Eoin Colfer - Artemis Fowl. The Opal Deception Страница 24

Chix took a deep breath, saying the words as he let it out. ‘Opal Koboi is back.’

Foaly’s laughter started somewhere around his hooves and grew in volume and intensity until it burst out of his mouth. ‘Opal is back! Koboi is back! I get it now. Mulch conned you into letting him steal the shuttle. He played on your fear of Opal waking up, and you bought it. Opal is back, don’t make me laugh.’

‘That’s what he said,’ said Chix sulkily. ‘There’s no need to laugh so hard. You’re spitting on the screen. I have feelings, you know.’

Foaly’s laughter petered out. It wasn’t real laughter anyway, it was just an outburst of emotion. Mostly sadness, with some frustration mixed in.

‘OK, Chix. I don’t blame you. Mulch has fooled smarter sprites than you.’

It took Chix a moment to realize that he was being insulted.

‘It could be true,’ he said, miffed. ‘You could be wrong. It is possible, you know. Maybe Opal Koboi conned you.’

Foaly opened another window on his wall. ‘No, Verbil, it is not possible. Opal could not be back because I’m looking at her right now.’

Live feed from the Argon Clinic confirmed that Opal was indeed still suspended in her coma harness. She’d had her DNA swab minutes beforehand.

Chix’s petulance crumbled. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he muttered. ‘Mulch seemed so sincere. I actually thought Holly was in danger.’

Foaly’s tail twitched. ‘What? Mulch said Holly was in danger? But Holly is gone. She died.’

‘Yes,’ said Chix morosely. ‘Mulch was shovelling more horse dung, I suppose. No offence.’

Of course. Opal would set Holly up to take the blame for Julius. That cruel little touch would be just like Opal. If she wasn’t right there, in her harness. DNA never lies.

Chix rapped the screen surround at his end, to get Foaly’s attention.

‘Listen, Foaly, remember what you promised. This is between us. No need for anyone else to know I got duped by a dwarf. I’ll end up scraping vole curry off the sidewalk after crunchball matches.’

Foaly absently shut the window. ‘Yes, whatever. Between us. Right.’

Opal was still secure. No doubt about it. Surely she couldn’t have escaped. If she had, then maybe this probe was more sinister than it seemed. She couldn’t have escaped. It wasn’t possible.

But Foaly’s paranoid streak couldn’t let it go. Just to be sure, there were a few little tests he could perform. He really should get authorization, but, if he were wrong, nobody had to know. And if he were right, nobody would care about a few hours of computer time.

The centaur ran a quick search on the surveillance database and selected the footage from the chute access tunnel where Julius had died. There was something he wanted to check.

UNCHARTED CHUTE, THREE MILES BELOW SOUTHERN ITALY

The stolen shuttle made good time to the surface. Holly flew as fast as she could without burning the gearbox or smashing them into a chute wall. Time may have been of the essence, but the motley crew would be of little use to anyone if they had to be scraped off the wall like so much crunchy pate.

‘These old rigs are mainly for watch changes,’ explained Holly. ‘The LEP got this one second-hand at a criminal assets auction. It’s souped up to avoid Customs ships. It used to belong to a curry smuggler.’

Artemis sniffed. A faint yellow odour still lingered in the cockpit.

‘Why would anyone smuggle curry?’

‘Extra-hot curry is illegal in Haven. Living underground, we have to be careful of emissions, if you catch my drift.’

Artemis caught her drift and decided not to pursue the subject.

‘We need to locate Opal’s shuttle before we venture above ground and give our position away.’

Holly pulled over, next to a small lake of black oil, the shuttle’s downdraught rippling the surface.

‘Artemis, I think I mentioned that it’s a stealth shuttle.

Nothing can detect her. We don’t have sensors sophisticated enough to spot her.

Opal and her pixie sidekicks could be sitting in their craft just round the next bend, and our computers wouldn’t pick them up.‘

Artemis leaned in over the dashboard readouts. ‘You’re approaching this the wrong way, Holly. We need to find out where the shuttle is not.’

Artemis launched various scans, searching for traces of certain gases within a hundred-mile radius. ‘I think we may assume that the stealth shuttle is very close to E7.

Perhaps right at the mouth, but that still leaves us with a lot of ground to cover, especially if all we have to rely on are our eyes.’

‘That’s what I’ve been saying. But do go on, I’m sure you have a point.’

‘So, I’m using this shuttle’s limited sensor dishes to scan from here right up the chute to the surface and down about thirty miles.’

‘Scanning for what?’ said Holly in exasperation. ‘A hole in the air?’

Artemis grinned. ‘Exactly. You see, normal space is made up of various gases: oxygen, hydrogen and so on; but the stealth shuttle would prevent any of these from being detected inside the ship’s hull. So if we find a small patch of space without the usual ambient gases…’

‘Then we’ve found the stealth shuttle,’ said Holly.

‘Exactly.’

The computer completed its scan quickly, building an on-screen model of the surrounding area. The gases were displayed in various whirling hues.

Artemis instructed the computer to search for anomalies. It found three, one with an abnormally high saturation of carbon monoxide.

‘That’s probably an airport. A lot of exhaust fumes.’

The second anomaly was a large area with only trace elements of any gas.

‘A vacuum, probably a computer plant,’ surmised Artemis.

The third anomaly was a small area, just outside the lip of E7, that appeared to contain no gas of any kind.

‘That’s her. The volume is exactly right. She’s on the north side of the chute entrance.’

‘Well done,’ said Holly, punching him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Let’s get up there.’

‘You know, of course, that as soon as we put our nose into the main chute system, Foaly will pick us up.’

Holly gave the engines a few seconds to warm up. ‘It’s too late to worry about that. Haven is more than six hundred miles away. By the time anyone gets here, we’ll be either heroes or outlaws.’

‘We’re already outlaws,’ said Artemis.

‘True,’ agreed Holly. ‘But soon we could be outlaws with no one chasing us.’

POLICE PLAZA, THE LOWER ELEMENTS

Opal Koboi was back. Could it be possible? The thought niggled at Foaly’s ordered mind, unravelling any chain of thought that he tried to compose. He would not find any peace until he found out for certain one way or the other.

The first place to check was the video footage from E37. If one began with the assumption that Koboi was indeed alive, then a number of details could be explained.

First, the strange haze that had appeared on all the tapes was manufactured to hide something and was not simply interference. The loss of audio signal too could have been orchestrated by Koboi to cover whatever had passed between Holly and Julius in the tunnel. And the calamitous explosion could have been Koboi’s doing and not Holly’s. The possibility brought tremendous peace to Foaly, but he contained it. He hadn’t proved anything yet.

Foaly ran the tape through a few filters without result. The strange blurred section refused to be sharpened, cloned or shifted. That in itself was unusual. If the blurred spot was just computer glitchery, Foaly should have been able to do something about it. But the indistinct patch stood its ground, repelling everything Foaly threw at it.

You may have the high-tech ground covered, thought the centaur. But what about good old low-tech?

Foaly zoomed the footage on to moments before the explosion. The blurred patch had transferred itself to Julius’s chest, and indeed at times the commander appeared to be looking at it. Was there an explosive device under there? If so, then it must have been remotely detonated. The jammer signal was probably sent from the same remote. The detonation command would override all other signals, including the jammer. This meant that for perhaps a thousandth of a second before detonation, whatever was on Julius’s chest would become visible. Not long enough for the fairy eye to capture, but a camera would see it just fine.

Foaly fast forwarded to the explosion and then began to work his way backwards, frame by frame. It was agonizing, watching his friend being reassembled by the reversed film. The centaur tried to ignore it, concentrating on the tape. The flames shrank from orange plumes to white shards, eventually containing themselves inside an orange mini-sun. Then, for a single frame, something appeared. Foaly flicked past it, then returned.

There! On Julius’s chest, right where the blur used to be. A device of some kind.

Foaly’s fingers jabbed the enlarge tool. A thirty-centimetre-square metal panel was secured to Julius’s chest with octo-bonds. It had been picked up by the camera for a single frame. Less than one-thousandth of a second, which was why it had been missed by the investigators. On the face of the panel was a plasma screen. Someone had been communicating with the commander before he died. That someone had not wanted to be overheard, hence the audio jammer. Unfortunately, the screen was now blank, as the detonation signal that disrupted the jammer would also have disrupted the video.

I know who it is, thought Foaly. It’s Opal Koboi, backjrom limbo. But he needed proof. The centaur’s word was worth about as much to Ark Sool as a dwarf’s denial that he had passed wind.

Foaly glared at the live feed from the Argon Clinic. There she was. Opal Koboi, still deep in her coma. Apparently.

How did you do it? How could you swap places with another fairy?

Plastic surgery wouldn’t do it. Surgery couldn’t change DNA. Foaly opened a drawer in his desk, pulling out a piece of equipment that resembled two miniature kitchen plungers.

There was only one way to find out what was going on here. He would have to ask Opal directly.

When Foaly arrived at the clinic, Doctor Argon was reluctant to allow him into Opal’s room.

‘Miss Koboi is in a deep state of catatonia,’ said the gnome peevishly. ‘Who knows what effect your devices will have on her psyche? It’s difficult, well-nigh impossible, to explain to a lay fairy what damage intrusive stimuli may have on the recovering mind.’

Foaly whinnied. ‘You had no trouble letting the TV networks in. I suppose they pay better than the LEP. I do hope you are not beginning to view Opal as your personal possession, Doctor. She is a state prisoner, and I can have her moved to a state facility any time I like.’

‘Maybe just five minutes,’ said Jerbal Argon, tapping in the door’s security code.

Foaly clopped past him, plonking his briefcase on the table. Opal swung gently in the draught from the doorway. And it did seem to be Opal. Even this close, with every feature in focus, Foaly could have sworn that this was his old adversary. The same Opal who had competed with him for every prize at college. The same Opal who had very nearly succeeded in having him blamed for the goblin uprising.

‘Get her down from there,’ he ordered.

Argon positioned a bunk below the harness, complaining at every step. ‘I shouldn’t be doing physical labour,’ he moaned. ‘It’s my hip. No one knows the pain I’m in. No one. The warlocks can’t do a thing for me.’

‘Don’t you have staff to do this sort of thing?’

‘Normally, yes,’ said Argon, lowering the harness. ‘But my janitors are on leave.

Both at the same time. Normally I wouldn’t allow it, but good pixie workers are hard to find.’

Foaly’s ears pricked up. ‘Pixies? Your janitors are pixies?’

‘Yes. We’re quite proud of them around here — minor celebrities, you know. The pixie twins. And, of course, they have the highest respect for me.’

Foaly’s hands shook as he unpacked his equipment. It all seemed to be coming together. First Chix, then the strange device on Julius’s chest, now pixie janitors who were on leave. He just needed one more piece of the puzzle.

‘What is it you have there?’ asked Argon anxiously. ‘Nothing that could cause any damage?’

Foaly tilted the unconscious pixie’s head backwards. ‘Don’t worry, Argon. It’s just a Retimager. I’m not going in any further than the eyeballs.’

He held the pixie’s eyes open, one at a time, sealing the plunger-like cups around the sockets. ‘Every image is recorded on the retinas. This leaves a trail of micro-scratches that can be enhanced and read.’

‘I know what a Retimager is,’ snapped Argon. ‘I do read science journals occasionally, you know. So you can tell what the last thing Opal saw was. What good will that do?’

Foaly connected the eyepieces to a wall computer. ‘We shall see,’ he said, endeavouring to sound cryptic rather than desperate.

He opened the Retimager’s program on the plasma screen, and two dark images appeared.

‘Left and right eyes,’ explained Foaly, toggling a key until the two images overlapped. The image was obviously a head from a side angle, but it was too dark to identify.

‘Ooh, such brilliance,’ gushed Argon sarcastically. ‘Shall I call the networks? Or should I just faint in awe?’

Foaly ignored him. ‘Lighten and enhance,’ he said to the computer.

A computer-generated paintbrush swabbed the screen, leaving a brighter and sharper picture behind it.

‘It’s a pixie,’ muttered Foaly. ‘But still not enough detail.’ He scratched his chin.

‘Computer, match this picture with patient Koboi, Opal.’

A picture of Opal flashed up on a separate window. It resized itself and revolved until the new picture was at the same angle as the original. Red arrows flashed between the pictures, connecting identical points. After a few moments the space between the two pictures was completely blitzed with red lines.

‘Are these two pictures of the same person?’ asked Foaly.

‘Affirmative,’ said the computer. ‘Though there is a point zero five per cent possibility of error.’

Foaly jabbed the print button. ‘I’ll take those odds.’

Argon stepped closer to the screen, as though in a daze. His face was pale, and growing paler as he realized the implications of the picture.

‘She saw herself from the side,’ he whispered. ‘That means…’

‘There were two Opal Kobois,’ completed Foaly. ‘The real one, that you let escape. And this shell here, which can only be…’

‘A clone.’

‘Precisely,’ said Foaly, plucking the hard copy from the printer. ‘She had herself cloned, and then your janitors waltzed her right out of here under your nose.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘“Oh dear” hardly covers it. Maybe now would be a good time to call the networks, or faint in awe.’