The Exorcism
II: Missions
"So, horse, what's it all supposed to mean?"
Foaly had gouged out a rough agreement from the three officers – Commander Root, Captain Trouble and Captain Holly – to help in whatever maniacal plan the Council had. Of course, without Fowl, little was maniacal anymore in Haven.
They hated the absence.
"Nobody knows. Not the Council, not the professors and sages, not even me. The consensus thus far is that this involves the unleashing of some artifacts, at some location, that will cause a transformation of the People. That's it."
"That's it? That's all there is?"
"Why, it's like looking for a stink worm in a dwarf's house!" Holly said. "How are we supposed to do something that ambiguous?"
"Well, we do have exactly one lead. There are seven originals scattered throughout the world, including the Tara and Antarctica originals. I have been theorizing about the locations of the remaining five. My current hypothesis is that they are arrayed at the vertices of a pseudo-regular hexagon," here he called up a diagram, a pale shade of a globe floating in nothingness, "with one more at the center. Taking the Tara-Antarctica line as a primary axis, here are the theoretical locations of the remaining five."
"Colombia, at the Cordillera mountain range," Captain Trouble read off the map. "Four more at sea. I wonder why?"
"Whatever the reason, that makes it easier for us to retrieve them without human detection," Commander Root noted.
"One off the coast of Chile, one in the far Atlantic, one in the Indian Ocean between Somalia and Iraq, and one last one in the far Indian," Captain Holly said. "It's as if they were spread so that it would take a long time to discover them."
"In the meantime, the Council has asked us to assist the Antarctica expedition. I'll be going there myself."
Everyone looked at Foaly in surprise. The last time he had went outside Haven – indeed, outside the Ops booth and LEP headquarters – had been - "Yes, I know, not since the Fowl Manor siege, eh? I need the air."
"So when do we leave?"
"Two hours' time."
There was a small constellation of military medals in the assembly of the army generals. They sat around the stout square table in the smoke-filled room, poring over a map of the Antarctic circle.
"Camp Ohio has been reporting some unexplained thermal spikes in the region lately."
"These are just deviations of slightly over a hundredth of a degree Celsius, with a huge error margin. It could be little more than snowfall friction heat."
"However, the experimental gravity-wave stations at Upstream 1 and 2 are also reporting unusually high error occurrences in their instruments. These indicate large mass movements at the Pole itself."
"The Pole? With temperatures below neg 50 degrees at this time of the year? What sort of people are doing things there?"
"I see." The shadowy figure at the head of the table raised his voice for the first time. "This does warrant an expedition, if only for the sake of reconnaissance. Deploy one unit. Arctic Special forces need training."
Deep within the Pentagon, snowsleds roared into life.