“You need to find a way out, Holly.”
Holly almost giggled. Driving the Cupid out of here would mean willfully destroying an entire LEP installation. She would not just be tearing up the rulebook; she would be shredding the pages, then mixing them with troll dung, baking the concoction, and tossing the biscuits on a campfire.
“Dung biscuits,” she muttered, which made no sense if you didn’t know her train of thought.
“You may be making dung biscuits of the rulebook,” said Artemis, who could apparently track trains of thought, “but Opal must be stopped for all our sakes.”
Holly hesitated.
Artemis capitalized on her hesitation. “Holly. These are extraordinary circumstances,” he said urgently. “Do you remember Butler’s phrase? Kill box. That’s where my brothers are at this moment. In the kill box. And you know how much Juliet will sacrifice to save them.”
Butler leaned forward, grasping a hanging hand-grip loop and pulling it from its housing in the process.
“Think tactically,” he said, instinctively knowing how to galvanize the fairy captain. “We need to proceed under the assumption that we are the only small force standing between Opal and whatever form of world domination her twisted mind has cooked up in solitary. And remember, she was prepared to sacrifice herself. She planned for it. We need to go. Now, soldier!”
Butler was right, and Holly knew it.
“Okay,” she said, punching parameters into the Cupid’s route finder. “You asked for it.”
A sprite in a hi-vis jacket was flying down the access tunnel, wings tapping the curved walls in his haste. Sprite wing tips were sensitive bio-sonar sensors that took decades to heal, so the sprite must have been in some considerable distress for such reckless flight.
Holly moaned. “It’s Nander Thall. Mister By-the-Book.”
Thall was paranoid that the humans would somehow contaminate Haven on the way in, or steal something on the way out, so he insisted on full scans every time the Cupid docked.
“Just go,” Butler urged. “We don’t have time for Thall’s regulations.”
Nander Thall hollered at them through a megaphone. “Power down, Captain Short. What in Frond’s name do you think you are doing? I knew you were a wild card, Short. I knew it. Unstable.”
“No time,” said Artemis. “No time.”
Thall hovered two feet from the windshield. “I’m a-looking in your eyeball, Short, and I see chaos. We’re in lockdown here. The shield has failed, do you understand that? All it would take is some Mud Man with a shovel to unearth the entire shuttleport. It’s all hands to the fortifications, Short. Power down. I’m giving you a direct order.”
Nander Thall’s eyes bulged in their sockets like goose eggs, and his wings beat erratically. This was a sprite on the edge.
“Do you think if we ask for permission, he will let us go in time?” said Artemis.
Holly doubted it. The access tunnel stretched out behind Thall, passengers huddled nervously in the pools of light cast by emergency beacons. The situation would be difficult enough to contain without her driving up the panic levels.
The onboard computer beeped, displaying the optimum escape route on the screen, and it was this beep that spurred Holly.
“Sorry,” she mouthed at Nander Thall. “Gotta go.”
Thall’s wings beat with nervous rapidity. “Don’t you mouth Sorry at me! And you do not gotta go anywhere.”
But Holly was sorry and she did gotta go. So she went. Straight up toward the luggage conveyor, which generally trundled overhead, luggage floating along on a transparent smart-water canal that displayed the identity of the owner through the Plexiglas. Now the conveyor canal was stagnant, and the suitcases bumped each other like abandoned skiffs.
Holly nudged the joystick with one thumb, settling the Cupid into the canal, which the computer assured her was wide enough to accommodate the vehicle. It was, with barely an inch to spare on each side of the wheel arches.
Incredibly, Nander Thall was in pursuit. He bobbed alongside the canal, his comb-over blown back like a windsock, shouting into his little megaphone.
Holly shrugged theatrically. “Can’t hear you,” she mouthed. “Sorry.”
And she left the sprite swearing at the baggage tunnel, which flowed in gentle sloped circles toward the Arrivals hall.
Holly piloted the Cupid along the tunnel’s curves, guided by twin headlights that revealed Plexiglas walls embedded with miles of dead circuitry. Dim shapes could be seen beavering at circuit boxes, stripping out smoking capacitors and fuses.
“Dwarfs,” said Holly. “They make the best electricians. No lighting required, and small dark spaces a bonus. Plus, they eat the dead components.”
“Seriously?” wondered Butler.