sitting on a jackhammer. If the heat didn’t bake him, the vibration would shake him to death.
Still, in spite of all these things, a thought struck Artemis, causing the corner of his mouth to twitch in a half smile.
They were desperate to have this lemur and they would not give up. He was certain of it.
Artemis turned his attention to the city suburbs bouncing past his window. The desert highway was suddenly thick with traffic as they neared the city centre. Giant trucks thundered past, tyres taller than a grown man, their flat-beds stuffed with sullen human cargo. Harried donkeys’ hooves clicked on the broken tarmac, their backs piled high with sticks, laundry or even furniture. Thousands of dusty mopeds slalomed through the lanes, often bearing entire families on their rusting frames. The roadside buildings shimmered in the late afternoon sun like mirages. Ghost houses, with tea-drinking spectres seated out at the front.
Closer to the city centre the buildings were denser with no tracts of desert in between. Dwellings were interspersed with garages and video stores, tea shops and pizza parlours. All were the same sandblasted orange colour, with patches of original paint poking through below the lintels.
Artemis felt, as he always did when visiting developing nations, mild surprise at the coexistence of ancient and modern. Goat herders toted iPods on spangled chains and wore Manchester United shirts. Shacks had satellite dishes bolted to their corrugated roofs.
Until recent times, Fez had been a place of real importance, being the depot for the caravan trade from the south and east. It was known as a centre of Arab wisdom, a holy city, and a place of pilgrimage when the route to Mecca was closed by weather conditions or overrun with bandits.
Now it had become a place where outlawed Extinctionists did deals with desperate Irish criminals.
Not a comforting thought, but comfort was not a luxury he expected to enjoy in the near future.
Artemis’s mobile phone buzzed as an incoming text message arrived, having made its way from Fez to Ireland and back to Morocco.
He checked the screen and a mirthless smile exposed his incisors.
Kronski wished to make the exchange in a public place.
Holly piloted the shuttle as though she were angry with it, slamming the mining craft round bends until its air brakes screamed and its readout needles shot into the red. She wore a flight helmet hard-wired directly into the shuttle’s cameras, so a wraparound view of the shuttle was available to her at all times; she could even choose a remote view beamed to the shuttle from the tunnel’s various cameras. This particular stretch of tunnel saw little traffic and so the motion-sensitive lights would pop on barely five miles before the shuttle entered a stretch.
Holly tried hard to enjoy the experience of flying and forget everything else. Being a pilot for the LEP was what she had dreamed of since childhood. As she cut yet another corner with a millimetre to spare, and felt the shuttle strain to its limits in her hands, the tension drained from her body as though absorbed by the craft.
And so she could understand what Artemis had done — even though she felt it was unnecessary — but that did not mean she could forgive him just yet.
And how could she forget it? It felt as though she had completely misjudged their friendship.
One thing that Holly was certain of: the most she and Artemis could ever have now was what they’d always had — grudging respect.
Holly patched into the passenger-seat bubble-cam on the shuttle ceiling and was gratified to see Artemis clutching the armrests on his seat. Perhaps it was the camera feed or perhaps his face was actually green.
There was a natural vent in the Moroccan desert, south of Agadir, where tunnel gas filtered up through half a mile of sand. The only evidence of this was a slight discoloration of the sand above the vent, which was quickly dispersed by the winds as soon as it reached the surface. Nevertheless, a thousand years of the process had left the dunes with curious red streaks, which the local villagers swore was blood from the victims of Raisuli, a famous twentieth-century bandit. It was highly unlikely that anyone swallowed these claims, least of all the villagers themselves, but it made good reading in the guidebooks and drew visitors to the otherwise unremarkable area.
Holly drilled the craft through the vent, sealing the shuttle’s own air filters against the tiny sand particles. She was flying virtually blind with only a three-dimensional model of the vent to navigate by. Luckily, it was a short leg of the trip and it took mere seconds for the shuttle to punch through to the African sky. In spite of the craft’s insulated skin, its passengers soon began to feel the heat. Especially Mulch Diggums. Unlike the other fairy families, dwarfs were not surface creatures and did not dream of golden sun on their upturned faces. Anything higher than sea level gave them vertigo.
Mulch burped wetly. ‘This is too high. I don’t like this. Hot, too darned hot. I need to go to the bathroom. For what I’m not sure exactly. Just don’t follow me in there. Whatever you hear, don’t come in.’
When a dwarf gave this sort of advice, it was wise not to ignore it.
Holly sent a charge through the windscreen to clear it, then pointed the shuttle’s nose north-east towards Fez. With a bit of luck, they could still beat little Artemis to the rendezvous point.
She set the autopilot and swivelled her seat to face Artemis, whose face was just returning to its normal pallor.
‘You’re sure about the rendezvous point?’ she asked.
Artemis wasn’t sure about anything and this uncertainty fogged his brain.
‘Not sure, Holly. But I clearly remember making the exchange at the leather souq in Fez. At the very least it is a place to start. If Kronski and my younger self do not show up, then we proceed to the Extinctionists’ compound.’
Holly frowned. ‘Hmm. This scheme is not up to your usual standards and our time is running out. We don’t have a couple of days to play around with. Time is the enemy.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Artemis. ‘Time is the crux of this entire misadventure.’
Holly took a nutri-block from the tiny refrigerator and returned to her controls.
Artemis studied his friend’s back, trying to read her body language. Hunched, rounded shoulders and arms crossed in front of her body. She was cutting herself off, hostile to communication. He needed to produce some masterstroke to get himself back in her good books.
Artemis pressed his nose to the porthole, watching the Moroccan desert flash past in streaks of ochre and gold. There must be something that Holly wanted. Something she regretted not doing that in some way he could facilitate.
After a moment’s concentrated thought, it came to him. Hadn’t he seen a field holograph pack on one of the storage rails? And wasn’t there someone to whom Holly had never said goodbye?
Commander Julius Root was up to the quivering tip of his fungus cigar in paperwork. Not that it was actual paperwork. There hadn’t been any LEP files written on real paper in a centaur’s age. It was all saved on a crystal and kept in a central core somewhere in info-space, and apparently now Foaly’s people were trying to grow memory plants, which meant that some day information could be stored in plants or dungheaps, or even the cigar sticking out of Root’s mouth. The commander did not understand any of this, nor did he want to. Let Foaly have the worlds of nano and cyber technologies. He would take the world of everyday LEP problems. And there were plenty of
