Butler was lying in an open cryo unit, with its own gyroscopes. He had been dressed in a special silver freezer suit, and cold packs were heaped on his body like sachets of sugar in a bowl.
Constance was unaccustomed to people actually paying attention when she explained the process, but this pale youth absorbed facts faster than she could present them.
‘Won’t the water freeze anyway? Glucose can’t prevent that.’
Constance was impressed. ‘Why, yes it will. But in small pieces, so it can float safely between cells.’
Artemis jotted a note in his hand-held computer. ‘Small pieces, I understand.’
‘The glucose is only a temporary measure,’ continued the doctor. ‘The next step is surgery; we need to completely wash out his veins, and replace the blood with a preservative. Then we can lower the patient’s temperature to minus thirty degrees. We’ll have to do that back at the institute.’
Artemis shut down his computer. ‘No need for that. I just need him held in stasis for a few hours. After that it won’t make any difference.’
‘I don’t think you understand, young man,’ said Doctor Lane. ‘Current medical practices have not evolved to the point where this kind of injury can be healed. If I don’t do a complete blood substitution soon, there will be severe tissue damage.’
The van jolted as a wheel crashed into one of London’s numerous potholes. Butler’s arm jerked and, for a moment, Artemis could pretend he was alive.
‘Don’t worry about that, Doctor.’
‘But…’
‘A hundred thousand pounds, Constance. Just keep repeating that figure to yourself. Park the mobile unit outside and forget all about us. In the morning we’ll be gone. Both of us.’
Doctor Lane was surprised.
‘Park outside? You don’t even want to come in?’
‘No, Butler stays outside,’ said Artemis. ‘My… ah… surgeon, has a problem with dwellings. But may I enter for a moment to use your phone? I need to make a rather special phone call.’
LONDON AIRSPACE
The lights of London were spread out below Holly like the stars of some turbulent galaxy. England’s capital was generally a no-fly area for Recon officers, because of the four airports feeding planes into the sky. Five years ago, Captain Trouble Kelp had narrowly missed being impaled by a Heathrow—JFK airbus. Since then, all flight plans involving airport cities had to be cleared personally by Foaly.
Holly spoke into her helmet mike.
‘Foaly. Any flights coming in I should know about?’
‘Let me just bring up the radar. OK, let’s see. I’d drop down to five hundred feet if I were you. There’s a 747 coming in from Malaga in a couple of minutes. It won’t hit you, but your helmet computer could interfere with its navigation systems.’
Holly dipped her flaps until she was at the correct altitude. Overhead, the giant jet screamed across the sky. If it hadn’t been for Holly’s sonic filter sponges, both her eardrums would have popped.
‘OK. One jet full of tourists successfully avoided. What now?’
‘Now we wait. I won’t call again unless it’s important.’
They didn’t have to wait long. Less than five minutes later Foaly broke radio silence.
‘Holly. We got something.’
‘Another probe?’
‘No. Something from Sentinel. Hold on, I’m sending the file to your helmet.’
A sound file appeared in Holly’s visor. Its wave resembled a seismograph’s readout.
‘What is it, a phone tap?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Foaly. ‘It’s one of a billion throwaway files that Sentinel sends us every day.’
The Sentinel system was a series of monitoring units that Foaly had piggybacked to obsolete US and Russian satellites. Their function was to monitor all human telecommunications. Obviously, it would be impossible to review every phone call made each day. So the computer was programmed to pick up on certain key words. If, for example, the words ‘fairy’, ‘haven’ and ‘underground’ appeared in a conversation, the computer would flag the call. The more People-related phrases that appeared, the more urgent the rating.
‘This call was made in London minutes ago. It’s loaded with keywords. I’ve never heard anything like it.’
‘Play,’ said Holly clearly, using voice command. A vertical line cursor began scrolling across the sound wave.
‘People,’ said a voice, hazy with distortion. ‘LEP, magic, Haven, shuttle ports, sprites, B’wa Kell, trolls, time-stop, Recon, Atlantis.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s not enough? Whoever made that call could be writing our biography.’
‘But it’s just a string of words. It makes no sense.’
‘Hey, there’s no point arguing with me,’ said the centaur. ‘I just collect information. But there has to be a connection to the probe. Two things like this don’t just happen on the same day.’
‘OK. Do we have an exact location?’
‘The call came from a cryogenics institute in London. Sentinel quality is not enough to run a voice-recognition scan. We just know it came from inside the building.’
‘Who was our mystery Mud Man calling?’