Eoin Colfer - Artemis Fowl. The Lost Colony

One, that your pride doesn't have long left before it disappears altogether.'

No.1 was stunned. This was more information than anyone could absorb in one day. For some reason the demoness with the red markings flashed into his mind. 'Isn't there any way to help? We are intelligent beings, you know. Not animals.'

Minerva stood and paced, stretching one of her corkscrew curls.

'I have been giving this some thought. There's nothing that can be done without magic, and Abbot told me the warlocks all died in the transition.'

'It's true,' said No.1. He did not mention that he might be a warlock himself. Something told him that this was valuable information and it was not a good idea to reveal too much valuable information to a person who had tied you to a chair. He had said too much already.

'Maybe if Abbot had known about the time spell, he wouldn't have been so eager to get back to Hybras,' mused Minerva. 'Papa told him that there was a silver chip in his arm, and that very night he dug it out with his nails and disappeared. We have the whole thing on tape. I have wondered every day if he managed to make it home.'

'He made it,' said No.1. 'The time spell took him right back to the beginning. He never said anything about this place. Just turned up with the book and the crossbow, claiming to be our saviour. It was all lies.'

'Well then,' sighed Minerva, and she seemed genuinely sorry. 'I don't have a single idea about how to save the pride. Maybe your little friend in the next room can help when she wakes up.'

'What little friend?' asked No.1, puzzled.

'The one who knocked out Bobo, my brother. The little creature we captured trying to rescue you,' explained Minerva. 'Or, more accurately, trying to rescue an empty golf bag. She looks like a magical creature.

Maybe she can help.'

Who would want to rescue a golf bag? wondered No.1.

The door opened a crack, and Juan Soto's head appeared in the gap.

'Minerva?'

'Not now,' snapped Minerva, waving at the man to go away.

'There's a call for you.'

'I'm not available. Take a number.'

The security guard persisted; he stepped into the room, one hand cupped over the mouthpiece of a cordless phone.

'I think you might want to talk to this person. He says his name is Artemis Fowl.'

Minerva gave So to her full attention.

'I'll take it,' she said, reaching for the phone.

The LEP recon field helmet is an amazing piece of equipment. The Section 8 field helmet, on the other hand, is a miracle of modern science. To compare the two would be akin to comparing a flintlock to a laser-sighted sniper rifle.

Foaly had taken full advantage of his almost unlimited budget to indulge his every tech-head fantasy and stuff the helmet with every piece of diagnostic, surveillance, defence and just plain cool equipment he could cram in there.

The centaur was vocally proud of the entire package. But if forced to pick just one add-on to brag about, he would go for the bouncing bags every time.

Bouncing bags in themselves were not a recent addition. Even civilian helmets had gel bags in between their outer and inner shells, which provided a bit of extra buffering in case of a crash. But Foaly had replaced the helmet's rigid outer shell with a more yielding polymer and then swapped the electro-sensitive gel for tiny electro-sensitive beads.

The beads could be controlled with electronic pulses to expand, contract, roll or group, providing the helmet with a simple but highly effective propulsion system.

This little marvel can't fly but it can bounce wherever you want it to,

Foaly had said earlier, when Holly was signing out her equipment. Only commanders get the flying helmets. I wouldn't recommend them though, the engine's field has been known to straighten perms. Not that I'm saying you have a perm. Or need one for that matter.

While No.1 was being interrogated by Minerva, Foaly was flexing his fingers over the remote controls for Holly's Section 8 helmet. At the moment, the helmet was locked in a wire mesh strongbox at the rear of the security office.

Foaly liked to sing a little ditty while he worked. In this instance the song was the Riverbend classic: 'If It Looks Like a Dwarf and Smells Like a Dwarf, Then It's Probably a Dwarf (or a Latrine Wearing Dungarees)'. This was a relatively short title for a Riverbend song, which was the fairy equivalent of human country and western.

Foaly had considerately switched off his mike, so Artemis would not have the chance to object to his singing. In fact he was using an extremely old hard-wired antenna to send his signal, in the hope that no one in Police Plaza would pick up on his transmission. Haven City was in lockdown, and that meant no communications with the surface.

Foaly was knowingly disobeying Commander Ark Sool's orders, and he was quite enjoying himself doing it.

The centaur donned a set of v-goggles through which he could see everything in the helmet's vista. Not only that, but the goggles' PIP facility gave him rear and side views from the helmet's cameras. Foaly already had control of the chateau's security systems; now he wanted to have a little peek through their computer files — something he could not do from Section 8 HQ, especially not with the LEP waiting to pounce on any signal coming out of the city.

The helmet was naturally equipped with wireless omni-sensor capabilities, but the closer he could get to an actual hard drive, the quicker the job could be completed.

Foaly pressed a combination key command on his v-keyboard. To anyone watching, it would have seemed like the centaur was playing an invisible piano, but in fact the v-goggles interpreted the movements as key strokes. A small laser pencil popped out of a hidden compartment just above the right ear-cushion of Holly's helmet.

Foaly targeted the wire mesh box's locking mechanism.

'One second burst. Fire.' Nothing happened, so Foaly swore briefly, turned on his microphone, and tried it again.

'One second burst. Fire.'

This time, a red beam pulsed from the pencil's tip, and the lock melted into metallic mush.

Always good to have the equipment switched on, thought Foaly, glad that no one had witnessed his mistake, especially not Artemis Fowl.

Foaly targeted a desktop computer at the far side of the office with a glare and three blinks.

'Compute bounce,' he ordered the helmet, and almost immediately an animated dotted arrow appeared on the screen, dipping once to the floor and then rising to the computer desk.

'Execute bounce,' said Foaly and smiled as his creation rolled into life.

The helmet hit the floor with a basketball ping then bounced across the room, directly on to the computer desk.

'Perfect, you genius,' said Foaly, congratulating himself. Sometimes his own achievements brought a tear to his eye.

I wish Caballine could have seen that, he thought. And then, Wow, I must be getting serious about this girl.

Caballine was a centaur he had bumped into at a gallery downtown. She was a researcher with PPTV by day and a sculptor by night. A very smart lady and she knew all about Foaly. Apparently Caballine was a big fan of the mood blanket, a multi-sensor massage and homeopathic garment designed by Foaly specifically for centaurs. So they talked about that for half an hour. One thing led to another, and now he found himself jogging with her every evening. Whenever there wasn't an emergency.

Which there is now! he reminded himself, turning his attention back to work.

The helmet was sitting next to the human computer keyboard, with its omni-sensor pointed directly at the hard drive.

Foaly stared at the hard drive and blinked three times, selecting it on the screen.

'Download all files from this and any networked computers,' instructed the centaur, and the helmet immediately began to suck information from the Apple Mac.

After several seconds, an animated bottle on the v-goggles screen was filled to the brim, and burped. Transfer completed. Now they could find out exactly how much information these humans had, and where they were getting it from. But there was still the matter of back-up files. This group could have burned their information on to' CDs, or even sent it by email or stored it on the Internet.

Foaly used the virtual keyboard to open a data charge folder and send a virus into the human computer. The charge would completely wipe any computers on the network, but before that it would run along any Internet pathways explored by these humans and completely burn the sites. Foaly would like to be a bit more delicate about it and just erase fairy-related files, but he couldn't afford to take chances with this mysterious group. The mere fact that they had avoided detection for so long was proof that they were not to be trifled with.

This was a major virus to lob into a human system. It would probably crash thousands of sites, including Google or Yahoo, but Foaly didn't see that he had a choice.

On Foaly's screen, the data charge appeared as a red flickering flame that chuckled nastily as it dived into the omni-sensor's data stream. In five minutes, the Paradizo's hard drives would be burned beyond repair.

And as an added bonus, the charge would also attach itself to any storage devices within the sensor's range that bore the network's signature. So any information stored on CDs or flashdrives would disintegrate as soon as someone tried to load them. It was potent stuff, and there wasn't a firewall or anti-virus that could stop it.

Artemis's voice issued from two gel speakers in jars on the desk, interrupting his concentration.

'There's a wall safe in the office. It's where Minerva keeps her notes.

You need to burn anything inside it.'

'Wall safe,' replied Foaly. 'Let's see.'

The centaur ran an X-ray scan on the room and found the safe behind a row of shelving. Given the time, he would like to scan all the contents, but he had a rendezvous to keep. He sent a concentrated laser beam the width of a length of fishing line into the belly of the safe, reducing the contents to ash. Hopefully he was destroying more than the family jewels.

The X-ray scan revealed nothing else promising so Foaly sent the helmet beads spinning, toppling Holly's helmet off the desk. In a display of keyboard virtuosity, Foaly used the laser to carve a section from the base of the office door while the helmet was in mid-air. In two choreographed bounces the helmet was through the section and into the corridor outside.

Foaly grinned, satisfied.

'Never even touched the wood,' he said.

The centaur called up a blueprint for the Chateau Paradizo and superimposed it over a grid on his screen. There were two dots on the grid. One was the helmet, and the other was Holly. It was time the two were reunited.

As he worked, Foaly unconsciously sang a verse of the Riverbend dirge.

'When my lucky numbers run out of luck, When I'm stuck in the hole I tumbled into. When my favourite dawg gets squashed by a truck, That's when I think me some thoughts of you.'

On the planet's surface, Artemis winced as the song twanged through his tiny phone and along his thumb.

'Please, Foaly,' he said in pained tones, 'I'm trying to negotiate on the other line.'

Foaly whinnied, surprised. He'd forgotten about Artemis.

'Some people ain't got no Riverbend in their souls,' he said, switching off his microphone.

Billy Kong decided that he'd have a little word with the new prisoner.

The female. If indeed she was female. How was he supposed to know for sure what class of a creature it was? It looked like a girl, but maybe demon girls weren't the same as human ones. So, Billy Kong thought he might ask it what exactly it was, among other things. If the creature decided not to answer, Kong didn't mind. There were ways to persuade people to talk. Asking them nicely was one way. Giving them candy was another. But Billy Kong preferred torture.