Thirteen: Aftershock, part two

"Easy work," Mulch Diggums grumbled to himself – for after all he had had no one else to talk to these past two weeks and he might as well keep himself company. "Easy work my bumflap."

It wasn't that the work was difficult – doing nothing at all rarely was – and the clay in these parts was certainly delicious, and the pay had been very nice, but he was beginning to exceed his own boredom threshold. "Just wait for them to leave the manor and then head in, find the omnitool, and get out," he mimed, doing his best impression of the LEP's foremost technology consultant. "Should be easy for a thief of your calibre, he says."

Mulch shook his head, and, plucking a beetle from his beard, popped it into his mouth. It would be simple indeed except that Foaly had forbidden him from entering Fowl manor until both Holly and Artemis were out and as far as he could tell they never left. Holly did go for a run every morning, but Artemis seemed to have an aversion to the outdoors such that Mulch never got more than a passing glimpse of him through a windowpane whenever he poked his head out of the earth. Foaly's scanners were supposed to alert him if they were both out, but so far no opportunity had presented itself.

What could they be doing in there all day anyway?

Mulch started up when the gadget Foaly had given him nearly two weeks ago began to beep, knocking his head on the roof of the small cave he'd dug out for himself. By Frond! They'd actually left the manor – both of them! Together!

Of course as brilliant as the centaur believed himself to be, Mulch was not about to trust one of his gadgets over his own senses. He unbuttoned his bum flap and prepared to do a little scouting for himself. He wasn't heading into that manor until he was certain that Artemis was no longer in it because when it came down to the option of having Foaly or Artemis mad at him, he would pick Foaly any day of the week.

He took his time, makings sure to circle around them to get a proper vantage point. After several starts and stops he finally turned his jaws upwards and chewed his way toward the surface, taking slow, even bites, careful to break through very gently. He poked his head aboveground and emerged in time to see a sight that set the hairs of his beard tingling.

Artemis and Holly were both apparently unconscious and being hauled away on a hover trolley by Opal Koboi. He wasn't up on all the fancy LEP terminology but he was fairly certain a scenario such as this qualified as very very bad, possibly even disastrous.

It did occur to him that he could simply alert Foaly to the situation and then sit back safe and sound underground and wait for the LEP to arrive... in a few hours.

"The things I do for the two of you," Mulch grumbled as he took a deep breath and dove back into the earth, tunnelling in the direction Opal was headed.

He managed to surface just behind her shuttle as she was closing the hatch. There wasn't much time. Grateful that it was overcast as he hadn't slathered on any sunblock this morning, he hurried towards the shuttle. All it took was a few drops of dwarf rock polish and he was in – just as the shuttle's engines were being fired up.

He managed to slither in through the small hole in the hull and stumble into the back compartment. Oblong cages made of wooden slats strung with strands of dried seaweed, crowded the room, stacked precariously. He was still trying to get his bearings when the craft gave a great shudder as it took to the air. That last rumble was all that was needed: the stacks of crates came tumbling down, knocking Mulch Diggums clear off his feet and clean out.

ooo

"Tell me you have a plan, Foaly." Butler's tone made it clear that it was less a request than a demand.

Foaly's fingers were flying over the keyboard, pulling up intel on several screens while also trying to get a signal from his man on the ground – or under the ground anyway. "I'm trying to contact Mulch."

"Why?" It sounded more like a snarl than a question proper.

"He was..." Foaly cleared his throat. "He's at Fowl manor. He might have seen something."

"And why was he at Fowl manor?"

"Commander Kelp asked him to stop in and try to get that omnitool back from Artemis."

"Stop in?" Butler repeated and Foaly was suddenly quite glad that there were hundreds kilometres of the earth's crust between himself and the Mud Man at the moment.

"All right break in."

But before Butler could make any reply, Mulch's com channel finally blared to life. "Foaly? Foaly, can you hear me?"

"Of course I can hear, Mulch," Foaly said with a horsey snort. "That microphone is so sensitive I can hear what you had for lunch."

"This is no time to be talking about lunch," he retorted. And that was when Foaly knew Mulch was serious.

"All right, what's going on?"

"I'm in Opal Koboi's shuttle," he said in a low tone.

"She's the one who grabbed Artemis and Holly, then?" Foaly asked. His mind was racing faster than his fingers could keep up. The commander had already gone home and would need to be called back. Anything that involved Opal Koboi was top priority for the LEP.

"Yup. Stunned them and loaded them onto a stealth shuttle. I manage to stow away on it. I hope you know I'm expecting danger pay for all this."

"I can trace your signal from here. You're not far. Scotland. We'll have a team en route in no time. Where's Koboi right now?"

"Don't know."

Foaly snorted into the mic – not a pleasant sound, to be certain. "What do you mean, you don't know?"

"Don't throw a horseshow, pony boy. I just woke up."

"This is no time to be napping," Foaly snapped.

"I'll have you know I got knocked out during takeoff."

"You–" Foaly whinnied and stamped a hoof. "Of all the– Just... go out and try to figure out what's happened to Holly." And then, as he recalled that Butler was still listening in, "And Artemis."

"Fine, fine. Sending a civilian to do the LEP's job. You really should be ashamed of yourself, you know."

Foaly heaved a sigh. He was going to need an energy drink. Probably several of them before the night was done. "All right, Diggums. Danger pay. Standard LEP rate."

"I'm going above and beyond. And you know, if I go out there it might be the last time you ever hear from me."

"If only," Foaly groaned.

"After all these years? I'm hurt. Really."

Foaly rolled his eyes at the melodrama. "Fine. Danger pay and overtime."

And then with the sound of escaping dwarf gas, Mulch was gone.

"Nice plan," Butler said dryly.

Foaly sighed once more. "I'll get the Commander on the line." It was going to be a long night. A very long night.

ooo

Mulch pressed himself against the inside of the shuttle's hatch, beard hair fanning out against its surface, sweeping for vibrations. There was nothing.

Assured that there were no guards on the other side of the hatch – or worse yet, Opal Koboi herself – Mulch let himself out into the shuttle port. He cast a quick glance around the room, all too aware of his vulnerable position. There was something very familiar about the place, about the layout of the shuttle port with its sleek, metal walls. Two doors, one at either end. No security cameras, that he could see. In fact there didn't seem to be much security at all.

His growing confidence took a serious blow when the hatches above slid open and he heard the purr of a shuttle's engines growing closer.

Even as he ran, he patted his belly and screwed up his face, searching his intestines for the bubbles of gas left over from his last meal of clay. "Come on," he encouraged his reluctant innards. Relief – among other things – surged through him as he felt the familiar gurgle. The gas shot out of him, propelling him forward across the room just as the shadow of the shuttle fell over the landing pad. He reached the far door as the shuttle was landing and didn't wait to find out who was in it. The tingling of his beard hairs gave him enough of a hunch.

The far door opened into a corridor – an amazingly nondescript corridor. Its walls consisted sleek sheets of dark metal with two pairs of doors situated on each side at equal intervals along its length. He recognized the make immediately from the days, over a century past, when he and his cousin Nord had been working their contractor scheme in order to get their hands on building plans. This was a build-as you-go portable unit. They were used for temporary facilities most of the time, especially for companies working on smaller budgets. The normal layout was roughly triangular: a shuttleports and two main rooms joined by three corridors lined with smaller service rooms.

A few bubbles of gas escaped him as he raced through the corridor, but he gritted his tombstone teeth and made sure to store up what was left for use in an emergency – a worse emergency.

As he came to the far door and jabbed the open button, his suspicions were confirmed. The room he arrived at was rectangular with a door on the far side, and the same dimensions he was familiar with from the portable units. It was all very standard. What was not standard, however, was the contents of the room.

Mulch's stomach began to rumble as he stared at two huge aquariums, one on each side of the room. A number of turtles swam through the murky water of one, while the other was populated by dozens of lobsters, scuttling around the bottom of the tank. Visions of crustacean feasts flashed before his mind's eye before his sense of self-preservation took over again as he sensed the vibrations of footsteps in the corridor behind him. Precariously close behind him.

"What is that stench?" He caught the words as he stepped into the room and the door slid closed. It was a woman's voice, an all-too-familiar one at that.

After millennia spent in tunnels and wriggling out of cave-ins, dwarves had adapted to be able to squeeze their bulk through small nooks and crannies, so Mulch had little difficulty wiggling himself into the narrow space between the tank of lobsters and the back wall before the laboratory door slid open again.

Peeking through the glass and water of the aquarium, Mulch was still able to recognise the wavering image: a tiny figure with jet black hair. It was Opal Koboi.

She sniffed the air and grimaced. "What in Frond's name has she been up to?" Opal muttered as she moved towards one of the consoles, her fingers flying over the touch pad. Even from his hiding place, Mulch could tell that she did not like what she saw.

With a grace born of centuries of thievery, Mulch slowly slid along behind the glass tank towards the other side of the room while the lobsters continued to scuttle about, nicely covering the distorted image created by his movements. Not that Opal was looking at the tanks, mind you. Her attention was entirely focussed on the screen before. The image through the water turned her scowl monstrous as if he were facing a miniature troll.

He stiffened, nerves a little frayed by all the excitement, when a loud bang reverberated through the room. But it was only sound of Opal's tiny fist. "How dare she! I ordered her to keep a low profile. That bumbling–" The rest of the sentence tapered off into a rather troll-worthy snarl.

Turning his eyes away from Opal, his attention fell on the captive crustaceans. Now he was not as crazed for sea food as pixies typically were – Doodah Day craved the stuff like a dwarf craved clay – but he'd been subsisting on minimal rations since he'd taken Foaly up on the Fowl manor job so a bit of meat had a certain appeal. Especially drenched with a buttery vinaigrette. And a pinch of silt for texture.

It took him a moment to realize that the low, loud rumbling that filled his ears was, in fact, the sound of his stomach.

Peering straight through the glass and water of the tank Opal looked more than ever like a tiny troll, the wavering image of her black hair turned into a strange likeness of a troll's matted dreadlocks. Mulch did what was natural when faced with such a creature. He ran.

Close as he was to the door, he managed to squirm out of his hiding place, jab the open button, and set off running, in a series of fluid motions, all before Opal could reach for a weapon or shoot magical bolts. She let out a shriek of eardrum-shattering ire as he raced out into the corridor, her voice echoing off the metallic walls like the whinny of an irate centaur.

Using the last bubbles of stored up gas to propel himself down the corridor, Mulch began to think that perhaps he should have pushed for double overtime in addition to the danger pay. Holly was the one who enjoyed these seat-of-your-bum-flap adventures while he was just a solid, self-employed citizen now.

For a moment, when he saw the door at the far end of the corridor slide open he thought he'd run out of luck – like the eighth time Julius has caught up to him – but instead...

"Mulch?" said both Holly and Artemis in perfect unison.

"Don't think you want to be heading this way," Mulch said, hearing footfalls behind him.

"Nor this way," Artemis said, glancing over his shoulder.

"Come on," Mulch said turning back down the corridor. Quick thinking had saved him more than once when dwarf gas could not. He reached to slide open one of the side doors and they all three piled in before Opal had come into sight.

They were in a storage unit, packed in amidst empty wire cages stacked to the ceiling and several pieces of lab equipment. Well at least it wasn't one of the lavatories; that would have made things more complicated.

The portable units were made to be low cost and soundproofing was not a standard feature so the footfalls that came from either end of the corridor and stopped just metres away from their door were clearly discernable.

"You! How dare you!" shrieked one very high pitch voice.

"You? What are you doing here?" demanded another nearly identical, if just slightly raspier voice, that of the Opal who'd turned herself into a Mud Person.

"What am I doing here?" repeated the Opal from the past. "I set up this entire facility and I came to check in on your progress–"

"I don't need you checking–"

Yet Past Opal ignored her and went on with her tirade, "–only to find you've brought Fowl and Short here."

"I–"

"Secrecy, I told you! We mut act slowly and secretly if we're to regenerate your cellular structure."

"I deserve my revenge."

"Your revenge? You've jeopardised our entire operation and your – our – continued longevity!"

"I am your elder," present Opal retorted, her voice reaching a new octave. "I am the one in charge here."

"You've let them escape and the LEP is already on their way here. I should just let them throw you back in prison."

"You are me."

"I refuse to believe that I could turn into such an utter ninny. That human pituitary glad has tainted you beyond repair."

What followed was the simultaneous sound of a blaster being fired and of an explosion in the form of Opal's patented magic bolts.

"I suggest we find a way out of here while they're occupied," hissed Artemis, who was pinned between Mulch and Holly.

"Scoot over, Mud Boy," Mulch grumbled, squeezing and wriggling until he could touch the deck plates. He reached into his beard once again for the bottle of dwarf rock polish and allowed one drop to corrode the tiles. Artemis and Holly both grimaced at the stench but Mulch smiled for already he could taste the scent fresh clay.

"Mulch," Holly said Before he could dive in. "Did Opal – the other Opal – get here by shuttle?"

"Your LEP buddies are on their way already."

"Did she or didn't she?" Holly snarled.

"She did but–"

"We are not leaving those two here with a working stealth shuttle. Can you tunnel us back to the shuttle port?"

"So let me get this straight," Mulch began, wincing as the walls rattled with the force of a magical explosion and the lights flickered for a moment. "You want us to break out of here and then break back in?"

"Mulch." That was the tone that led to nothing at all good.

"All right, all right," he relented. "You're the captain and all that."