Holly hovered twenty feet above the Needle, waiting for the green light. She was not comfortable with this operation. There were too many variables. If this mission wasn’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 have found his childhood with an encyclopedia.
Captain Short followed team one’s 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 spaceward like the world’s biggest rocket. Low fog gathered around its base, adding to the illusion. Holly set her wings to descend, dropping gently toward 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 ccess code for the rooftop door.
“Thank you, Spiro,” she grinned, punching in the key.
The door slid open silently. Automatic lights flickered into life along the stairwell. There was a camera every twenty feet. 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 had been 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 elevator doors.
“Artemis is on eighty-four,” said Foaly. “The vault is on eighty-five, and Spiro’s penthouse is on eighty-six, where we are now.”
“How are the walls?”
“According to the spectrometer, mostly Sheetrock, steel studs, and wood paneling in the partition walls.
Except around 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 offense.”
“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 elevator. Holly floated into the metal box and descended to the eighty-fifth floor. The guiding laser led her out of the elevator 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?”
“Of course,” said Foaly. Holly could imagine the childish pout on his lips.
Holly unshielded and took an omnitool from her belt. The omnitool’s sensor would send an X-ray of the lock’s workings to the chip and select the right bit. It even did the turning. Of course, the omnitool only worked on keyhole locks, which, in spite of their unreliability, the Mud Men still used.
In less than five seconds, the door lay open before her.
“Five seconds,” said Holly. “This thing needs a new battery.”
The red line in her visor ran to the office’s center, and then took a right-angle turn downward through the floor.
“Let me guess. Artemis is down there.”
“Yes. Asleep, judging by the pictures coming in on his iris-cam.”
“You said the cell was lined with reinforced steel.”
“True. But no motion sensors in the walls or roof. So all you have to do is burn through.”
Holly drew her Neutrino 2000. “Oh, is that all?”
She chose a spot adjacent to a wall air conditioner and peeled back the carpet. Underneath the floor was dull and metallic.
“No trace, remember?” said Foaly in her earpiece. “That’s vital.”