The Arctic Incident

“Oh,” said Luc Carrère blearily.

“Some friends of mine are coming to visit you. And I want you to take their picture. It’s just a game we play.”

“How will I know your friends?” asked Luc. “A lot of people visit me.”

“They will ask about the batteries. If they ask about the batteries, then you take their picture.”

“Sure. Great.” And it was great. Because the voice would never make him do anything wrong. The voice was his friend.





E37 Shuttleport


Holly steered the slammer through the chute’s final section. A proximity sensor in the shuttle’s nose set off the landing lights.

“Hmm,” muttered Holly.

Artemis squinted through the quartz windshield.

“A problem?”

“No. It’s just that those lights shouldn’t be working. There hasn’t been a power source in the terminal since the last century.”

“Our goblin friends, no doubt.”

Holly frowned. “Doubtful. It takes half a dozen goblins to turn on a glow cube. Wiring a shuttleport takes real know-how. Elfin know-how.”

“The plot thickens,” said Artemis. If he’d had a beard, he would have stroked it. “I smell a traitor. Now who would have access to all this technology, and a motive for selling it?”

Holly pointed the shuttle’s cone toward the landing nodes.

“We’ll find out soon enough. You just get me a live trader, and my mesmer will soon have him spilling his guts.”

The shuttle docked with a pneumatic hiss as the bay’s rubber collar formed an airtight seal against the outer hull. Butler was out of his chair before the seat belt light winked off, ready for action.

“Just don’t kill anyone,” warned Holly. “That’s not how the LEP like to operate. Anyway, dead Mud Men don’t rat on their partners.” She brought up a schematic on the wall screen. It depicted Paris’s old city. “Okay,” she said, pointing to a bridge across the Seine. “We’re here. Under this bridge, two hundred feet from Notre Dame. That’s the cathedral, not the football team. The dock is disguised as a bridge support. Stand in the doorway until I give you a green light. We have to be careful here. The last thing we need is some Parisian seeing you emerge from a brick wall.”

“You’re not accompanying us?” asked Artemis.

“Orders,” said Holly, scowling. “Apparently this could be a trap. Who knows what hardware is pointed at the terminal door? Lucky for you, you’re expendable. Irish tourists on holiday, you’ll fit right in.”

“Lucky us. What leads do we have?”

Holly slid a disk into the console. “Foaly stuck his Retimager on the goblin prisoner. Apparently he has seen this human.”

The captain brought up a mug shot on the screen.

“Foaly got a match on his Interpol files. Luc Carrère. Disbarred attorney, does a bit of P.I. work.”

She printed off a card. “Here’s his address. He just moved to a swanky new apartment. It could be nothing, but at least we have somewhere to start. I need you to immobilize him, and show him this.” Holly handed the bodyguard what looked like a diver’s watch.

“What is it?” asked the manservant.

“Just a com-screen. You just put it in front of Carrère’s face and I can mesmerize the truth out of him from down here. It also contains one of Foaly’s doodads. A personal shield. The Safetynet. A prototype, you’ll be delighted to know. You can have the honor of testing it. Touch the screen, and the micro reactor generates a six-foot diameter sphere of tri-phased light. No good for solids, but laser bursts or concussion shocks are okay.”

“Hmm,” said Butler doubtfully. “We don’t get a lot of laser bursts aboveground.”

“Hey, don’t use it. Do I care?”

Butler studied the tiny instrument. “Six-foot radius? What about the bits that are sticking out?”

Holly thumped the manservant playfully in the stomach.

“My advice to you, big man, is to curl up in a ball.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” said Butler, cinching the strap around his wrist. “You two try not to kill each other while I’m gone.”

Artemis was surprised. It didn’t happen very often.

“While you’re gone? Surely, you don’t expect me to stay behind.”

Butler tapped his forehead.

“Don’t worry, you’ll see everything on the iris-cam.”

Artemis fumed for several moments, before settling into a passenger chair.

“I know. I would only slow you down, and that in turn would slow down the search for my father.”

“Of course, if you insist . . .”

“No. This is no time for childishness.”

Butler smiled gently. Childishness was one thing Master Artemis was hardly likely to be accused of.

“How long do I have?”