speed drip of blood running from the corner of his mouth to his hairline. Foaly dropped to his forelegs and tried to encourage Artemis back into consciousness with a stiff talking to.
“Come on, Mud Boy,” he said, poking Artemis’s forearm. “No time for lollygagging.”
Artemis’s response to this chastising was a barely noticeable jerking of his arm. This was good-at least it told Holly that Artemis was still alive.
Holly tripped over the crater’s lip, and stumbled to the bottom.
“
Foaly poked Artemis one more time. “Yes. It is. And shouldn’t you be killing those robots with your pencil?”
Holly’s eyes seemed to light up. “Really? Can I do that?”
Foaly snorted. “Certainly. If your pencil has a super-duper demon magic beam inside it instead of graphite.”
Holly was still groggy, but even through a fugue of injury and battle stress, it was obvious that the situation was dire. They heard strange metallic clicks and animalistic whoops chittering through the air, softly at first then rising in tempo and intensity to a frenzy.
The noise grated against Holly’s forehead as though her skin were being yanked.
“What is that?”
“The amorphobots are communicating,” whispered Foaly. “Transferring terabytes of information wirelessly. Updating each other. What one knows, they all know.”
Holly scanned Artemis’s vitals through her visor. The glowing readouts informed her that he had a slight heart murmur and there was some unusual brain activity in the parietal lobe. Other than that, the best thing her helmet computer could conclude about Artemis was that he was basically not dead. If she could survive this latest misadventure, maybe Artemis would too.
“What are they looking for, Foaly?”
“What are they looking for?” repeated the centaur, smiling that particular hysterical smile that exposed too much gum.
Holly suddenly felt her senses snap into focus and knew that the magic had finished its overhaul of her injuries. Her pelvis still throbbed and probably would for a few months, but she was operational again, so maybe she could lead them back to fairy civilization.
“Foaly, pull yourself together. We need to know what those things can do.”
The centaur seemed put out that someone would choose this particular moment to ask him questions when he had so many vital issues to consider.
“Holly, really! Do we have time for explanations now?”
“Snap out of it, Foaly! Information, hand it over.”
Foaly sighed, lips flapping. “They are biospheres. Amorphobots. Dumb plasma-based machines. They collect samples of plant life and analyze them in their plasma. Simple as that. Harmless.”
“Harmless,” blurted Holly. “I think someone has reprogrammed your amorphobots, centaur.”
The blood disappeared from Foaly’s cheeks and his fingers twitched. “No. Not possible. That probe is supposed to be on its way to Mars to search for microorganisms.”
“I think we can be pretty sure that your probe has been hijacked.”
“There is another possibility,” suggested Foaly. “I could be dreaming all of this.”
Holly pressed on with her questions. “How do we stop them, Foaly?”
It was impossible to miss the fear that flickered across Foaly’s face, like a sun flash across a lake. “Stop them? The amorphobots are built to withstand prolonged exposure to open space. You could drop one of these onto the surface of a star and it would survive for long enough to transmit some information back to its mother probe. Obviously I have a kill code, but I suspect that has been overridden.”
“There must be a way. Can’t we shoot them?”
“Absolutely not. They love energy. It feeds their cells. If you shoot them, they’ll just get bigger and more powerful.”
Holly laid a palm on Artemis’s forehead, checking his temperature.
I wish you would wake up, she thought. We could really use one of your brilliant schemes right now.
“Foaly,” she said urgently. “What are the amorphobots doing right now? What are they looking for?”
“Life,” replied Foaly simply. “They’re doing a grid search now, starting at the drop site and moving out. Any life forms they encounter will be absorbed into the sac, analyzed, then released.”
Holly peeped over the lip of the crater. “What are their scan criteria?”
“Thermal is the default. But they can use anything.”
Thermal, thought Holly. Heat signatures. That’s why they are spending so much time by the flaming shuttle.
The amorphobots were arranged on corners of invisible grid squares, slowly working their way outward from the shuttle’s smoking carcass. They seemed innocuous enough, rolling balls of gel with twin glowing red sensors at their cores. Like slime balloons from a children’s party.
Maybe the size of a crunchball.
Her opinion altered sharply when one of the amorphobots changed color from translucent green to angry electric blue and the color spread to the others. Their eerie chittering became a constant shrill whine.
They have found something, Holly realized.
The entire squad of twenty or so bots converged on a single spot, some merging so that they formed larger blobs, which flowed across the ice with a speed and grace heretofore concealed. The bot that had flashed the message to the others allowed a charge to crackle across its skin, which it then discharged into a hillock of snow. An unfortunate snow fox leaped from the steam, tail smoking like a fuse, and made a dart for freedom.
The amorphobots jiggled as though laughing and sent a few bolts of crackling blue energy after the doomed fox, carving black rents in the ground, steering the terror-stricken mammal away from the shelter of the Great Skua. In spite of the fox’s natural speed and agility, the bots anticipated its movements with incredible accuracy, sending the animal running in circles, its eyes rolling, tongue dangling.
There was only one possible conclusion to this game of cat and mouse. The largest amorphobot droned an impatient bass command through the almost invisible gel speakers in its body and turned abruptly to continue its search. The others followed, leaving only the original bot to hunt the fox. It quickly tired of the sport and nailed the fox in mid-jump with a bolt of power, cast like a spear from its midsection.
Murderer, thought Holly, more angry than horrified. Foaly didn’t design this.
Foaly suddenly moved in front of her. “You’ve got that look in your eyes, Captain.”
“What look?”
“The one Julius Root always talked about. The I’m-about-to-do-something-incredibly-stupid look.”
There was no time for debate. “I need to get to Artemis’s project.”
“You can’t go. What does the LEP manual suggest in these kinds of situations?”
Holly ground her teeth. Her two geniuses were useless; she would have to do this herself.
“The manual, which you helped to write, would advise me to retreat to a safe distance and construct a bivouac, but, with respect, those guidelines are a pile of troll weevils.”
“Wow. Nice respect. Do you know what the word
“I never said steaming,” said Holly, then decided that time was short and she could apologize later. “Listen, Foaly. I don’t have a downlink to Police Plaza. There are murdering blobby robots on our trail, and the only people who might be able to come up with a solution are either fast asleep dreaming or, in your case, wide awake dreaming. So I need you to cover me while I make a run for Artemis’s crate. Do you think you can do that?”
Holly handed the centaur her backup weapon. Foaly held the gun gingerly, as though it were radioactive, which to a certain degree it was.
“Okay. I know how this thing works, in theory.”
“Good,” said Holly, and slithered on her belly up and onto the ice field before she could change her mind.
