two-day head start when this is over.’
Mulch swallowed. That was a good offer. They must be in a whole lot of trouble.
Things were hotting up at Police Plaza. The monsters were at the door.
Literally. Captain Kelp was running between stations, trying to reassure his men.
‘Don’t worry, people, they can’t get through those doors with Softnoses.
Nothing less than some kind of missile —’
At that moment, a tremendous force buckled the main doors, like a child blowing up a paper bag. They held. Barely.
Cudgeon came rushing out of the tactical room, his commander’s acorns glinting on his breast. With his reinstatement by the Council, he had made history by becoming the only commander in the LEP to have been appointed twice.
‘What was that?’
Trouble brought up a front view on the monitors. A goblin stood with a large tube on his shoulder.
‘Bazooka of some kind. I think it’s one of the old wide-bore Softnose cannons.’
Cudgeon smacked his own forehead. ‘Don’t tell me. They were all supposed to have been destroyed. A curse on that centaur! How did he manage to sneak all that hardware out from under my nose?’
‘Don’t be too hard on yourself,’ said Trouble. ‘He fooled all of us.’
‘How much more of that can we stand?’
Trouble shrugged. ‘Not much. A couple more hits. Maybe they only had one missile.’
Famous last words. The doorway shook a second time; large chunks of masonry tumbled from the marble pillars.
Trouble picked himself off the ground, magic zipping a gash on his forehead. ‘Paramedics, check for casualties. Have we got those weapons charged yet?’
Grub hobbled over, hampered by the weight of two electric rifles.
‘Ready to go, Captain. Thirty-two weapons. Twenty pulses each.’
‘OK. Best marks-fairies only. Not one shot fired until I give the word.’
Grub nodded, his face grim and pale.
‘Good, Corporal, now move it out.’
When his brother was out of earshot, Trouble spoke quietly to
Commander Cudgeon. ‘I don’t know what to tell you, Commander. They blew the Atlantis tunnel, so there’s no help coming from there. We can’t get a pentagram around them to stop time. We’re completely surrounded, outnumbered and outgunned. If the B’wa Kell breaches the blast doors, it will be over in seconds. We have to get into that Operations’ booth. Any progress?’
Cudgeon shook his head. ‘The techies are working on it. We have sensors pointed at every centimetre of the surface. If we hit on the access code, it will be blind luck.’
Trouble rubbed the tiredness from his eyes. ‘I need time. There must be a way to stall them.’
Cudgeon drew a white flag from inside his tunic. ‘There is a way
‘Commander! You can’t go out there. It’s suicide.’
‘Perhaps,’ admitted the commander. ‘But if I don’t go, we could all be dead in a matter of minutes. At least this way, we’ll have a few minutes to work on the Operations’ booth.’
Trouble considered it. There was no other way. ‘What have you got to bargain with?’
‘The prisoners in Howler’s Peak. Maybe we could negotiate some kind of controlled release.’
‘The Council will never go for that.’
Cudgeon drew himself up to his full height. ‘This is not a time for politics, Captain. This is a time for action.’
Trouble was, quite frankly, amazed. This was not the same Briar
Cudgeon he knew. Someone had given this fairy a spine transplant.
Now the newly appointed commander was going to earn that acorn cluster on his lapel. Trouble felt an emotion well up in his chest. One that he’d never before associated with Briar Cudgeon. It was respect.
‘Open the front door a crack,’ ordered the commander in steely tones.
Foaly would be just loving this on camera. ‘I’m going out to talk to these reptiles.’
Trouble relayed the command. If they ever got out of this, he would see to it that Commander Cudgeon was awarded a posthumous Golden Acorn. At the very least.
The Atlantean shuttle sped down a vast chute, sticking tightly to the walls. Close enough to scrape paint from the hull.
Artemis poked his head through from the passenger bay.
‘Is this really necessary, Captain?’ he asked, as they avoided death by a centimetre for the umpteenth time. ‘Or is it just more fly-boy grandstanding?’
Holly winked. ‘Do I look like a fly boy to you, Fowl?’
Artemis had to admit that she didn’t. Captain Short was extremely pretty in a dangerous sort of way. Black-widow pretty. Artemis was expecting puberty to hit in approximately eight months, and he suspected that at that point he would look at Holly in a different light. It was probably just as well that she was eighty years old.
‘I’m hugging the surface to search for this alleged crack that Mulch insists is along here,’ Holly explained.
Artemis nodded. The dwarf’s theory. Just incredible enough to be true.
He returned to the aft bay for Mulch’s version of a briefing.
The dwarf had drawn a crude diagram on a backlit wall panel. In fairness, there were more artistic chimpanzees. And less pungent ones. Mulch was using a carrot as a pointer — or, more accurately, several carrots. Dwarfs liked carrots.
‘This is Koboi Labs,’ he mumbled around a mouthful of vegetable.
‘That?’ exclaimed Root.
‘I realize, Julius, that it is not an accurate schematic.’
The commander exploded from his chair. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear there was dwarf gas involved. ‘An accurate schematic? It’s a rectangle, for heaven’s sake!’
Mulch was unperturbed. ‘That’s not important. This is the important bit.’
‘That wobbly line?’
‘It’s a fissure,’ protested the dwarf. ‘Anybody can see that.’
‘Anybody in kindergarten, maybe. So it’s a fissure, so what?’
‘This is the clever bit.Y’see, that fissure is not usually there.’
Root began strangling the air again. Something he was doing more and more lately. But Artemis was suddenly interested.
‘When does the fissure appear?’
But Mulch wasn’t just going to give a straight answer. ‘Us dwarfs. We know something about rocks. Been digging around ‘em for ages.’ Root’s fingers began beating a tattoo on his buzz baton. ‘What fairies don’t realize is that rocks are alive. They breathe.’
Artemis nodded. ‘Of course. Heat expansion.’
Mulch bit the carrot triumphantly. ‘Exactly. And, of course, the opposite.
They contract when they cool down.’ Even Root was listening now. ‘Koboi
Labs is built on solid mantle. Three miles of rock. No way in, short of sonix warheads. And I think Opal Koboi might notice them.’
‘And that helps us how?’
‘A crack opens up in that rock when it cools down. I worked on the foundations when they were building this place. Gets you right in under the labs. Still a way to go, but at least you’re in.’
The commander was sceptical. ‘So how come Opal Koboi hasn’t noticed this gaping fissure?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say it was gaping.’
