” noted Turnball, stepping out of puke range just in case. The fit lasted less than a minute, leaving Holly rigid on the floor, breathing abnormally fast, eyelids fluttering. Turnball licked the blood rune on his own thumb. “Now, Miss Short, what say we go and kidnap a warlock?” Holly stood, arms stiff by her side, eyes unfocused.

“Yes, Captain,” she said.

Turnball clapped her on the back. “That’s more like it, Short. Isn’t it liberating not to have a choice? You just do what I say, and nothing is your fault.”

“Yes, Captain. Most liberating.”

Turnball handed her a Neutrino. “Feel free to kill anyone who gets in your way.”

Holly checked the battery level expertly. “Anyone who gets in my way, I kill them.”

“I like these lasers,” said Turnball, twiddling the rune pen. “Let’s do someone else. Tell the bot to pop young Fowl out of his bubble, Unix. It will be nice to have a pet genius.”

Unix dragged his finger across the touch screen, and Artemis flopped gasping to the floor like a fish out of water.

The Aquanaut
Nostremius
, Atlantis Trench; Now

The young demon warlock who chose to call himself N º1 was feeling extremely sad. He was a sensitive little fellow—though you would not think it to look at his gray armor-plated hide and the squat head that seemed to push its way out of his lumpy shoulders—but he felt others’ pain, and this trait, according to his master, was what made him such an excellent warlock.

There was a lot of pain in the fairy world today. The Martian probe disasters in Iceland and the Atlantis Trench were the worst fairy disasters to have occurred in recent times. To the humans, injury on this scale would probably not even make it onto the big news stations, but the fairy folk were small in number and cautious by nature, so to have two probe-related disasters in one cycle was horrific. But at least a larger catastrophe had been averted by the efficient evacuation of Atlantis. N
^o
1 had barely begun to grieve for the loss of his friends in Iceland, when the LEP had informed him that Holly, Foaly, and Artemis had actually survived.

Commander Trouble Kelp asked him to go to Atlantis on the
Nostremius
hospital ship to help heal those injured by the probe’s blast wave. The little demon had immediately agreed, hoping that he could distract himself for a short period at least by using his powers to help others. And now news had filtered through that Holly’s escape pod had gone down at sea, and all hands were presumed lost. It was too much to process: dead, alive, then dead again. If Holly had had some magic in her system, N
^o
1 might have been able to sense her out there somewhere, but he could feel nothing.

So for the past several hours N
^o
1 had worked himself ragged, laying hands on the injured. He had knitted bones, sealed gashes, repaired ruptured organs, drawn salt water from lungs, draped veils of calm over hysteria, and, in some extreme cases, wiped the entire pileup from people’s memory. For the first time since he had blossomed as a warlock, N
^o
1 was actually feeling a little depleted. But he could not leave right now, as word had just come over the aquanaut’s speakers that yet another ambulance had docked.

I need to sleep, he thought wearily. But not to dream. I would only dream of Holly. I cannot believe she’s gone.

And something made him look up at that moment, and he saw Holly Short walking down the corridor toward the quarantine door. The sight was so unexpected that N
^o
1 was strangely unsurprised.

It’s Holly, but she’s moving weirdly. As though she’s underwater.

N
^o
1 finished the bone knit he was working on, then left the cleanup to a nurse. He shambled toward the security door, where Holly was having her retina scanned. The computer accepted her LEP credentials and popped open with a pneumatic hiss.

Nº1 skipped outside to prevent Holly entering.

“We have to keep that area germ free,” he said, sorry these had to be the first words he uttered to his resurrected friend. “And you look like you just escaped from toxic garbage.” Then he hugged her tightly. “You smell like a toxic dump too, but you’re alive. Thank goodness. Tell me, did Foaly survive? Please say he did. And Artemis? I couldn’t bear it when I heard you were all gone.”

Holly did not meet his eyes. “Artemis is sick. I need you to come.”

N
^o
1 was immediately desolate, his mood swinging rapidly like a small child’s. “Artemis is sick? Oh no. Bring him in and we can take care of him here.”

Holly turned back the way she had come. “No. He can’t be moved. You need to follow me.”

N
^o
1 jogged after his friend Holly without a moment’s hesitation. “Is it a broken bone, is that it? Artemis can’t be moved? Is Foaly okay? Where did you guys go?”

But there were no answers for the little demon, and all he could do was follow Holly’s square shoulders through the throngs of walking wounded, past the cots that had been erected in the hallways. The smell of disinfectant burned his nostrils, and the cries of the injured seared his heart.

I’ll just fix Artemis quickly. Maybe lie down for a minute, then get back to work.

N
^o
1 was a good soul, and it never for a moment occurred to him to probe Holly a little to make sure she was fully herself. It never crossed his mind that one of his closest friends could be leading him into a life of servitude.

Turnball sat by Leonor’s bed in the stolen shuttle ambulance, holding her hand while she slept. He felt a little giddy about changing his plan at the last minute. It was quite the cavalier move, and the rush of adrenaline reminded him of his younger days.

“It was all seat-of-the-pants stuff before I went to prison,” he confided to the sleeping Leonor. “I was a captain in the LEP and running the underworld at the same time. To be honest, there wasn’t much of an underworld before I came along. In the morning I would chair a meeting of the task force that was trying to apprehend me, and in the evening I would be doing black-market deals with the goblin gangs.” Turnball smiled and shook his head. “Good days.”

Leonor did not react, as Turnball had thought it best to give her just a drop of sedative until the warlock had restored her youth. He knew from her talk of death that he was losing his grip on his wife, and she was not strong enough to survive another thrall rune.

So sleep, my darling. Sleep. Soon, all will be as it was.

As soon as Captain Short returned with the demon. And if she did not? Then he would board the
Nostremius
and take the warlock by force. Perhaps he would lose a crew member or two, but they should be glad to die for their captain’s wife.

One level down, in the brig, Bobb Ragby was on guard duty, a duty that he was enjoying immensely, as he considered it payback for all the years he himself had been lorded over by guards. It didn’t matter to Bobb that his gel-bound prisoners weren’t actually the people who’d watched over him: that was just their bad luck. He was taking special pleasure in teasing Mulch Diggums, whom he had long considered a competitor in the
top criminal dwarf
competition that he’d played in his head during the long hours spent on the toilet, thanks to a diet of processed food.

Turnball had ordered him to split the amorphobots for safety, and now one hung in each corner of the cell like a giant wobbling egg sac.

If any of them act up, then use the shocker feature at your own discretion
, Turnball had said.
And if they try to shoot their way out, make sure we get that on video so we can have a good laugh later.

Ragby had decided he would definitely use the shocker at the first provocation, maybe
before
the first provocation.

“Hey, Diggums, why don’t you try to eat some of the gel so I have an excuse to electrocute you?”

Mulch did not waste his energy talking: he simply bared his enormous teeth.

“Yeah?” said Ragby. “They ain’t so big. The more I look at you, Diggums, the less I believe all that junk your little groupies spew back at The Sozzled Parrot. You don’t look like much of a burglar to me, Diggums. I think you’re a phoney. A fraud, a tale-spinning liar.”

Mulch brought a hand up to his face.
Yawn.

Artemis had been returned to the grip of his amorphobot once the branding had been completed, and with nothing to do but think in its clammy folds, he could feel whatever was left of his battered personality slipping away. The rune on his neck had taken hold of his willpower in a vicelike grip, and while he could think and speak at the moment, it took a lot of effort, and he guessed that he only had those rudimentary functions because Turnball hadn’t given him any specific instructions yet. Once he had his orders, then he would be powerless to resist.

Turnball will be able to order me to do anything, he realized.

Through the distorting field of gel, Artemis could see Ragby taunting Mulch, and thought that perhaps it would be a good idea if he joined the argument.

Speaking through the gel was a tricky affair that involved forming the words through clenched teeth, which kept the gel out but allowed it to pick up vibration in the throat.