Artemis Fowl_ The Opal Deception - Eoin Colfer [97]
“Not yet. Soon.”
“Keep trying. Keep your finger on that button.”
Opal unstrapped herself and strode through to the lounge. The dwarf couldn’t have carried all the truffles and the explosives. Surely not. She had been so looking forward to a handful of the heavenly chocolate once Haven was destroyed.
She knelt on the carpet, worming her hand underneath the seam to the hidden catch. It popped beneath her fingers, and the booty box’s lid slid up and back.
There was not a single truffle left in the box. Instead there were two shaped charges. For a moment Opal could not understand what she was seeing. Then it became terrifyingly clear. Artemis had not stolen the charges; he had simply told the dwarf to move them. Once in the booty box they could not be detected or detonated, as long as the lid was sealed. She had opened the box herself. Artemis had goaded her into sealing her own fate.
The blood drained from Opal’s face. “Mervall,” she screamed. “The detonation signal!”
“Don’t worry, Miss Koboi,” the pixie shouted from the cockpit. “We just got contact. Nothing can stop it now.”
Green countdown clocks activated on both charges and began counting back from twenty. A standard mining fuse.
Opal lurched into the cockpit. She had been tricked.
Duped. Now the charges would detonate uselessly at seventy-five miles, well above the parallel stretch. Of course her own shuttle would be destroyed and she would be left stranded, ready to be scooped up by the LEP. At least that was the theory. But Opal Koboi never left herself without options.
She strapped herself into a seat in the cockpit.
“I advise you to strap in,” she said curtly to the Brill brothers. “You have failed me. Enjoy prison.”
Merv and Scant barely had time to buckle up before Opal activated the ejector gel-pods under their seats. They were immediately immersed in a bubble of amber impact-gel and ejected through panels that had opened in the hull.
The impact-gel bubbles had no power source and relied on the initial gas propulsion to get them out of harm’s way. The gel was fireproof, blast resistant, and contained enough oxygen for thirty minutes of shallow breathing. Merv and Scant were catapulted through black space until they came into contact with the chute wall. The gel stuck to the rocky surface, leaving the Brill brothers stranded thousands of miles from home.
Opal, meanwhile, was rapidly keying codes into the shuttle’s computer. She had less than ten seconds left to complete her final act of aggression. Artemis Fowl may have beaten her this time, but he wouldn’t live to gloat about it.
Opal expertly activated and launched two heat-seeking plasma rockets from the nose tubes, then launched her own escape pod. No plasma-gel for Opal Koboi. She had, of course, included a luxury pod in the ship’s design. Just one, though; no need for the help to travel in comfort. In fact, Opal didn’t care much what happened to the Brill brothers, one way or the other. They were of no further use to her.
She opened the throttles wide, ignoring safety regulations. After all, who cared if she scorched the shuttle’s hull. It was about to get a lot more than just scorched. The pod streaked toward the surface at over five hundred miles per hour. Pretty fast, but not fast enough to completely escape the shock wave from the two shaped charges.
The stealth shuttle exploded in a flash of multicolored light. Holly pulled the LEP shuttle close to the wall to avoid falling debris. After the shock waves had passed, the shuttle’s occupants waited in silence for the computer to run a scan on the stretch of chute above them. Eventually three red dots appeared on the 3-D representation of the chute. Two were static, the other was moving rapidly toward the surface.
“They made it,” sighed Artemis. “I have no doubt that the moving dot is Opal. We should pick her up.”
“We should,” said Holly, not looking as happy as one would expect. “But we won’t.”
Artemis picked up on Holly’s tone. “Why not? What’s wrong?”
“That’s wrong,” said