“Yes, Captain,” she said.
Turnball clapped her on the back. “That’s more like it, Short. Isn’t it liberating not to have a choice? You just do what I say, and nothing is your fault.”
“Yes, Captain. Most liberating.”
Turnball handed her a Neutrino. “Feel free to kill anyone who gets in your way.”
Holly checked the battery level expertly. “Anyone who gets in my way, I kill them.”
“I like these lasers,” said Turnball, twiddling the rune pen. “Let’s do someone else. Tell the bot to pop young Fowl out of his bubble, Unix. It will be nice to have a pet genius.”
Unix dragged his finger across the touch screen, and Artemis flopped gasping to the floor like a fish out of water.
The Aquanaut Nostremius, Atlantis Trench; Now
The young demon warlock who chose to call himself N º1 was feeling extremely sad. He was a sensitive little fellow—though you would not think it to look at his gray armor-plated hide and the squat head that seemed to push its way out of his lumpy shoulders—but he felt others’ pain, and this trait, according to his master, was what made him such an excellent warlock.
There was a lot of pain in the fairy world today. The Martian probe disasters in Iceland and the Atlantis Trench were the worst fairy disasters to have occurred in recent times. To the humans, injury on this scale would probably not even make it onto the big news stations, but the fairy folk were small in number and cautious by nature, so to have two probe-related disasters in one cycle was horrific. But at least a larger catastrophe had been averted by the efficient evacuation of Atlantis. No1 had barely begun to grieve for the loss of his friends in Iceland, when the LEP had informed him that Holly, Foaly, and Artemis had actually survived.
Commander Trouble Kelp asked him to go to Atlantis on the Nostremius hospital ship to help heal those injured by the probe’s blast wave. The little demon had immediately agreed, hoping that he could distract himself for a short period at least by using his powers to help others. And now news had filtered through that Holly’s escape pod had gone down at sea, and all hands were presumed lost. It was too much to process: dead, alive, then dead again. If Holly had had some magic in her system, No1 might have been able to sense her out there somewhere, but he could feel nothing.
So for the past several hours No1 had worked himself ragged, laying hands on the injured. He had knitted bones, sealed gashes, repaired ruptured organs, drawn salt water from lungs, draped veils of calm over hysteria, and, in some extreme cases, wiped the entire pileup from people’s memory. For the first time since he had blossomed as a warlock, No1 was actually feeling a little depleted. But he could not leave right now, as word had just come over the aquanaut’s speakers that yet another ambulance had docked.
I need to sleep, he thought wearily. But not to dream. I would only dream of Holly. I cannot believe she’s gone.
And something made him look up at that moment, and he saw Holly Short walking down the corridor toward the quarantine door. The sight was so unexpected that No1 was strangely unsurprised.
It’s Holly, but she’s moving weirdly. As though she’s underwater.
No1 finished the bone knit he was working on, then left the cleanup to a nurse. He shambled toward the security door, where Holly was having her retina scanned. The computer accepted her LEP credentials and popped open with a pneumatic hiss.
Nº1 skipped outside to prevent Holly entering.
“We have to keep that area germ free,” he said, sorry these had to be the first words he uttered to his resurrected friend. “And you look like you just escaped from toxic garbage.” Then he hugged her tightly. “You smell like a toxic dump too, but you’re alive. Thank goodness. Tell me, did Foaly survive? Please say he did. And Artemis? I couldn’t bear it when I heard you were all gone.”
Holly did not meet his eyes. “Artemis is sick. I need you to come.”
No1 was immediately desolate, his mood swinging rapidly like a small child’s. “Artemis is sick? Oh no. Bring him in and we can take care of him here.”
Holly turned back the way she had come. “No. He can’t be moved. You need to follow me.”
No1 jogged after his friend Holly without a moment’s hesitation. “Is it a broken bone, is that it? Artemis can’t be moved? Is Foaly okay? Where did you guys go?”
But there were no answers for the little demon, and all he could do was follow Holly’s square shoulders through the throngs of walking wounded, past the cots that had been erected in the hallways. The smell of disinfectant burned his nostrils, and the cries of the injured seared his heart.
I’ll just fix Artemis quickly. Maybe lie down for a minute, then get back to work.
No1 was a good soul, and it never for a moment occurred to him to probe Holly a little to make sure she was fully herself. It never crossed his mind that one of his closest friends could be leading him into a life of servitude.
Turnball sat by Leonor’s bed in the stolen shuttle ambulance, holding her hand while she slept. He felt a little giddy about changing his plan at the last minute. It was quite the cavalier move, and the rush of adrenaline reminded him of his younger days.
“It was all seat-of-the-pants stuff before I went to prison,” he confided to the sleeping Leonor. “I was a captain in the LEP and running the underworld at the same time. To be honest, there wasn’t much of an underworld before I came along. In the morning I would chair a meeting of the task force that was trying to apprehend me, and in the evening I would be doing black-market deals with the goblin gangs.” Turnball smiled and shook his head. “Good days.”
Leonor did not react, as Turnball had thought it best to give her just a drop of sedative until the warlock had restored her youth. He knew from her talk of death that he was losing his grip on his wife, and she was not strong enough to survive another thrall rune.
So sleep, my darling. Sleep. Soon, all will be as it was.
As soon as Captain Short returned with the demon. And if she did not? Then he would board the Nostremius and take the warlock by force. Perhaps he would lose a crew member or two, but they should be glad to die for their captain’s wife.
One level down, in the brig, Bobb Ragby was on guard duty, a duty that he was enjoying immensely, as he considered it payback for all the years he himself had been lorded over by guards. It didn’t matter to Bobb that his gel-bound prisoners weren’t actually the people who’d watched over him: that was just their bad luck. He was taking special pleasure in teasing Mulch Diggums, whom he had long considered a competitor in the top criminal dwarf competition that he’d played in his head during the long hours spent on the toilet, thanks to a diet of processed food.
Turnball had ordered him to split the amorphobots for safety, and now one hung in each corner of the cell like a giant wobbling egg sac.
If any of them act up, then use the shocker feature at your own discretion, Turnball had said. And if they try to shoot their way out, make sure we get that on video so we can have a good laugh later.
Ragby had decided he would definitely use the shocker at the first provocation, maybe before the first provocation.
“Hey, Diggums, why don’t you try to eat some of the gel so I have an excuse to electrocute you?”
Mulch did not waste his energy talking: he simply bared his enormous teeth.
“Yeah?” said Ragby. “They ain’t so big. The more I look at you, Diggums, the less I believe all that junk your little groupies spew back at The Sozzled Parrot. You don’t look like much of a burglar to me, Diggums. I think you’re a phoney. A fraud, a tale-spinning liar.”
Mulch brought a hand up to his face. Yawn.
Artemis had been returned to the grip of his amorphobot once the branding had been completed, and with nothing to do but think in its clammy folds, he could feel whatever was left of his battered personality slipping away. The rune on his neck had taken hold of his willpower in a vicelike grip, and while he could think and speak at the moment, it took a lot of effor
t, and he guessed that he only had those rudimentary functions because Turnball hadn’t given him any specific instructions yet. Once he had his orders, then he would be powerless to resist.
Turnball will be able to order me to do anything, he realized.
Through the distorting field of gel, Artemis could see Ragby taunting Mulch, and thought that perhaps it would be a good idea if he joined the argument.
Speaking through the gel was a tricky affair that involved forming the words through clenched teeth, which kept the gel out but allowed it to pick up vibration in the throat.
“Hello, Mr. Ragby,” he said. The amorphobot sprouted a gel speaker and translated the vibrations into words.
“Hey, look,” said Ragby. “The thrall speaks. What do you want, Mud Boy? A little shock, is that what you want?”
Artemis decided that highbrow intellectual argument was not the way to go with this person, and chose to go straight for the personal insult.
“I want you to have a bath, dwarf. You stink.”
Ragby was delighted to have a little diversion. “Wow. That’s like actual grown-up fighting talk. You do know that your bodyguard is out of action?”
If Butler had been equipped with laser eyeballs, Bobb Ragby would have had holes bored right through his skull.
What are you up to, Artemis? wondered Butler. This kind of insult is not your style.
“I don’t need a bodyguard to dispose of you, Ragby,” continued Artemis. “Just a bucket of water and a wire brush.”
“Funny,” said Ragby, though he sounded a little less amused than previously.
“Perhaps some disinfectant, so your germs would not spread.”
“I have a fungus,” said Ragby. “It’s a real medical condition and it’s very hurtful of you to bring it up.”
“Awww,” said Artemis. “Is the big tough dwarf in pain?”
Ragby had had enough. “Not as much pain as you,” he said, and instructed the bot to pass a charge through its gel sac.
Artemis was attacked by shards of white lightning. He jittered for a moment like a marionette in the hands of a toddler, then relaxed, floating unconscious in the gel.
Ragby laughed. “Not so funny now, are you?”
Butler growled, which would have been menacing had not his bot speakers translated it as a robotic purr, then he began to push. It should have been impossible for him to make any impact without traction, but somehow he actually managed to distend the gel, causing the bot to chitter as though being tickled.
“You guys are hilarious,” said Ragby, and allowed Butler to wear himself out for a few minutes before he grew bored and shocked the bodyguard. Not enough to knock the big human out, but certainly enough to calm him down a little.
“Two down,” he said cheerily. “Who’s next?”
“Me,” said Mulch. “I’m next.”
Bobb Ragby turned to find Mulch Diggums rolled into a ball, rear end pointed directly at Bobb himself. The rear end was not covered by material, or, in other words, it was a bare bottom and it meant business.
Ragby, as a dwarf himself and a subscriber to Where the Wind Blows monthly, knew exactly what was about to happen.
“No way,” he breathed. He should shock Diggums, he knew, but this was too much entertainment to pass up. If things got out of hand, he could press the button; until then no harm in watching. Just in time, he remembered to press record on the security cameras, in case the captain wanted a look later.
“Go on, Diggums. If you actually break free, then I’ll present my own backside for a good kicking.”
Mulch did not reply: breathing was too difficult inside the gel to go wasting any precious energy trading insults with Bobb Ragby. Instead he wrapped his forearms around his shins and bore down on his colon, which was inflated like a very long balloon snake.
“Go, Mulch!” whooped Ragby. “Make your people proud. Just so you know, this will be up on the Ethernet in about five minutes.”
The first bubble to emerge was cantaloupe sized. These big bubbles were known among dwarf tunnelers as corkers, from back in the days when corks were used to cap bottles. Often a corker had to be cleared before the main flow could begin.
“Good-sized corker,” Bobb Ragby admitted.
Once the corker was out of his system, Mulch followed it with a flurry of smaller squibs, which emerged into the gel with an initial speed that was quickly arrested by the bot’s gel.
“Is that it?” called Bobb, a little disappointed, truth be known. “Is that all you got?”
That was not all Mulch had got. A hundred more assorted squibs quickly followed, some spheres, some ellipsoids, and Ragby swore he saw a cube.
“Now you’re just showing off!” he said.
The bubbles just kept on coming in various sizes and shapes. Some were transparent, some suspiciously opaque, and a few had wisps of gas inside that crackled when they hit the gel.
The bot chittered nervously, the metal hardware heart flashing orange as its built-in spectrometer struggled to analyze the gas’s components.
“Now that I have never seen,” said Bobb, his finger hovering over the shocker button.
Still the bubbles flowed, inflating the amorphobot to twice its original size. Its chitterings climbed the octaves until eventually they shattered nearby medical beakers and climbed to ultrasonic wavelengths, too high for the humans and fairies to hear.
The shrieking has stopped, thought Bobb. That must mean the danger is past.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Mulch was virtually invisible now behind the bubbles, his image twisted and refracted by their curved surfaces. More and more bubbles were produced. Mulch seemed to be the dwarf equivalent of a clown’s car that could hold more passengers than would seem to be allowed by the laws of physics. The amorphobot was stretched to its limits, and its surface was dappled by the pressure. It began bouncing on the spot, venting bursts of the mysterious smoky gas.
“Well, Mulch, it’s been fun,” said Bobb Ragby, and reluctantly pressed the shocker button, which, as it turned out, was the wrong thing to do. Even the amorphobot tried to refuse the order, but Ragby insisted, jabbing the button again and again until the familiar crackling sparked from two nodes on its metallic heart. Any first-day chemistry student could have told Ragby never to put sparks near a mystery gas.
Unfortunately, Ragby had never met any first-day chemistry students, and so it came as a total surprise to him when the gas passed by Mulch Diggums ignited, bubble after bubble, in a chain reaction of mini explosions.
The bot expanded and ruptured, gel jets erupting from its surface. It bounced from floor to ceiling then pinballed across the cell, running Ragby over like a giant tire. It was a testament to Foaly’s design and standards that the amorphobot held its integrity even under such extreme circumstances. It transferred gel from unscorched sections and grafted them onto ruined areas.
Ragby lay stunned on the deck while the bot came to rest across the hatch, shuddering and heaving. In cases like this, it had a deep-rooted self-preservation order that Turnball had not thought to override. In the event that a sample collected by one of the amorphobots proved dangerous to the bot’s systems, then that subject was to be immediately ejected. And this pungent dwarf was definitely dangerous, and so the damaged amorphobot hawked Mulch Diggums onto the blackened deck, where he lay, smoking.
“I should never have had all that vole curry,” he mumbled, then passed out.
Bobb Ragby was the first dwarf to recover.
“That was something,” he said, then spat out a lump of charred gel. “You got out, darn it if you didn’t, so I suppose by rights I should present my behind for a kicking.”
Ragby lowered his wide bottom toward Mulch’s unconscious face, but got no reaction.
“No takers?” he said. “Well, you can’t say I didn’t offer.”
“Here,” said a voice behind him. “Let me kick that for you.”
He twisted his neck around just in time t
o see an enormous boot heading for his behind, and behind that boot there was an angry head, which, in spite of being a little out of focus because of Bobb’s perspective, unmistakably belonged to the human Butler.
Mulch had never believed he would actually get out of the amorphobot’s belly, but he had hoped to distract Bobb Ragby for a few moments so that Foaly could come up with one of his genius techy plans.
And that was exactly what had happened. While Ragby had been occupied watching the gastrobatics of his fellow dwarf, Foaly had been busy syncing the bot core Artemis had picked up at the impact site with the core in his own amorphobot. In a laboratory it would have taken him about ten seconds to connect and send a string of code to shut out the instructions from the stolen control orb, but, suspended inside an amorphobot, it took the centaur at least half a minute. As soon as the readout flashed green, Foaly networked with the remaining bots and instructed them to dissolve.
Half a second later, Juliet and Foaly flopped to the floor, tears in their eyes, gel in their windpipes. Artemis lay unmoving, still unconscious from his electrocution.
Butler landed on his feet, spat and attacked.
* * *
Poor Bobb Ragby never had a chance, not that Butler did much to him. All it took was one kick, then the dwarf’s terror took hold and jetted him straight into the lip of a metal bunk. He collapsed with a surprisingly childlike moan.
Butler turned quickly to Artemis and checked his pulse.
“How’s Artemis’s heart?” asked Juliet, bending to check on Mulch.
“It’s beating,” replied her brother. “That’s about all I can tell you. We need to get him over to that hospital ship. Mulch too.” The dwarf coughed then muttered something about beer and cheese pies.