but the stealth shuttle would prevent any of these from being detected inside the ship’s hull. So if we find a small patch of space without the usual ambient gases…’
‘Then we’ve found the stealth shuttle,’ said Holly.
‘Exactly.’
The computer completed its scan quickly, building an on-screen model of the surrounding area. The gases were displayed in various whirling hues.
Artemis instructed the computer to search for anomalies. It found three, one with an abnormally high saturation of carbon monoxide.
‘That’s probably an airport. A lot of exhaust fumes.’
The second anomaly was a large area with only trace elements of any gas.
‘A vacuum, probably a computer plant,’ surmised Artemis.
The third anomaly was a small area, just outside the lip of E7, that appeared to contain no gas of any kind.
‘That’s her. The volume is exactly right. She’s on the north side of the chute entrance.’
‘Well done,’ said Holly, punching him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Let’s get up there.’
‘You know, of course, that as soon as we put our nose into the main chute system, Foaly will pick us up.’
Holly gave the engines a few seconds to warm up. ‘It’s too late to worry about that. Haven is more than six hundred miles away. By the time anyone gets here, we’ll be either heroes or outlaws.’
‘We’re already outlaws,’ said Artemis.
‘True,’ agreed Holly. ‘But soon we could be outlaws with no one chasing us.’
POLICE PLAZA, THE LOWER ELEMENTS
Opal Koboi was back. Could it be possible? The thought niggled at Foaly’s ordered mind, unravelling any chain of thought that he tried to compose. He would not find any peace until he found out for certain one way or the other.
The first place to check was the video footage from E37. If one began with the assumption that Koboi was indeed alive, then a number of details could be explained.
First, the strange haze that had appeared on all the tapes was manufactured to hide something and was not simply interference. The loss of audio signal too could have been orchestrated by Koboi to cover whatever had passed between Holly and Julius in the tunnel. And the calamitous explosion could have been Koboi’s doing and not Holly’s. The possibility brought tremendous peace to Foaly, but he contained it. He hadn’t proved anything yet.
Foaly ran the tape through a few filters without result. The strange blurred section refused to be sharpened, cloned or shifted. That in itself was unusual. If the blurred spot was just computer glitchery, Foaly should have been able to do something about it. But the indistinct patch stood its ground, repelling everything Foaly threw at it.
You may have the high-tech ground covered, thought the centaur. But what about good old low-tech?
Foaly zoomed the footage on to moments before the explosion. The blurred patch had transferred itself to Julius’s chest, and indeed at times the commander appeared to be looking at it. Was there an explosive device under there? If so, then it must have been remotely detonated. The jammer signal was probably sent from the same remote. The detonation command would override all other signals, including the jammer. This meant that for perhaps a thousandth of a second before detonation, whatever was on Julius’s chest would become visible. Not long enough for the fairy eye to capture, but a camera would see it just fine.
Foaly fast forwarded to the explosion and then began to work his way backwards, frame by frame. It was agonizing, watching his friend being reassembled by the reversed film. The centaur tried to ignore it, concentrating on the tape. The flames shrank from orange plumes to white shards, eventually containing themselves inside an orange mini-sun. Then, for a single frame, something appeared. Foaly flicked past it, then returned.
There! On Julius’s chest, right where the blur used to be. A device of some kind.
Foaly’s fingers jabbed the enlarge tool. A thirty-centimetre-square metal panel was secured to Julius’s chest with octo-bonds. It had been picked up by the camera for a single frame. Less than one-thousandth of a second, which was why it had been missed by the investigators. On the face of the panel was a plasma screen. Someone had been communicating with the commander before he died. That someone had not wanted to be overheard, hence the audio jammer. Unfortunately, the screen was now blank, as the detonation signal that disrupted the jammer would also have disrupted the video.
I know who it is, thought Foaly. It’s Opal Koboi, backjrom limbo. But he needed proof. The centaur’s word was worth about as much to Ark Sool as a dwarf’s denial that he had passed wind.
Foaly glared at the live feed from the Argon Clinic. There she was. Opal Koboi, still deep in her coma. Apparently.
How did you do it? How could you swap places with another fairy?
Plastic surgery wouldn’t do it. Surgery couldn’t change DNA. Foaly opened a drawer in his desk, pulling out a piece of equipment that resembled two miniature kitchen plungers.
There was only one way to find out what was going on here. He would have to ask Opal directly.
When Foaly arrived at the clinic, Doctor Argon was reluctant to allow him into Opal’s room.
‘Miss Koboi is in a deep state of catatonia,’ said the gnome peevishly. ‘Who knows what effect your devices will have on her psyche? It’s difficult, well-nigh impossible, to explain to a lay fairy what damage intrusive stimuli may have on the recovering mind.’
Foaly whinnied. ‘You had no trouble letting the TV networks in. I suppose they pay better than the LEP. I do hope you are not beginning to view Opal as your personal possession, Doctor. She is a state prisoner, and I can have her moved to a state facility any time I like.’
‘Maybe just five minutes,’ said Jerbal Argon, tapping in the door’s security code.
Foaly clopped past him, plonking his briefcase on the table. Opal swung gently in the draught from the doorway. And it did seem to be Opal. Even this close, with every feature in focus, Foaly could have sworn that this was his old adversary. The same Opal who had competed with him for every prize at college. The same Opal who had very nearly succeeded in having him blamed for the goblin uprising.
‘Get her down from there,’ he ordered.
Argon positioned a bunk below the harness, complaining at every step. ‘I shouldn’t be doing physical labour,’ he moaned. ‘It’s my hip. No one knows the pain I’m in. No one. The warlocks can’t do a thing for me.’
‘Don’t you have staff to do this sort of thing?’
‘Normally, yes,’ said Argon, lowering the harness. ‘But my janitors are on leave.
Both at the same time. Normally I wouldn’t allow it, but good pixie workers are hard to find.’
Foaly’s ears pricked up. ‘Pixies? Your janitors are pixies?’
‘Yes. We’re quite proud of them around here — minor celebrities, you know. The pixie twins. And, of course, they have the highest respect for me.’
Foaly’s hands shook as he unpacked his equipment. It all seemed to be coming together. First Chix, then the strange device on Julius’s chest, now pixie janitors who were on leave. He just needed one more piece of the puzzle.
‘What is it you have there?’ asked Argon anxiously. ‘Nothing that could cause any damage?’
Foaly tilted the unconscious pixie’s head backwards. ‘Don’t worry, Argon. It’s just a Retimager. I’m not going in any further than the eyeballs.’
He held the pixie’s eyes open, one at a time, sealing the plunger-like cups around the sockets. ‘Every image is recorded on the retinas. This leaves a trail of micro-scratches that can be enhanced and read.’
‘I know what a Retimager is,’ snapped Argon. ‘I do read science journals occasionally, you know. So you can tell what the last thing Opal saw was. What good will that do?’
Foaly connected the eyepieces to a wall computer. ‘We shall see,’ he said, endeavouring to sound cryptic rather than desperate.
He opened the Retimager’s program on the plasma screen, and two dark images appeared.
‘Left and right eyes,’ explained Foaly, toggling a key until the two images overlapped. The image was obviously a head from a side angle, but it was too dark to identify.
‘Ooh, such brilliance,’ gushed Argon sarcastically. ‘Shall I call the networks? Or should I just faint in
