Artemis Fowl_ The Arctic Incident - Eoin Colfer [7]
Holly sighed. Chix would be OK. He probably wouldn’t fly any more missions on that wing, but he would live. Holly laid the unconscious sprite on his side, careful not to put pressure on the injured wing. Now for the mysterious grey shapes. Holly upped the setting on her weapon to four and ran without hesitation towards the chute entrance.
On your very first day in the LEP Academy, a big hairy gnome, with a chest the size of a bull troll, pins each cadet to a wall and warns them never to run into an unsecured building during a firefight. He says this in a most insistent fashion. He repeats it every day until the maxim is etched on every cadet’s brain. Nevertheless, this was exactly what Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon Unit proceeded to do.
She blasted the terminal’s double doors, diving through to the shelter of a check-in desk. Less than four hundred years ago, this building had been a hive of activity, with tourists queuing for above-ground visas. Paris had once been a very popular tourist destination. But inevitably, it seemed, humans had claimed the European capital for themselves. The only place fairies felt safe was in Disneyland, Paris, where no one looked twice at diminutive creatures, even if they were green.
Holly activated a motion-sensor filter in her helmet and scanned the building through the desk’s quartz security panel. If anything moved, the helmet’s computer would automatically flag it with an orange corona. She looked up, just in time to see two figures loping along a viewing gallery towards the shuttle bay. They were goblins all right, reverting to all fours for extra speed, trailing a hover trolley behind them. They were wearing some kind of reflective foil suits, complete with headgear, obviously to fox the thermal sensors. Very clever.Too clever for goblins.
Holly ran parallel to the goblins, one floor down. All around her, ancient advertising hoardings sagged in their brackets. TWO-WEEK SOLSTICE TOUR. TWENTY GOLD GRAMS. CHILDREN UNDER TEN TRAVEL FREE.
She vaulted the turnstile gate, racing past the security zone and duty-free booths. The goblins were descending now, boots and gloves flapping on a frozen escalator. One lost his headgear in his haste. He was big for a goblin, over a metre. His lidless eyes rolled in panic, and his forked tongue flicked upwards to moisten his pupils.
Captain Short squeezed off a few bursts on the run. One clipped the backside of the nearest goblin. Holly groaned. Nowhere near a nerve centre. But it didn’t have to be. There was a disadvantage to these foil suits. They conducted neutrino charges. The charge spread through the suit’s material like fiery ripples across a pond. The goblin jumped a good two metres straight up, then tumbled, unconscious, to the foot of the escalator. The hover trolley spun out of control, crashing into a luggage carousel. Hundreds of small cylindrical objects spilled from a shattered crate.
Goblin Number Two fired a dozen rounds Holly’s way. He missed, partly because his arms were jittery with nerves. But also because firing from the hip only works in the movies. Holly tried to take a screen shot of his weapon with her helmet camera for the computer to run a match on, but there was too much vibration.
The chase continued down the conduits and into the departure bay itself. Holly was surprised to hear the hum of docking computers. There wasn’t supposed to be any power here. LEP Engineering would have dismantled the generators. Why would power be needed here?
She already knew the answer. Power would be needed to operate the shuttle monorail and Mission Control. Her suspicions were confirmed as she entered the hangar. The goblins had built a shuttle!
It was unbelievable. Goblins had barely enough electricity in their brains to power a ten-watt bulb. How could they possibly build a shuttle? Yet there it was, sitting in the dock like a used-craft seller’s worst nightmare. There wasn’t a bit of it less than a decade old, and the hull was a patchwork of weld spots and rivets.