Artemis Fowl_ The Opal Deception - Eoin Colfer [46]
“It looks like you’ll be wearing those chains for a bit longer than you thought.”
Mulch’s jaw strained against the steel mouth ring. “Why? What’s happened?”
Vishby scratched a strip of gill rot on his neck. “I shouldn’t tell you this, convict, but Commander Root has been murdered.”
Mulch couldn’t have been more shocked if they had connected him to the underworld grid.
“Murdered? How?”
“Explosion,” said Vishby. “Another LEP officer is the prime suspect. Captain Holly Short. She’s missing, presumed dead on the surface, but that hasn’t been confirmed.”
“I’m not a bit surprised,” said the water sprite. “Females are too temperamental for police work. They couldn’t even handle a simple transport job like this.”
Mulch was in shock. He felt as though his brain had snapped its moorings and was spinning in his head. Holly murdered Julius? How could that be possible? It wasn’t possible, simple as that. There must be a mistake. And now Holly was missing, presumed dead. How could this be happening?
“Anyways,” continued Vishby. “We gotta turn this crate around and head back to Atlantis. Obviously your little hearing is being postponed indefinitely, until this entire mess gets sorted out.”
The water sprite slapped Mulch playfully on the cheek. “Tough break, dwarf. Maybe they’ll get the red tape untangled in a couple of years.”
Mulch barely felt the slap, though the words penetrated. A couple of years. Could he take a couple of years in the Deeps? Already his soul cried out for the tunnels. He needed to feel soft earth between his fingers. His insides needed real roughage to clear them out. And of course, there was a chance that Holly was still alive and needed help. A friend. He had no option but to escape.
Julius dead. It couldn’t be true.
Mulch mentally leafed through his dwarf abilities to select the best tool for this escape. He had long since forfeited his magic by breaking most of the Fairy Book’s commandments, but dwarfs had extraordinary gifts granted them by evolution. Some of these were common knowledge among the People, but dwarfs were a notoriously secretive race who believed that their survival depended on concealing these talents. It was well known that dwarfs excavated tunnels by ingesting the earth through their unhinged jaws, then ejecting the recycled dirt and air through the other end. Most fairies were aware that dwarfs could drink through their pores, and if they stopped drinking for a while, then these pores were transformed into minisuction cups. Fewer People knew that dwarf spit was luminous, and hardened when layered. And no one knew that a by-product of dwarf flatulence was a methane-producing bacterium called Methanobrevibacter smithii, which prevented decompression sickness in deep-sea divers. In fairness, dwarfs didn’t know this either; all they knew was that on the rare occasion they found themselves accidentally burrowing into the open sea, the bends did not seem to affect them.
Mulch thought about it for a moment and realized that there was a way to combine all of his talents and get out of here. He had to put his on-the-hoof plan into effect immediately, before they went into the deep Atlantic trenches. Once the subshuttle went too deep, he would never make it.
The craft swung in a long arc until it was heading back the way it had come. The pilot would punch the engines as soon as they were outside Irish fishing waters. Mulch began to lick his palms, smoothing the spittle through his halo of wild hair.
Vishby laughed. “What are you doing, Diggums? Cleaning up for your cell mate?”
Mulch would have dearly loved to unhinge his jaw and take a bite out of Vishby, but the mouth ring prevented him from opening his mouth far enough to unhinge. He had to content himself with an insult.
“I may be a prisoner, fishboy, but in ten years I’ll be free. You, on the other hand, will be an ugly bottom-feeder