Artemis Fowl 08 - The Last Guardian Read Free Page A

fourth-floor windows and marvel at how the sim-sunlight caught the rim of each gold-leafed cobble and set the whole arrangement a-twinkling.
    On this particular day it seemed that everyone on the fourth floor had slid from their cubicles like pebbles on a tilted surface and gathered in a tight cluster by the Situation room, which adjoined Foaly’s office/laboratory.
    Holly made directly for the narrowest section of the throng and used sharp elbows to inch through the strangely silent crowd. Butler simply cleared his throat once and the crowd peeled apart as though magnetically repelled from the giant human. Artemis took this path into the Situation room to find Commander Trouble Kelp and Foaly standing before a wall-sized screen, raptly following unfolding events.
    Foaly noticed the gasps that followed Butler wherever he went in Haven, and glanced around.
    “May the fours be with you,” the centaur whispered to Artemis—his standard greeting/joke for the past six months.
    “I am cured, as you well know,” said Artemis. “What is going on here?”
    Holly cleared a space beside Trouble Kelp, who seemed to be morphing into her former boss, Commander Julius Root, as the years went on. Commander Kelp was so brimfull of gung-ho attitude that he had taken the name Trouble upon graduation and had once tried to arrest a troll for littering, which accounted for the sim-skin patch on the tip of his nose, which glowed yellow from a certain angle.
    “Haircut’s new, Skipper,” Holly said. “Beetroot had one just like it.”
    Commander Kelp did not take his eyes from the screen. Holly was joshing because she was nervous, and Trouble knew it. She was right to be nervous. In fact, outright fear would have been more appropriate, given the situation that was being beamed in to them.
    “Watch the show, Captain,” he said tightly. “It’s pretty self-explanatory.”
    There were three figures onscreen, a kneeling prisoner and two captors; but Holly did not place Opal Koboi right away because she was searching for the pixie among the standing pair. She realized with a jolt that Opal was the prisoner.
    “This is a trick,” she said. “It must be.”
    Commander Kelp shrugged. Watch it and see.
    Artemis stepped closer to the screen, scanning the picture for information. “You are sure this is live?”
    “It’s a live feed,” said Foaly. “I suppose they could be sending us a pre-record.”
    “Where is it coming from?”
    Foaly checked the tracer map on his own screen. The call line ran from a fairy satellite down to South Africa and from there to Miami and then on to a hundred other places, like the scribble of an angry child.
    “They jacked a satellite and ran the line through a series of shells. Could be anywhere.”
    “The sun is high,” Artemis mused aloud. “I would guess by the shadows that it is early noon. If it is actually a live feed.”
    “That narrows it down to a quarter of the planet,” said Foaly caustically.
    The hubbub in the room rose as, onscreen, one of the two bulky gnomes standing behind Opal drew a human automatic handgun, the chrome weapon looking like a cannon in his fairy fingers.
    It seemed as though the temperature had suddenly dropped in the Situation room.
    “I need quiet,” said Artemis. “Get these people out of here.”
    On most days Trouble Kelp would argue that Artemis had no authority to clear a room, and would possibly invite more people into the cramped office just to prove his point—but this was not most days.
    “Everybody out,” he barked at the assembled officers. “Holly, Foaly, and the Mud Boy, stay where you are.”
    “I think perhaps I’ll stay too,” said Butler, shielding the top of his head from lamp burn with one hand.
    Nobody objected.
    Usually the LEP officers would shuffle with macho reluctance when ordered to move, but in this instance they rushed to the nearest monitor, eager not to miss a single frame of unfolding events.
    Foaly shut the door behind them