Artemis Fowl_ The Opal Deception - Eoin Colfer [37]
“Good-bye, Butler, old friend,” she whispered. “I’ll be back for you.”
The bodyguard groaned once, as though he had heard. Holly hated to leave him, though there was no choice. It was either Artemis alone or no one, and Butler himself would thank her for what she was doing.
Holly gritted her teeth, tensed every muscle in her body, and opened the throttle wide on her wings. She took off out of that shed like a dart from a blowpipe, kicking up a fresh cloud of dust in her wake. Even if someone had been staring right at her, all they would have seen was dust and a sky-colored blur, with possibly one loafered shoe poking out. But that must have been their eyes playing tricks, because shoes couldn’t fly. Could they?
CHAPTER 5
MEET THE NEIGHBORS
E37, The Lower Elements
Foaly could not believe what was happening. His eyes were sending information to his brain, but his brain refused to accept it. Because if he were to accept this information, he would have to believe that his friend Holly Short had just shot her own commander and was now attempting to escape to the surface. This was completely impossible, though not everybody was so reluctant to accept this.
The centaur’s mobile tech shuttle had been commandeered by Internal Affairs. This operation now fell under their jurisdiction because an LEP officer was suspected of a crime. All LEP personnel had been ejected from the shuttle, but Foaly was allowed to stay simply because he was the only one able to operate the surveillance equipment.
Commander Ark Sool was an LEP gnome who went after suspect police fairies. Sool was unusually tall and thin for a gnome, like a giraffe in a baboon’s skin. His dark hair was slicked straight back in a no-nonsense style, and his fingers and ears boasted none of the golden adornments generally so beloved of the gnome families. Ark Sool was the highest-ranking gnome officer in Internal Affairs, and he believed that the LEP was basically a bunch of loose cannons who were presided over by a maverick. And now the maverick was dead, killed, apparently, by the biggest loose cannon in the bunch. Holly Short may have narrowly avoided criminal charges on two previous occasions. She would not escape this time.
“Play the video again, centaur,” he instructed, tapping the worktop with his cane. Most annoying.
“We’ve looked at this a dozen times,” protested Foaly. “I don’t see the point.”
Sool silenced him with a glare from his red-rimmed eyes. “You don’t see the point? The centaur doesn’t see the point? I don’t see where that’s an important factor in the current equation. You, Mister Foaly, are here to press buttons, not to offer opinions. Commander Root placed far too much value on your opinions, and look where that got him, eh?”
Foaly swallowed the dozen or so acidic responses that were queuing on his tongue. If he was excluded from this operation now, he could do nothing to help Holly.
“Play the video. Yessir.”
Foaly cued the video from E37. It was damning stuff. Julius and Holly hovered around General Scalene for several moments. They appeared to be quite agitated. Then for some reason, and incredible as it sounded, Holly shot the commander with some kind of incendiary bullet. At this point they lost all video feeds from both helmets.
“Back up the tape twenty seconds,” ordered Sool, leaning in close to the monitor. He poked his cane into the plasma screen. “What’s that?”
“Careful with the cane,” said Foaly. “These screens are expensive. I get them from Atlantis.”
“Answer the question, centaur. What is that?” Sool prodded the screen twice, just to show how little he cared about Foaly’s gizmos.
The Internal Affairs Commander was pointing to a slight shimmer on Root’s chest.
“I’m not sure,” admitted Foaly. “It could be heat distortion, or maybe equipment failure. Or perhaps just a glitch. I’ll have to run some tests.”
Sool nodded. “Run your tests, though I don’t expect you’ll find anything. Short is a burnout, simple as that. She always was. I nearly had her before, but this time it