The Last Guardian by Eoin Colfer
Artemis spoke quietly but with the commanding tone that had made him a natural leader since the age of ten.
“It’s too late to free Opal. All we can do is save her life. That’s what she planned for all along.”
“Save her life?” objected Trouble. “But we still have…” Commander Kelp checked the countdown clock. “Ten minutes.”
Artemis patted Holly’s shoulder, then stepped away from her. “If fairy bureaucracy is anything like the human kind, you won’t be able to get Opal into a shuttle in that time. What you might be able to do is get her down to the reactor core.”
Kelp had not yet learned the hard way to shut up and let Artemis explain, and so kept asking questions, slowing down the process, wasting valuable seconds.
“Reactor core? What reactor core?”
Artemis raised a finger. “One more question, Commander, and I will be forced to have Butler restrain you.”
Kelp was a breath away from ejecting Artemis or charging him with something, but the situation was critical and if there was a chance that this human could in some way help…
He clenched his fists till his fingers creaked. “Okay. Talk.”
“The Deeps is powered by a natural fission reactor in a uranium ore layer set on a bed of granite similar to the one in Oklo, Gabon,” said Artemis, tugging the facts from his memory. “The People’s Power Company harvests the energy in small pods set into the uranium. These pods are constructed with science and magic to withstand a moderate nuclear blast. This is taught in schools here. Every fairy in the room knows this, correct?”
Everyone nodded. Technically it was correct, as they did know it now.
“If we can place Opal inside the pod before the deadline, then the blast will at least be contained and theoretically, if we pump in enough anti-rad foam, Opal might even retain her physical integrity. Though that is something I would not bet my last gold coin on. Opal, apparently, is prepared to take the risk.”
Trouble was tempted to poke Artemis in the chest but wisely resisted. “You’re saying that all of this is an elaborate escape plan?”
“Of course,” said Artemis. “And not all that elaborate. Opal is forcing you to release her from her cell. The alternative is the utter destruction of Atlantis and every soul in it, which is unthinkable to anyone except Opal herself.”
Foaly had already brought up the prison plans. “The reactor core is less than a hundred yards below Opal’s cell. I’m contacting the warden now.”
Holly knew that Artemis was a genius and that there was no one more qualified to second-guess kidnappers. But still, they had options.
She gazed at the figures onscreen and was chilled by how casual the gnomes seemed, in the light of what they were about to do. They slouched like adolescents, barely glancing at their captive, cocky in their abilities and not even a jot self-conscious about their cartoon-character smart-masks, which “read” their faces and displayed the appropriate emotions in exaggerated cartoon style. Smart-masks were very popular with the karaoke crowd, who could then look like their idols as well as trying to sound like them.
Perhaps they don’t know exactly what’s at stake here, Holly thought suddenly. Perhaps they are as clueless as I was ten seconds ago.
“Can they hear us?” she asked Foaly.
“They can, but we haven’t responded yet. Just press the button.”
This was just an old figure of speech; there was of course no actual button, just a sensor on the touch screen.
“Hold it, Captain!” ordered Trouble.
“I am a trained negotiator, sir,” said Holly, hoping the respect in her tone would get her what she wanted. “And I was once …” She glanced guiltily at Artemis, sorry that she had to play this card. “I was once a hostage myself, so I know how these things go. Let me talk to them.”
Artemis nodded encouragingly, and Holly knew that he understood her tactics.
“Captain Short is correct, Commander,” he said. “Holly is a natural communicator. She even managed to get through to me.”
“Do it,” barked Trouble. “Foaly, you keep trying to reach Atlantis. And assemble the Council; we need to begin evacuating both cities now.”
Though you could not see their real faces, the gnomes’ cartoon expressions were bored now. It was in the slant of their heads and the bend of their knees. Perhaps this whole thing was not as exciting as they hoped it would be. After all, they could not see their audience, and no one had responded to their threats. What had started out as a revolutionary action was now beginning to look like two big gnomes picking on a pixie.
Pip waggled his gun at Kip, and the meaning was clear. Why don’t we just shoot her now?
Holly activated the microphone with a wave of her hand.
“Hello, you there. This is Captain Holly Short of the LEP. Can you hear me?”
The gnomes perked up immediately, and Pip even attempted a whistle, which came through the vox-box as a raspberry.
“Hey, Captain Short. We heard of you. I’ve seen pictures. Not too shabby, Captain.”
Holly bit back a caustic retort. Never force a kidnapper to demonstrate his resolve.
“Thank you, Pip. Should I call you Pip?”
“You, Holly Short, can call me anything and any time you like,” squeaked Pip, and he extended his free hand toward his partner for a knuckle bump.
Holly was incredulous. These two were about to totally incapacitate the entire fairy world, and they were goofing about like two goblins at a fireball party.
“Okay, Pip,” she continued evenly. “What can we do for you today?”
Pip shook his head sorrowfully at Kip. “Why are the pretty ones always stupid?” He turned to the camera. “You know what you can do for us. We told you already. Release Opal Koboi, or the younger model is gonna take a long sleep. And by that I mean, get shot in the head.”
“You need to give us some time to show good faith. Come on, Pip. One more hour? For me?”
Pip scratched his head with the gun barrel, pretending to consider it. “You are cute, Holly. But not that cute. If I give you another hour, you’ll track me down somehow and drop a time-stop on my head. No thanks, Cap. You have ten minutes. If I was you, I would get that cell open or call the undertaker.”
“This kind of thing takes time, Pip,” persisted Holly, repeating the name, forging a bond. “It takes three days to pay a parking fine.”
Pip shrugged. “Not my problem, babe. And you can call me Pip all day and it won’t make us BFFs. It ain’t my real name.”
Artemis deactivated the microphone. “This one is smart, Holly. Don’t play with him, just tell the truth.”
Holly nodded and switched on the mike. “Okay, whatever your name is. Let me give it to you straight. There’s a good chance that if you shoot young Opal, then we’re going to have a series of very big explosions down here. A lot of innocent people will die.”
Pip waved his gun carelessly. “Oh yeah, the quantum laws. We know about that, don’t we, Kip?”
“Quantum laws,” said Kip. “Of course we know about that.”
“And you don’t care that good fairies, gnomes that could be related to you, will die?”
Pip raised his eyebrows so that they jutted over the top of the mask. “You like any of your family, Kip?”
“Ain’t got no family. I’m an orphan.”
“Really? Me too.”
While they bantered, Opal shivered in the dirt, trying to speak through the tape. Foaly would get voice analysis on the muffled mumbles later—if there was a later—but it didn’t take a genius to figure out she was pleading for her life.
“There must be something you need,” said Holly.
“There is one thing,” replied Pip. “Could I get your com-code? I sure would love to hook up for a sim-latte when this is all over. Might be a while, of course, what with Haven City being in ruins.”
Foaly put a text box on the screen. It read: They’re moving Opal now.
Holly fluttered
Pip’s theatrical responses were getting a little hard to take. “Well then, I guess a lot of people are going swimming. Fission can put a hell of a hole in the shield.”
Holly broke. “Don’t you care about anyone? What’s the going rate for genocide?”
Pip and Kip actually laughed.
“It’s a horrible feeling, impotency, ain’t it?” said Pip. “But there are worse feelings. Drowning, for example.”
“And getting crushed by falling buildings,” added Kip.
Holly banged her tiny fists on the console.
These two are so infuriating.
Pip stepped close to the camera, so that his mask filled the screen. “If I don’t get a call from Opal Koboi in the next few minutes telling me she is in a shuttle on her way to the surface, then I will shoot this pixie. Believe it.”
Foaly rested his head in his hands. “I used to love Pip and Kip,” he said.
The Deeps, Atlantis
Opal Koboi was making a futile attempt to levitate when the guards came for her. It was something she had been able to do as a child before her chosen life of crime had stripped the magic from her synapses, the tiny junctions between nerve cells where most experts agreed magic originated. Her power might have regenerated if it hadn’t been for the human pituitary gland she’d had briefly attached to her hypothalamus. Levitation was a complicated art, especially for pixies with their limited powers, and usually a state only achieved by Hey-Hey Monks of the Third Balcony; but Opal had managed it while still in diapers, which had been her parents’ first sign that their daughter was a little bit special.
Imagine it, she thought. I wished to be human. That was a mistake for which I will eventually find someone to blame. The centaur, Foaly—he drove me to it. I do hope he is killed in the explosion.
Opal smirked in self-satisfaction. There had been a time when she’d whiled away the prison monotony by concocting ever more elaborate death traps for her centaur nemesis, but now she was content to let Foaly die with the rest in the imminent explosions. Granted, she had cooked up a little surprise for his wife; but this was merely a side project and not something she had spent too much time on.
It is a measure of how far I have come, Opal thought. I have matured somewhat. The veil has lifted, and I see my true purpose.
There had been a time when Opal had simply been a ruthless business fairy with daddy issues; but somewhere during the years of banned experimentation, she had allowed black magic to fester in her soul and let it warp her heart’s desire until it was not enough to be lauded in her own city. She needed the world to bow down, and she was prepared to risk everything and sacrifice anyone to see her wish fulfilled.
This time it will be different, for I will have fearsome warriors bound to my will. Ancient soldiers who will die for me.
Opal cleared her mind and sent out a probe searching for her other self. All that came back was the white noise of terror.
She knows, Opal realized. Poor thing.
This moment of sympathy for her younger self did not last long, as the imprisoned Opal had learned not to live in the past.
I am merely killing a memory, she thought. That is all.
Which was a convenient way of looking at it.
Her cell door phase-changed from solid to gas, and Opal was unsurprised to see Warden Tarpon Vinyáya, a malleable pen pusher who had never spent a night outside under the moon, fidgeting in her doorway, flanked by two jumbo pixie guards.
“Warden,” she said, abandoning her levitation attempt. “Has my pardon arrived?”
Tarpon had no time for pleasantries. “We’re moving you, Koboi. No discussion; just come along.”
He gestured to his guards. “Wrap her up, boys.”
The jumbo pixies strode rapidly into the room, wordlessly pinning Opal’s arms to her sides. Jumbo pixies were a breed peculiar to Atlantis, where the particular blend of pressurized environment and algae-based filtration had caused them to pop up with increased regularity over the years. What the jumbo pixies gained in brawn they generally sacrificed in brains, and so they made the ideal prison guards, having no respect for anyone smaller than themselves who did not sign their paychecks.
Before Opal could open her mouth to voice an objection, the pixies had bundled her into a lined anti-radiation suit and clipped three bungee cords around her torso.
The warden sighed, as if he had been expecting Opal to somehow disable his guards. Which he had.
“Good. Good,” he said, mopping his high brow with a handkerchief. “Take her to the basement. Don’t touch any of the pipes, and avoid breathing if possible.”
The pixies hefted their captive between them like a rolled rug and double-timed it from Opal’s cell, across the narrow bridge that linked her cell-pod to the main prison, and into the service elevator.
Opal smiled behind the heavy lead gauze of her headpiece.
This certainly is the day for Opal Kobois to be manhandled by burly boys.
She beamed a thought to her younger self on the surface.
I feel for you, sister.
The elevator cube flashed downward through a hundred yards of soft sandstone to a small chamber composed entirely of hyperdense material harvested from the crust of a neutron star.
Opal guessed they had arrived at the chamber, and giggled at the memory of a stupid gnome in her high school who had asked what neutron stars were made of.
Neutrons, boy, Professor Leguminous had snapped. Neutrons! The clue is in the name.
This chamber held the record for being the most expensive room per square inch to construct anywhere on the planet, though it looked a little like a concrete furnace room. At one end was the elevator door; at the other were what looked like four missile tubes; and in the middle was an extremely grumpy dwarf.
“You are bleeping joking me?” he said, belly thrust out belligerently.
The jumbo pixies dumped Opal on the gray floor.
“Orders, pal,” said one. “Put her in the tube.”
The dwarf shook his head stubbornly. “I ain’t putting no one in a tube. Them tubes is built for rods.”
“I do believe,” said the second pixie, very proud of himself for remembering the information he was about to deliver, “that one of them reactor sites is depleted so the tube do be empty.”
“That sounded pretty good, Jumbo, except for the do be at the end,” said the dwarf, whose name was Kolin Ozkopy. “But even so, I need to know how the consequences of not putting a person in a tube are worse than the consequences of putting them in one?”
A sentence of this length would take a jumbo pixie several minutes to digest; luckily, they were spared the embarrassment of being pressed for an explanation when Kolin’s phone rang.
“Just a sec,” he said, checking caller ID. “It’s the warden.”
Kolin answered the phone with a flourish. “Y’ello. Engineer Ozkopy here.”
Ozkopy listened for a long moment, interjecting three uh-huhs and two D’Arvits before pocketing the phone.
“Wow,” he said, prodding the radiation suit with his toe. “I guess you’d better put her in the tube.”
Police Plaza, Haven City, The Lower Elements
Pip waggled his phone at the camera.
“You hear anything? Because I don’t. No one is calling this number, and I’ve got five bars. One hundred percent planetary coverage. Hell, I once took a call on a spaceship.”
Holly swiped the mike sensor. “We’re moving as fast as we can. Opal Koboi is in the shuttle bay right now. We just need ten more minutes.”
Pip adopted a singsong voice.
“Never tell a lie, just to get you by.
Never tell a tale, lest yo
Foaly found himself humming along. It was the Pip and Kip theme song. Holly glared at him.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
Artemis grew impatient with the fruitless wrangling. “This is futile and, frankly, embarrassing. They have no intention of releasing Opal. We should evacuate now, at least to the shuttle bays. They are built to withstand magma flares.”
Foaly disagreed. “We’re secure here. The real danger is in Atlantis. That’s where the other Opal is. You said, and I concur, that the serious explosions, theoretical explosions, only occur with living beings.”
“Theoretical explosions are only theoretical until the theory is proven,” countered Artemis. “And with so many—” He stopped mid-sentence, which was very unlike him, as Artemis detested both poor grammar and poor manners. His skin tone faded from pale to porcelain, and he actually rapped his own forehead.
“Stupid. Stupid. Foaly, we are both imbeciles. I don’t expect lateral thinking from the LEP, but from you…”
Holly recognized this tone. She had heard it during previous adventures, generally before things went catastrophically wrong.
“What is it?” she asked, afraid of the answer, which must surely be terrible.
“Yeah,” agreed Foaly, who always had time to feel insulted. “Why am I an imbecile?”
Artemis pointed an index finger diagonally down and southwest in the approximate direction they had come from the J. Argon Clinic.
“The oxygen booth has addled my senses,” he said. “The clone. Nopal. She’s a living being. If she explodes, it could go nuclear.”
Foaly accessed the clone’s file on Argon’s Web site, navigating with blurred speed to the patient details.
“No. I think we should be okay there. Opal harvested her own DNA before the time line split.”
Artemis was angry with himself all the same for momentarily forgetting the clone.
“We were minutes into this crisis before the clone’s relevance occurred to me,” he said. “If Nopal had been created at a later date, my slow thinking could have cost lives.”
“There are still plenty of lives at stake,” said Foaly. “We need to save as many as we can.”