Artemis Fowl: The Book of Ages
Battlelines
The stare that Artemis Fowl gave to the cup of tea in his hands was nearly enough to make the liquid boil.
"The way I see it," said Minerva calmly from across the table, ignoring his look, "you don't can't mount a rescue. He hasn't even asked for anything yet. It's obvious that he wants you to contact him, and that's really your only viable option. I doubt even you could predict Fowl's every move."
As she took a sip of tea, Artemis glared at her. Of course, he knew it was irrational for him to be angry at her of all people, but her seemingly minimal concern with the whole situation was making it difficult for him to not be angry.
More importantly, he was angry with himself. Both of himselves.
Here they were, sitting in Minerva's posh Paris apartment, still without plans to go after Holly. Well, actually, they planned to go after Holly… they just hadn't planned out how yet.
"I would shoot him just as quickly as I would negotiate with him," Artemis said acidly. Somewhere in the back of his mind, his own words surprised him… but he knew they were true words.
Minerva looked startled at Artemis' response, but only for a moment. Then she frowned.
"You won't do anything well if you're riled up like that, Fowl," She put her cup down and pointed a finger at the Irish teen, "whether it's planning, negotiating, or shooting. And I might add that it wouldn't be a good idea to try to murder one of the world's most brilliant inventors and businessmen."
"What I need to do," said Artemis with a scowl, "is find out exactly what he wants."
"So call him," replied the woman calmly, "e-mail him, text him for all I care. Like I said, it's your only realistic option."
Fowl Manor, Dublin, Ireland
Holly Short wasn't quite sure how she woke up. There wasn't any sound that could have brought her out of sleep, nor was there any sort of movement or vibration. It might have been the lights.
She awoke to find herself blinded by bright white lights, so that she squeezed her eyes shut again almost as soon as she had opened them. The room looked all white, and there didn't seem to be anything in it besides whatever it was she was lying down on.
"Ah… it's so good to see that you're awake Holly Short."
Holly squinted and shielded her eyes with an arm, but as she did, her knuckles bumped into something on the side of her head. She pushed her elbows back and sat up slowly, her muscles feeling tired and sluggish. When she felt around her ears and head her hands cupped around a pair of large, padded headphones.
"That's your present. It's very high quality. I hope you like it."
The elf looked left and right, but realized quickly enough that nobody was in the room. The voice came from the headphones themselves, speaking in English.
"Artemis?" she asked, confused. That was definitely his voice, but it sounded… off. There was a subtle mockery in his tone, which actually wasn't all too unusual, but she was used to it sounding a bit more lighthearted. "What's going on? Where are you?" Then after a pause, "Where am I?"
Nobody responded for a few seconds, and Holly was about to take off the headphones, but then stopped herself when she realized that if Artemis had been talking to her through it, he'd probably still be using it.
"Turn around, Holly."
Holly jerked her head around and nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw him. He was barely a foot away from her, and there was a metal door behind him. He must have come in when she wasn't paying attention, and with the device covering her ears, she hadn't heard a thing.
Artemis was dressed now in an impeccably pressed dark suit, with a steel-grey tie that had a small cylindrical thing clipped on it.
When he spoke again, he crouched down to bring himself to her eye level.
"You are in my laboratory clean room. I, obviously, am right here, and as for what's going on… well, you tell me."
The elf stared blankly at the teen for a moment. Then she saw it.
Well, actually, it wasn't just one thing- it was a combination of things. Artemis' hair was a bit shorter, and had the look of a recent haircut. His brow had the beginnings of creases that looked to be from stress. Then there were his eyes: they were the same color- mirrored, in fact.
Her whole body suddenly shivered, and her hands felt went from dry to sweat-slicked in what seemed like less than a second. She unconsciously sucked in a breath through her teeth.
"No, it can't be," she whispered in English. "This is some sort of joke… right, Artemis?"
The man- for he wasn't a teen, but an adult- scowled.
"Traditionally among humans Lieutenant, first names are used among friends and imply familiarity," he snapped, "Whatever experience you may have had with a little boy who thought he could play at being a world-class genius is irrelevant to this point, and thus you will refer to me as Dr. Fowl."
Holly tensed, and her mouth opened slightly, but no words came out. Instead, her mind was rapidly going through several rather obscene words and phrases in multiple languages. This couldn't be real… could it?
"Are we quite clear?" asked Fowl, suddenly smiling and sounding friendly again.
In response, Holly moved to take off the headphones, but paused when Fowl raised a finger.
"Don't do that, elf."
She continued anyway- there wasn't anything to lose at this point. But she had barely lifted a padded headphone from one ear when she felt bile rising up from her stomach. She gagged and held both hands against her stomach. The headphones snapped back in place.
"Please don't take those off," ordered Artemis mildly, though he stood up and took a few steps back, as if he knew she felt sick.
Holly balled up her hands into tight fists and very nearly growled at the man. But she didn't try to take the headphones off again.
"There, isn't that better?" he asked, looking amused at her expression.
And it was. The sick feeling she had just moment ago was gone, and her body felt oddly relaxed.
Artemis smiled at her, and suddenly, she was reminded of just how much he resembled a vampire.
"You'll find that it's far easier to just do what I say than try to resist." He clasped his hands behind his back and observed Holly with a slight smirk. It was a look that one would give to a furry animal doing tricks. "Now, the rules are simple," explained Fowl, "You will not attempt to harm any human within the confines of the Manor; you will not attempt to leave this room; you will not attempt to use any magic- which, by the way, is mostly gone."
Holly glared at the man. It might have been slightly more intimidating if he didn't tower over her, forcing her to glare upward like an angry child.
"You have no idea what's going on, do you… Fowl?" she hissed. "Or who I am?"
Artemis shrugged casually.
"You are Lieutenant Colonel Holly Short of the LEPrecon fireteam six. You recently escaped a human prison compound with the help of some fool who calls himself Sean Ackart and has an unhealthy obsession with imitating me. As to what you and he are doing with an escaped imp, or why you were wearing an advanced auto-armor with Captain printed on it, you are correct, I do not know. But giving me that information is your job."
The elf looked at him as if he was insane- which, in her opinion, might very well have been the case.
"No," she stated flatly. Suddenly, she started feeling slightly queasy again.
Fowl shook his head with a small smile.
"You misunderstand, that is an order Lieutenant. You're in a dwelling now, and I am the master of this house."
"Go choke on a stinkworm, Mudboy," growled Holly through clenched teeth.
And with that, the elf promptly threw up. Suffice to say it was a rather unpleasant sight.
Artemis closed his eyes and wrinkled his nose as the regurgitated contents of Holly's last meal splattered on the floor. So much for his clean room. When he opened his eyes again, he took one look at his Armani loafers and sighed.
"Great," he muttered at the flecks of vomit on his shoes and pants, "that'll never come out. And this suit is going to stink for ages. I might as well change and burn the clothes right now." He eyed Holly with a frown. "You should be glad I am a rich man, or I would be really annoyed."
The man spun around sharply and opened the room's single door. Holly suddenly felt the pungent smell of chlorine punch its way into her nose, and a moment later, she saw why. Artemis had produced two buckets and a Mud Man-sized mop from behind the door and pushed it towards her. It looked pretty archaic, even for human cleaning methods.
"You made the mess, and you'll clean it up," said Artemis coolly, "I hear responsibility is looked quite favorably upon in the LEP."
"And who cleans up your messes?" asked Holly, her mouth still in a grimace from the taste of bile.
Fowl smiled at her as if she was a primary school student who just wasn't quite old enough to understand how the world worked.
"I don't make messes," he said, "I only create opportunities."
He turned and left without another sound that Holly could hear. She couldn't even hear the door closing, even though she was watching it not more than a few feet away.
And thus, an elf in an expensive pair of sound-proofed headphones was left in a cleared laboratory room with nothing but a pile of vomit and a few cleaning supplies.
Artemis Fowl shut off the microphone clipped on his tie as his bodyguard fell into step behind him. They walked in the underground corridor for a few moments in silence before Coleman spoke up.
"If I may, sir," he asked, "why did you give her headphones?"
Artemis didn't break stride.
"So she only hears what I want her to hear."
There was a pause before Coleman spoke again.
"And…?"
Fowl turned his head slightly to glance at the bodyguard from the corner of his eye. He smirked slightly. Coleman probably expected something to do with the elf's magic, or the rules in the Book. Perfect.
"And nothing," he replied. "That's all there is. Of course she- and obviously you- expected something more. That keeps her off balance."
Coleman fell silent, apparently accepting his employer's explanation.
Temporary LEP Headquarters, Industrial District, Haven City
A red-faced Julius Root stabbed his metal pointing rod at a floating hologram of the city. He always insisted on using a metal pointer instead of the holographic highlighting system, saying that real Commanders used pointy objects to explain things. He was, naturally, a real Commander.
"Recon reports that there are at least two hundred attack drones of various models. That means we still outnumber them four to one. But we don't have the firepower to take them down directly, especially if Mud Man forces are moving in at the same time, so we're going to cut the city in two!" The old elf made a slicing motion down the hologram with his pointer. "Foaly!" he called.
The centaur trotted nervously up to the front of the room, feeling the weight of some three hundred LEP officers and an old TV camera staring at his swishing tail. The camera made sure that even as he addressed the officers present, everybody else who was still out in some other location in the city would still see and hear him.
The last time he had spoken in front of so many people was during an awards ceremony for his invention of the flare prediction system. That had been a boon for the People, but this time, the mood was decidedly more sober.
He cleared his throat and scratched self-consciously at his head through the tin-foil hat with one hand as his other keyed away at the holo-projector.
"We've been analyzing the activity of the robotic fleet, and my models predict that most of the scout craft have already been launched even before we found their main staging area. The main things we have to worry about are their squads of Reaper drones. They pack what the humans call 'Hellfire' missiles, and from the demonstration videos I've seen, getting hit by one of those is like riding a flare," Foaly smiled without humor, "without your pod."
The entire Recon section winced almost simultaneously. They rode hotshots up to the surface the most out of anybody in Haven, and almost all casualties of errant flares came from their ranks.
"There're also the lateral-launch mortars, autonomous weapons platforms and area denial turrets to contend with once the army itself moves in. Oh, and of course, there are the soldiers themselves," Foaly added almost as an afterthought.
"I think we get the point, Pony-boy," growled a Major a couple rows back. Foaly frowned heavily. How was it that he didn't even know who the gnome was, and yet he knew Julius' stupid name for him?
"Get to the defense plan already!" the gnome called out.
Foaly glanced at the Commander, who gave a (still red-faced) nod.
The centaur coughed and ran the simulation on the projector.
"Some of my tech guys have been down at the power plant laying down some new wiring ever since the Mud Men managed to take over the other two plants. With the additions, I've been able to modify the last few generators. We'll cut off the power supply lines, then feed them back into the generators. With the magma that powers it still running, the safeties will be overloaded within minutes. Think electromagnetic and thermite bombs fused into one big explosion."
On the hologram, a set of blast doors began closing down, dividing the city into two very unequal halves. Several of the small triangles which were supposed to represent the swarm of scout planes bumped into the blast doors and fizzled before exploding like some shot-up enemy on an old video game. A small red cylinder in the larger half of the city began pulsing dangerously, and in seconds, it fizzled out, bringing most of the other shapes down with it.
If anybody asked about the quality of the simulation, Foaly would have told them that he had about ten minutes to make it before the meeting started. Even genius centaurs need some time to make cinema-level graphics.
Up in the front of the room, Chix Verbil raised a hand.
"Uh, it might just be me, but what about the fact that the blast doors won't open again until you've replaced the fried circuitry? And I think most of the Mud Men's guns aren't exactly electronic."
"You're right, Verbil," answered Root with a grimace, "At this point, the best we can do is fight them to a stalemate and hold our ground. This is our territory and we have an advantage underground, but they have bigger guns and more soldiers." The old Commander gave everyone a hard look. "So if anybody has any bright ideas, you'd better speak up now!"
The room remained silent. Everybody, it seemed, was coming to the conclusion that hiding behind blast doors really was their only option.
"What if we need to evacuate?" asked Grub Kelp through one of the room's speakers. He was still out in the field and watching the meeting through a screen, but everyone in the room still heard the tremor in his voice.
"Then we evacuate," answered the Commander evenly.
In the back of the warehouse, Lieutenant Colonel Holly Short watched Commander Root explain the plan with an increasingly uneasy stomach. It sounded like a death trap to her: jammed blast doors on one side, solid bedrock on the other, and they would lose their primary source of electricity.
She heard Grub asking about an evacuation and cringed inwardly.
"Then we evacuate," Julius said calmly.
'Liar,' thought Holly, furrowing her brow and pressing her lips together in disgust. She looked around her at the crowd of police officers. 'We couldn't possibly evacuate in time- there aren't enough vehicles. And even if we could, where would we go?'
But the elf stayed silent. She knew it was useless to voice her thoughts right now.
Minerva Paradizo's Apartment, Quartier des Invalides, Paris
Artemis Fowl emerged from Minerva's small study a little more than two hours after he had gone in. At this point, he looked less like a vampire than he did a zombie, and he wasn't exactly the most beautiful person in the world to begin with.
"I'm going to have to make a deal," he announced grimly, sliding into the chair across from Minerva's.
The woman looked up at him over the laptop screen she had been reading from, and quickly pushed the computer to the side. She frowned.
"Come now, your house cannot be that impenetrable. Surely it's not as bad as Strangeroads?"
Artemis shook his head. "The last time anybody tried to break Ho-" he cut himself off, "-an elf out of Fowl Manor, it took a time stop and most of the LEP's resources- Retrieval One, the threat of a bio bomb, even a troll, for crying out loud!" The teen suddenly lowered his voice. "And in the end, she only got out because I let her."
He looked up to see Minerva staring at him. After a few seconds, she spoke, slowly.
"If I ever had the time, I would take one of Foaly's brain scanners and crack your head open just to see what the hell you've actually done…" she muttered.
She coughed.
"In any case, it's fairly obvious that you have a leak- an information source that's somehow connecting your activities to the other Fowl's. Have you considered anybody?"
"Yes," answered Artemis, looking directly at the woman, "you."
"Moi!?" Minerva looked taken aback. "Mais pourquoi?"
"I have my own reasons," Fowl shook his head. "But I also have reason enough to not believe that hypothesis."
"Well isn't it wonderful to be so trusted," mumbled the woman, "If I may remind you, I'm the one sticking her neck out to help you and your little band of time travelers."
Artemis smiled mirthlessly. "Indeed you are." But then he quickly got back on track. "I'll need to let Trouble and Nº1 know about this. Then we'll contact the Manor."
"WHAT!?" yelled the image of Trouble Kelp, the C Cube reproducing his furious features rather nicely on its holographic projection. "Are you sure you're on our side, Fowl?"
"Yes, I'm damn sure I'm on your side Commander," replied Artemis crossly, "but in case you haven't noticed, there happens to be a me on the other side as well, so we don't exactly have time to argue about the specifics of my morality."
"We're coming up there Artemis," said Nº1 quickly, but quite a bit more angrily than the teen had ever seen him. "I'll blast my way through your house if I have to, and if you don't mind, I'd like to turn the other Artemis into a ferret."
"By all means, turn him into anything you want," said Artemis dryly, "but don't leave Haven until I call you again. I'm going to find out exactly what he wants, and we'll work from there. You might need to grab some things from Haven."
Trouble nodded curtly. He knew the dangers of going to Fowl Manor unprepared better than anyone. "Do it," he ordered, "we'll stand by."
The projection faded, and Artemis sighed heavily as he slumped back into his chair.
Minerva handed him her cell phone.
"Ready for even more fun?" she asked sarcastically.
The teen looked at her phone.
"We should use a disposable," he said, frowning, "or he'll trace this back to you."
Minerva rolled her eyes. "Just make the call. It's not like he won't find out anyway."
Artemis hesitated for just a second. Then he punched in the number and pressed the phone icon.
Fowl Manor, Dublin, Ireland
Though he wasn't looking at anyone in particular, Artemis Fowl was smiling his best vampire smile in a long time.
The phone was ringing, but there were only two people who had this number- both of whom were no more than three rooms away. That meant it had to be…
"Hello, Copycat. Or should I call you Sean?" he greeted jovially, "How's the weather in Paris?"
The caller sighed, then began without preamble. "Look, Arty, both of us are skilled enough at playing mind games so that this call could go on for years. Let's avoid that, shall we? What do I do to get the elf back?"
Artemis scowled. The boy called him by his mother's old childish name for him, and he was even imitating his voice. Stalkers. This was precisely why he didn't reply to idiotic fan mail disguised as academic research papers mailed to him for 'review.'
"Let's meet up and discuss this little island you call Mu. I'll even bring Holly with me."
The phone was silent for a moment.
"Fine," said the caller finally, seeming more than a little surprised- probably at the directness. "Where do we meet?"
Artemis smiled even wider. "Why, on the island itself, of course. Noon local time, three days from now."
"What guarantee do I have that you'll bring Holly?"
He didn't even ask about how Artemis knew about Mu.
"Oh, we'll stop at a few major cities and have her write you a post card," mocked the man. Then he laughed. "Of course you don't have any guarantees. But I don't have any problems with letting her go, provided that you meet with me and give me the information I want. Remember what Father said about gambling, Artemis? Never play unless you already hold the highest cards. In this case, I've done that, and the dealer owes me a favor."
The imitator ignored the jab.
"Let me speak to Holly."
"I don't think that will be possible," replied Artemis casually, looking at the security feed from his lab, "She's a bit preoccupied at the moment."
The elf was really just sitting there brooding, but this Sean didn't need to know that.
"Pass the phone to Minerva, won't you?" asked Artemis politely. "I know she's nearby."
There was a long pause, followed by an uncertain voice.
"Dr. Fowl?"
Artemis vaguely remembered the voice- he'd only ever spoken to Minerva once before, after all.
"Please, Minerva, don't Dr. Fowl me," he said, as if they were old friends. "I seem to recall promising to have tea with you several years ago. My work trapped me at the time though. If you'd like, how does next Thursday sound?"
The phone clicked as the call ended. Artemis set the mobile down and chuckled. This was going to be fun.
Minerva Paradizo's Apartment, La Rive Gauche, Paris
"The nerve of the man!" yelled Minerva, more than a little displeased. "He's such a… what's the word in English?"
"Arrogant bastard?" supplied Artemis helpfully.
"Yes, there you go," agreed the woman, "Of the ten thousand ways to let us know that he's onto my involvement, he has to ask me out for tea!"
She looked at Artemis. "He really does think that the world revolved revolves around his will, doesn't he?"
The teen nodded glumly. "Yes, unfortunately."
"Well I'll tell you one thing," said Minerva, suddenly not quite so angry, "he chose the wrong battlefield. I daresay I know Mu better than either of you ever will."
Artemis eyebrows leapt up in surprise.
"You do?"
"Let's just say I had a temporary infatuation with demonology when I was younger." Artemis noticed that the woman was rather conspicuously avoiding his gaze, as if nervous. "You told me about the island a few days ago." She nodded at the laptop on the table. "Now that I have access to my old research again, did you honestly think that I was sitting here twiddling my thumbs while you were off thinking for hours?"
The Irish teen stared at her suspiciously.
"What exactly do you know?"