Juliet crept, panther-like, down the corridor, her footfalls muffled by the carpet. On reaching the final corner she lay flat and inched her nose round the bend. She could see the floor’s security station. Just as Pex had revealed under the mesmer, the vault guard’s oxygen canisters were slotted in a rack in front of the desk.
There was only one guard on duty, and he was busy watching basketball on a portable television. Juliet moved forward on her stomach until she was directly below the rack. The guard had his back to her, concentrating on the game.
‘What the hell?’ exclaimed the security man, who was roughly the size of a refrigerator. He had noticed something in a security monitor.
‘Move!’ hissed Foaly in Juliet’s earpiece.
‘What?’
‘Move! You’re showing up on the monitors.’
Juliet wiggled her toe. She had forgotten to keep moving. Butler would never have forgotten that.
Over her head, the guard employed the age-old method of rapid repair, slapping the monitor’s plastic casing. The fuzzy figure disappeared.
‘Interference,’ he muttered. ‘Stupid satellite TV.’
Juliet felt a bead of sweat run along the bridge of her nose. The younger Butler reached up slowly and slipped two substitute oxygen canisters into the rack. Although ‘oxygen canisters’ was a bit of a misnomer, because it wasn’t oxygen in these canisters.
She checked her watch. It might already be too late.
TEAM TWO, ABOVE THE SPIRO NEEDLE
Holly hovered six metres above the Needle, waiting for the green light. She was not comfortable with this operation. There were too many variables. If this mission weren’t so vital to the future of the fairy civilization, she would have refused to participate in it altogether.
Her mood did not improve as the night progressed. Team One was proving extremely unprofessional, bickering like a pair of adolescents. Although, to be fair to Juliet, she was barely beyond adolescence. Mulch, on the other hand, couldn’t find his childhood with an encyclopaedia.
Captain Short followed their progress on her helmet visor, wincing at each new development. Finally, and against all the odds, Juliet managed to switch the canisters.
‘Go,’ said Mulch, doing his best to sound military. ‘I say again, we have a go situation on the black op. code red thing.’
Holly shut off Mulch’s communication in the middle of the dwarf’s giggling fit. Foaly could open a screen in her visor if there was a crisis.
Below her the Spiro Needle pointed spacewards like the world’s biggest rocket. Low fog gathered around its base, adding to the illusion. Holly set her wings to descend, dropping gently towards the helipad. She called up the video file of Artemis’s entry to the Needle on her visor and slowed it down at the point where Spiro keyed in the access code for the rooftop door.
‘Thank you, Spiro,’ she said, grinning, as she punched in the code.
The door slid open pneumatically. Automatic lights flickered into life along the stairwell. There was a camera every six metres. No blind spots. This didn’t matter to Holly, as human cameras could not detect a shielded fairy – unless they were of the type with an extremely high frame-per-second rate. And even then, the frames had to be viewed as stills to catch a glimpse of the fairy folk. Only one human had ever managed to do this. An Irish one, who was twelve years old at the time.
Holly floated down the stairwell, activating an Argon laser filter on her visor. This entire building could be crisscrossed with laser beams and she wouldn’t know it until she set off an alarm. Even a shielded fairy had mass enough to stop a beam reaching its sensor, if only for a millisecond. The view before her turned a cloudy purple, but there were no beams. She was certain that wouldn’t be the case when they came to the vault.
Holly continued her flight to the brushed-steel lift doors.
‘Artemis is on eighty-four,’ said Foaly. ‘The vault is on eighty-five; Spiro’s penthouse is on eighty-six, where we are now.’
‘How are the walls?’
‘According to the spectrometer, mostly plaster and wood in the partition walls. Except round key rooms, which are reinforced steel.’
‘Let me guess: Artemis’s room, the vault and Spiro’s penthouse.’
‘Dead on, Captain. But do not despair. I have plotted the shortest course. I am sending it to your helmet now.’
Holly waited a moment until a quill icon flashed in the corner of her visor, informing her that she had mail.
‘Open mail,’ she said into the helmet mike, enunciating clearly. A matrix of green lines superimposed themselves in front of her regular vision. Her trail was marked by a thick red line.
‘Follow the laser, Holly. Foolproof. No offence.’
‘None taken, for now. But if this doesn’t work, I’ll be so offended you won’t believe it.’
The red laser led straight into the belly of the lift. Holly floated into the metal box and descended to the eighty-fifth floor. The guiding laser led her out of the lift and down the corridor.
She tried the door to an office on her left. Locked. Hardly surprising.
‘I’m going to have to unshield to pick this lock. Are you sure my pattern is wiped from the video?’