Juliet had not ceased to worry: from what she remembered, reassurance from Mulch Diggums was about as reliable as a cocktail from the Pittsburgh Poisoner.
Fortunately, the underwater jaunt hadn’t lasted too long, and soon they were flitting across the wave tops once more without incident, except for the time when Mulch forgot his promise not to press mysterious buttons and almost crashed them into the sun-flecked seas by releasing the emergency-brake mini-parachute cluster.
“It was calling me, that button,” he offered as his excuse. “I couldn’t resist.”
The jolting stop had shunted Butler along the bench. He slid the entire length of the fuselage into the cockpit divider. Only his lightning reactions stopped him from getting his head jammed in the railings.
Butler rubbed his crown, which he had clipped on a bar. “Take it easy, or there will be consequences. You said it yourself: we don’t need you to fly the ship.”
Mulch guffawed, giving a nasty view of his cavernous food pipe. “That’s true, Butler, my freakishly large friend. But you certainly need me to land it.”
Juliet’s laugh was high and sweet and seemed to ricochet off the curved metal walls.
“You too, Juliet?” said Butler reproachfully.
“Come on, brother. That was funny. You’ll laugh too when Mulch plays back the video.”
“There’s video?” said Butler, which just set the other two laughing again.
All of this laughing did nothing to delay Butler’s reunion with his principal, Artemis Fowl. A principal who no longer trusted him and who had probably lied to him, sending Butler to another continent and using Juliet to ensure that he would travel.
There would be tough questions asked when he finally caught up with Artemis. And the answers had better be good or, for the first time in the history of their families’ centuries-long relationship, a Butler might just walk away from his duties.
Artemis is ill, Butler rationalized. He’s not responsible.
Maybe Artemis was not responsible. But he soon would be.
The mercenaries’ shuttle finally jerked to a halt over a spot of open ocean just above the sixtieth parallel. It was a spot that seemed no different than the square gray miles that stretched away on all sides, until the anti-grav pillar plowed through six feet of water below, revealing the arrowhead escape pod.
“I love this ship,” Mulch crowed. “It makes me look smarter-er than I am.”
The surrounding waters churned and boiled as the invisible pulses tested the surface and compacted the waves enough to keep the ship hovering in place. Down below, the pulses would sound like bell clappers on the pod’s skin.
“Hello,” called Mulch. “We’re up here.”
Butler stuck his head and shoulders into the cockpit, which was about all of him that could fit.
“Can’t we radio them?”
“Radio?” said the dwarf. “You don’t know much about being a fugitive, do you? The first thing you do when you steal an LEP ship is strip out anything that could carry a signal to Police Plaza. Every wire, every fuse, every lens. All gone. I’ve known guys who got caught because they left the sound system in. That’s an old Foaly trick. He knows bad boys love their loud music, so he installs a set of speakers to kill for in every LEP bird, each one loaded with tracer gel. There’s hardly any tech left in here.”
“So?”
“So what?” said Mulch, as if he had no idea what they were talking about.
“So how do we communicate with that ship down there?”
“You have a phone, don’t you?”
Butler’s eyes dropped to the floor. “Artemis is not taking my calls. He’s not himself.”
“That’s terrible,” said Mulch. “But do you think they have food? Some of those escape pods have emergency rations. A little chewy, but okay with a nice bottle of beer.”
Butler was wondering whether this change of subject warranted a clip on the ear, when his phone rang.
“It’s Artemis,” he said, seeming a little more shocked than when he’d been surrounded by
“Butler?” said Artemis’s voice.
“Yes, Artemis.”
“We need to talk.”
“You’d better make it good,” said Butler, and severed the connection.
It took mere moments to winch down a bucket seat to the pod below, and another few minutes for the pod’s occupants to clamber into the mercenaries’ shuttle. Holly was the last up as she pulled the scuttle cord and opened the escape pod’s ballast tanks wide before she left, sinking the craft.
As soon as her elbow crabbed over the doorway’s lip, Holly began giving orders.
“Monitor LEP channels on the radio,” she barked. “We need to find out how the investigation is proceeding.”
Mulch grinned from the pilot’s chair. “Aha, you see that might be a problem, this being a stolen ship and all. Not much in the way of communications. And hello, by the way. I’m fine, still alive, and all that. Happy to be able to save your life. Also, what investigation are we talking about?”
Holly pulled herself all the way inside, glancing regretfully down at the sinking pod with its-until recently- functional communications array.
“Ah well,” she sighed. “You work with whatever limited resources you have.”
“Thanks a bunch,” said Mulch, miffed. “Did you bring any food? I haven’t eaten for, wow, it must be minutes.”
“No, no food,” said Holly. She hugged Mulch tightly, one of perhaps four people in the world who would voluntarily touch the dwarf, then pushed him out of the pilot’s chair, taking his place. “That will have to do for niceties. I’ll buy you an entire barbecue hamper later.”
“With real meat?”
Holly shuddered. “Of course not. Don’t be disgusting.”
Butler sat up and spared a moment to nod at Holly, then turned his full attention on Artemis, who carried himself like the Artemis of old but without the customary cockiness.
“Well?” said Butler, the single syllable laden with implication.
Artemis knew that the situation merited at least a hug, and some day in the future, after years of meditation, he might feel comfortable spontaneously hugging people, but at this moment it was all he could do to lay a hand on Juliet’s shoulder and another on Butler’s forearm.
“I am so sorry, my friends, to have lied to you.”
Juliet covered the hand with her own, for that was her nature, but Butler raised his as though he were being arrested.
“Juliet could have died, Artemis. We were forced to fight off a horde of
Artemis pulled away, the moment of emotion past. “Real danger? Then someone has been spying on me. Someone who knew our movements. Possibly the same someone who sent the probe to kill Vinyaya and target Atlantis.”
Over the next few minutes, while Holly ran a systems check and plotted a course for the crash site, Artemis brought Butler and Juliet up to speed, saving the diagnosis of his own illness for last.
“I have a disorder which the fairies call an Atlantis Complex. It is similar to obsessive-compulsive disorder but also manifests as delusional dementia and even multiple personality.” Butler nodded slowly. “I see. So when you sent me away, you were in the grips of this Atlantis Complex.”
“Exactly. I was in stage one, which involves a large dose of paranoia as one of its symptoms. You missed stage two.”
“Lucky for you,” Holly called back from the cockpit. “That Orion guy was a little too friendly.”
“My subconscious built the Orion personality as my alter ego. Artemis, I’m sure you remember, was the goddess of the hunt, and legend has it that Orion was Artemis’s mortal enemy, so she sent a scorpion to kill him. In my mind Orion was free from the guilt I harbored from my various schemes, especially the guilt of
