Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex

innocent. Also, you have feelings for me.”

“An innocent!” spluttered Holly, and it took an especially outlandish statement to make her splutter. “You are Artemis Fowl! For years, you were public enemy number one.”

“I am not Artemis Fowl,” protested Orion. “I share his body and his knowledge of the Gnommish tongue, among other things, but I have a completely different personality. I am what is known as an alter ego.”

Holly snorted. “I don’t think that defense will stand up in front of a tribunal.”

“Oh, it does,” said Orion happily. “All the time.”

Holly wormed up the slide of wafer slop to the lip of the crater in which the small band sheltered.

“No signs of hostiles. They appear to have descended into the underground craters.”

“Appear?” said Foaly. “Can’t you be a little more specific?”

Holly shook her head. “No. I’m on eyes only. All our instruments are out. We have no link outside our own local network. I would guess that the probe is blocking communications.”

Foaly was busy grooming himself, peeling long strings of gluey nano-wafers from his flank. “It’s designed to emit a broad-spectrum jammer if it’s under attack, knocking out communications and weapons. I’m surprised Artemis’s cannon fired, and I would imagine your guns have been isolated by now, and shut down.”

Holly checked her Neutrino. Dead as a doornail. There was nothing on her helmet readout either except a slowly revolving red skull icon, which signaled catastrophic systems failure.

“D’Arvit,” she hissed. “No weapons, no communications. How are we supposed to stop this thing?”

The centaur shrugged. “It’s a probe, not a battleship. It should be easy enough to destroy once radar picks it up. If this is some mastermind’s plot to destroy the fairy world, then he’s not much of a mastermind.”

Orion raised a finger. “I feel I should point out, correct me if Artemis is misremembering, but didn’t your instruments dismally fail to pick up this probe in the first place?”

Foaly scowled. “I was just starting to like you a little better than the other one.”

Holly stood erect. “We need to follow the probe.

Work out where it’s going and somehow get word through to Haven.”

Orion smiled. “You know, Miss Holly, you look very dramatic like that, backlit by the fire. Very attractive, if I may say so. I know you shared a moment passionne with Artemis, which he subsequently fouled up with his typical boorish behavior. Let me just throw something out there for you to consider while we’re chasing the probe: I share Artemis’s passion but not his boorishness. No pressure; just think about it.”

This was enough to elicit a deafening moment of silence even in the middle of a crisis, which Orion seemed to be blissfully unaffected by.

Foaly was the first to speak. “What’s that look you have on your face there, Commander Short? What’s going through your head right now? Don’t think about it, just tell me.”

Holly ignored him, but that didn’t stop the centaur talking.

“You had a moment of passion with Artemis Fowl?” he said. “I don’t remember reading that in your report.”

Holly may have been blushing, or it may have been the aforementioned dramatic backlighting. “It wasn’t in my report, okay? Because there was no moment of passion.”

Foaly didn’t give up so easily. “So nothing happened, Holly?”

“Nothing worth talking about. When we went back in time, my emotions got a little jumbled. It was temporary, okay? Can we please focus? We are supposed to be professionals.”

“Not me,” said Orion cheerily. “I’m just a teenager with hormones running wild. And may I say, young fairy lady, they’re running wild in your direction.”

Holly lifted her visor and looked the hormonal teenager in the eye. “This had better not be a game, Artemis. If you do not have some serious psychosis, you will be sorry.”

“Oh, I’m crazy, all right. I do have plenty of psychoses,” said Orion cheerily. “Multiple personality, delusional dementia, OCD. I’ve got them all, but most of all, I’m crazy about you.”

“That’s not a bad line,” muttered Foaly. “He is definitely not Artemis.”

Holly stamped the slush from her boots. “We have two objectives: first, we need to hide evidence of fairy technology, i.e. the shuttle, from curious humans until such time as we can send a LEPretrieval team to haul it below. And our second objective is to somehow stay on the tail of that probe and get a message through to Police Plaza that it’s up here.” She glanced sharply at Foaly. “Could this be a simple malfunction?”

“No,” said the centaur with absolute certainty. “And I say that with absolute certainty. That probe has been deliberately reprogrammed, the amorphobots too. They were never meant to be used as weapons.”

“Then we have an enemy. Police Plaza needs to be warned.”

Holly turned to Orion. “Well, any ideas?”

The boy’s eyebrows rose a notch. “Bivouac?”

Holly rubbed the spot on her forehead where a headache had just blossomed.

“Bivouac. Fabulous.”

From behind came a sudden wrenching noise as the shuttle sank a little lower in the ice like a defeated warrior.

“You know,” mused Foaly, “that ship is pretty heavy and the rock shelf there is not very-”

Before he could finish, the entire shuttle disappeared into the landscape, taking the restaurant with it, as though both had been swallowed by a subterranean kraken.

Seconds later, Artemis’s Ice Cube nano-wafer cannon tumbled into the newborn chasm.

“That was incredibly quiet,” said Orion. “If I hadn’t seen it, I would never have known.”

“This terrain is like dwarf cheese. Full of holes,” said Holly, then she was up and gone, racing across the ice toward the new crater.

Orion and Foaly took their time strolling across the glacier, chatting amiably.

“On the plus side,” said Foaly, “there’s our first objective achieved. The evidence is gone.”

Orion nodded, then asked, “Dwarf cheese?”

“Cheese made by dwarfs.”

“Oh,” said Orion, relieved. “They make it. It’s not actually. .”

“No. What a horrible thought.”

“Exactly.”

The hole in the surface of the ice revealed a cavernous underworld. A subterranean river pulsed along, tearing shreds from what was left of the Great Skua restaurant. The water was deep blue and moving with such power that it almost seemed alive. Great chunks of ice, some the size of elephants, sheared away from the banks, tumbled against the current, and then submitted to its will, gathering speed until they struck the building, pulverizing what was left. The only sound was one of raging water; the building seemed to surrender without a whimper.

The shuttle had become impaled on an ice ridge below a slight bank in the underground river. An ice bank that could not survive the pounding waters for long. The craft was stripped down by the brute force of nature until only a small section remained, an obsidian arrowhead jammed point down into the ice and rock.

“The shuttle’s escape pod,” shouted Holly. “Of course.”

Objective two, staying on the probe’s tail, was now actually possible. If they could board the pod, and if the pod still had any power in it, they would be able to follow the probe and try to get a message to LEP headquarters.

Holly tried to scan the small craft with her helmet, but her beams were still blocked.

She turned to the centaur. “Foaly? What do you think?”

Foaly did not need her question explained. There was only one thing to think about: the escape pod wedged into the ice below them.

“Those things are damn near indestructible and built to hold the entire crew in a pinch. Also, the power source is a solid fuel block, so there aren’t many moving parts to go wrong. All the usual modes of communication are on board, plus a good old-fashioned radio, which our secret enemy might not have thought to block, though considering he thought to phase the probe’s shield to repulse our own sensors, I doubt there’s much he didn’t think of.”

Holly lay down and wiggled forward until her torso hung over the rim, spray from the subterranean river