The goblin D’Nall removed a small rectangular mirror from his tunic and checked his scales were smooth.
‘These Koboi wings are great. You think we’ll be allowed to keep ‘em?’
Aymon scowled. Not that you’d notice. Goblin lizard ancestry meant that facial movement was pretty limited. ‘Quiet, you hot-blooded fool!’
Hot-blooded. That was a pretty serious insult for one of the B’waKell.
D’Nall bristled. ‘Be careful, friend, or I’ll tear that forked tongue right out of your head.’
‘We won’t have a tongue between us if those elves escape!’ retorted Aymon.
It was true. The generals did not take disappointment well.
‘So what do we do? I got the looks in this outfit. That must make you the brains.’
‘We shoot at the train,’ interjected Nyle. ‘Simple.’
D’Nall adjusted his Koboi DoubleDex, hovering across to the squad’s junior member.
‘Idiot,’ he snapped, administering a swift slap to the head. ‘That thing is radioactive, can’t you smell it? One stray burst and we’ll all be ash floating on the breeze.’
‘Good point,’ admitted Nyle. ‘You’re not as stupid as you look.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Welcome.’
Aymon throttled down, descending to a hundred and fifty metres. It was so tempting. One tightly focused burst to take out the elf clinging to the carriage, another to dispatch the human on the roof. But he couldn’t risk it.
One degree off target and he’d sucked his last stink-worm spaghetti.
‘OK,’ he announced into his helmet mike. ‘Here’s the plan. With all the radiation in that carriage, chances are the targets will be dead in minutes. We follow the train for a while just to make sure. Then we go back and tell the general we saw the bodies.’
D’Nall buzzed down beside him. ‘And do we see the bodies?’
Aymon groaned. ‘Of course not, you fool! Do you want your eyeballs to dry up and fall out?’
‘Duh;
‘Exactly. So are we clear?’
‘Crystal,’ said Nyle, drawing his Softnose Redboy handgun. He shot his comrades from behind. Close range, point blank. They never had a chance.
He followed their bodies to Earth on full magnification. The snow would cover them in minutes. Nobody would be stumbling over those particular corpses until the polar caps melted.
Nyle bolstered his weapon, punching in the coordinates for the shuttle terminal on his flight computer. If you studied his reptilian face carefully, it was just possible to make out a grin.There was a new lieutenant in town.
CHAPTER 9: NO SAFE HAVEN
Foaly was sitting in front of the LEP mainframe waiting for the results of his latest search. Extensive laser brushing of the goblin shuttle had revealed one complete and one partial thumbprint. The complete print was his own.
Easily explicable as Foaly personally inspected all retired shuttle parts. The partial print could well belong to their traitor. Not enough to identify the fairy who’d been running LEP technology to the B’wa Kell, but certainly enough to eliminate the innocent. Cross-reference the remaining names with everybody who had shuttle-part access, and the list got considerably shorter. Foaly switched his tail contentedly. Genius. No point in being humble about it.
At the moment, the computer was crunching through personnel files with the partial print. All Foaly could do was twiddle his thumbs and wait for contact with the surface team. The magma flares were still up. Very unusual.
Unusual and coincidental.
Foaly’s suspicious train of thought was interrupted by a familiar voice.
‘Search complete,’ said the computer, in Foaly’s own tones. A little vanity. ‘Three hundred and forty-six eliminated. Forty possibles remaining.’
Forty. Not bad. They could easily be interviewed. An opportunity to use the Retimager once again. But there was another way to narrow the field.
‘Computer. Cross-reference possibles with Level Three clearance personnel.’ Level Three clearance would include everybody with access to the recycling smelters.
‘Referencing.’
Of course, the computer would only accept commands from fairies whose voice patterns it was programmed to recognize. And as a further security precaution, Foaly had coded his personal log and other important files in a computer language he’d based on the ancient tongue of the centaurs:
Centaurian.
All centaurs were a touch paranoid, and with good reason, since there were less than a hundred left. The humans had managed to kill off their cousins, the unicorns, altogether. There were probably six centaurs under the
Earth who could read the language, and only one who could decipher the computer dialect.
Centaurian was possibly the oldest form of writing, dating back over ten millennia to when humans first began hunting fairies. The opening paragraph of The Scrolls of Capalla, the only surviving illuminated Centaurian manuscript, read:
Fairy creatures, heed this warning,
On Earth, the human era is dawning.
So hide, fairy, lest you be found,
And make a home beneath the ground.
Centaurs were known for their intellect, not their poetry. Still, Foaly felt the words were as relevant today as they had been all those centuries ago.
Cudgeon knocked on the booth’s security glass. Now, technically,
Cudgeon shouldn’t be allowed in Ops, but Foaly buzzed him through. He could never resist having a crack at the ex-commander. Cudgeon had been demoted to lieutenant following a disastrous attempt to replace Root as Recon head honcho. If it hadn’t been for his family’s considerable political clout, he would have been booted off the force altogether. All in all, he might have been better off in some other line of work. At least he wouldn’t have had to suffer
Foaly’s constant teasing.
‘I have some e-forms for you to initial,’ said the lieutenant, avoiding eye-contact.
‘No problem, Commander,’ chuckled the centaur. ‘How’s the plotting going? Any revolutions planned for this afternoon?’
‘Just sign the forms please,’ said Cudgeon holding out a digi-pen. His hand was shaking.
Amazing, thought Foaly. This broken-down shell of an elf was once on the LEP fast track.
‘No, but seriously, Cudgeon. You’re doing a bang-up job on the form-signing thing.’
Cudgeon’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘Thank you, sir.’
A grin tugged at the corner of Foaly’s mouth. ‘You’re welcome. No need to get a swelled head.’
Cudgeon’s hand flew to his misshapen forehead. Still a touch of the old vanity left.
‘Oops. Sore subject. Sorry about that.’
There was a spark in the corner of Cudgeon’s eye. A spark that should have warned Foaly. But he was distracted by a beep from the computer.
