window. Mind playing tricks. Really.
‘Now, Giovanni, Daddy. I think we need to talk about your next project.’
‘The water-powered car?’
‘No, idiot. Not the water-powered car. The core probe. I know you have designed one. Quite a good design for a human, though I will be making changes.’
‘The core probe. Impossible. Can’t get through crust. Don’t have enough iron.’
‘We can’t get through the crust. We don’t have enough iron. Speak properly, for heaven’s sake. It’s trying enough speaking Mud Man without listening to your gibberish. Honestly, you human geniuses are not all you’re cracked up to be.’
Zito’s beleaguered brain made the effort. ‘I am sorry, dearest Belinda. I simply mean that the core probe project is long term. It will have to wait until we can find a practical way to gather the iron, and cut through the Earth’s crust.’
Opal looked at the dazed Sicilian. ‘Poor, dear, stupid Daddy. You developed a super laser to cut through the crust. Don’t you remember?’
A dewdrop of sweat rolled down Zito’s cheek. ‘A super laser? Now that you mention it…’
‘And can you guess what you’ll find when you do cut through?’
Zito could guess. Part of his intellect was still his own. ‘A haematite orebody? It would have to be massive. Of very high grade.’
Opal led him to the window. In the distance the wind farm’s blades flashed in the starlight.
‘And where do you think we should dig?’
‘I think we should dig under the wind farm,’ said Zito, resting his forehead against the cool glass.
‘Very good, Daddy. If you dig there, I will be ever so happy.’
Zito patted the pixie’s hair. ‘Ever so happy,’ he said sleepily. ‘Belinda, my little girl. Papers are in bureau.’
‘The papers are in the bureau,’ Opal corrected him. ‘If you persist with this baby talk I will have to punish you.’
She wasn’t joking.
E7, BELOW THE MEDITERRANEAN
Holly had to stay out of the major chutes on her way to the surface. Foaly had sensors monitoring all traffic through commercial and LEP routes. This meant navigating unlit, meandering secondary chutes, but the alternative was being picked up by the centaur’s bugs and hauled back to Police Plaza before the job was done.
Holly negotiated stalactites the size of skyscrapers and skirted vast craters teeming with bioluminescent insect life. But instinct was doing the driving. Holly’s thoughts were a thousand miles away, reflecting on the events of the last twenty-four hours. It seemed as though her heart were finally catching up with her body.
All her previous adventures with Artemis were comic-book escapades compared to their current situation. It had always been ‘… happy ever after’ before. There had been a few close calls but everyone had made it out alive. Holly studied her trigger finger. A faint scar circled the base, where it had been severed during the Arctic incident. She could have healed the scar or covered it with a ring, but she preferred to keep it where she could see it. The scar was part of her. The commander had been a part of her too. Her superior, her friend.
Sadness emptied her out, then filled her up again. For a while, thoughts of revenge had fuelled her. But now, even the thought of dumping Opal Koboi into a cold cell could not light a spark of vengeful joy in her heart. She would keep going, to ensure the People were safe from humans. Maybe when that task was done, it would be time to take a look at her life. Maybe there were a few things that needed changing.
Artemis summoned everyone to the passenger area as soon as he had finished work on the computer. His ‘new old’ memories were giving him immense pleasure. As his fingers skimmed across the Gnommish keyboards, he marvelled at the ease with which he navigated the fairy platform. He marvelled too at the technology itself, even though he was no stranger to it any more. The Irish boy felt the same thrill of rediscovery that a small child feels when he has chanced upon a lost favourite toy.
For the past hour, rediscovery had been a major theme in his life. Having a major theme for an hour doesn’t seem like much, but Artemis had a catalogue of memories all clamouring to be acknowledged. The memories themselves were startling enough: boarding a radioactive train near Murmansk, or flying across the ocean, concealed beneath LEP cam foil. But it was the cumulative effect of these memories that interested Artemis. He could literally feel himself becoming a different person. Not exactly the way he used to be, but closer to that individual. Before the fairies had mind-wiped him as part of the Jon Spiro deal, his personality had been undergoing what could be seen as positive change. So much so that he had decided to go completely legitimate and donate ninety per cent of Spiro’s massive fortune to Amnesty International. Since his mind wipe, he had reverted to his old ways, indulging his passion for criminal acts.
Now he was somewhere in the middle. He had no desire to hurt or steal from the innocent, but he was having difficulty giving up his criminal ways. Some people just needed to be stolen from.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was the desire he felt to help his fairy friends, and the real sadness he felt at the loss of Julius Root. Artemis was no stranger to loss; at one time or another he had lost and found everyone close to him. Julius’s death cut him just as deeply as any of these. His drive to avenge the commander and stop Opal Koboi was more powerful than any criminal urge he had ever felt.
Artemis smiled to himself. It seemed as though good was a more powerful motivation than bad. Who would have thought it?
The rest of the group gathered round the central holographic projector. Holly had parked the shuttle on the floor of a secondary chute, close to the surface.
Butler was forced to squat on his hunkers in the fairy-sized ship.
‘Well, Artemis, what did you find out?’ asked the bodyguard, trying to fold his massive arms without knocking someone smaller over.
Artemis activated a holographic animation, which rotated slowly in the middle of the chamber. The animation showed a cutaway of the Earth from crust to core. Artemis switched on a laser pointer and began his briefing.
‘As you can see, there is a distance of approximately one thousand eight hundred miles from the Earth’s surface to the outer core.’
The projection’s liquid outer core swirled and bubbled with molten magma.
‘However, humankind has never managed to penetrate more than nine miles through the crust. To go any deeper would necessitate the use of nuclear warheads, or huge amounts of dynamite. An explosion of this magnitude could generate huge shifts in the Earth’s tectonic plates, causing earthquakes and tidal waves around the globe.’
Mulch was, as usual, eating something. Nobody knew what, as he had emptied the food locker over an hour ago. Nobody really wanted to ask either. ‘That doesn’t sound like a good thing.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ agreed Artemis. ‘Which is why the ironclad probe theory has never been put into practice, until now. The original idea belongs to a New Zealander,
Professor David Stevenson. It is quite brilliant actually, if impractical. Encase a reinforced probe in a hundred million tonnes of molten iron. The iron will sink through the crack generated by the explosive, even closing the crack behind it. Within a week the probe will reach the core. The iron will be consumed by the outer core, and the probe will gradually disintegrate. The entire process is even environmentally sound.’
The projection put Artemis’s words into pictures.
‘How come the iron doesn’t un-melt?’ asked Mulch.
Artemis raised a long thin eyebrow. ‘Un-melt? The orebody’s sheer size stops it from solidifying.’
Holly stood and stepped into the projection itself, studying the orebody. ‘Foaly must know all about this. Humans couldn’t keep something so big a secret.’
‘Indeed,’ said Artemis, opening a second holographic projection. ‘I ran a search on the on-board database and found this: Foaly ran several computer simulations, more than eighty years ago. He concluded that the best way to deal with the threat was simply to broadcast misinformation to whichever probe was being sent down. As far as the humans were concerned, their probe would simply sink through a few hundred miles of various low- grade ores, and then the orebody would solidify. A resounding and very expensive failure.’
