That personality chip must be corrupted, thought Foaly. I would never be so reckless, and I would absolutely never call anyone “dude.”
When the front door exploded, Caballine’s reaction was fury. Firstly because the house’s front door was antique rosewood and had been responsibly sourced from Brazil, and secondly because the door had been open and only a moron would feel the need to blow up something that was already ajar. Now the door would have to be reconstituted, and it would never be the same, even if they could find all the splinters.
Caballine stormed into the lobby to find a crazed goblin slithering into the house on all fours, smoke leaking from its flat nostrils, its lizardlike head thrashing from side to side as though there were a hornet in its skull.
“How dare you!” said Caballine, dealing the lizardlike creature a blow to the side of its head that literally knocked the goblin out of its skin, which it had been on the point of shedding.
Well, that was upsetting, she thought, believing the assault to be over, when a second goblin appeared in the blackened doorway, head weaving in the same disconcerting manner as the first. Two more began pawing at the window, and something began scrabbling inside the garbage disposal.
Don’t tell me. Another goblin.
Caballine turned her back on the goblin in the doorway and dealt him a double-barreled kick with her hind legs that knocked a puff of smoke from his open mouth and sent him flying backward over the boundary wall as though yanked by a bungee cord. She simultaneously punctured holes in the window with two lightning jabs of her bamboo, dislodging the goblins from a windowsill that had just been painted. Through the cracked pane she saw dozens of goblins converging on the property and felt something close to real panic.
I hope Foaly doesn’t come home, she thought, bending her knees in a fighter’s stance. I don’t think I can rescue us both.
Foaly rummaged around the van, looking for something, anything, that could save his beloved.
Even if I could call for help, he thought, everybody is up to their necks in one disaster or other. It’s up to me.
The van was a jumble of clutter, the shelves piled high with robot casings, specimen jars, incubators, power sources, and bionic body parts.
But no weapons. Not one single gun.
He found a jar of bio-hybrid eyes, which glared at him, and a specimen jar full of some kind of liquid specimen that he could not remember collecting.
“Any luck?” asked the nav-bot from a gel speaker adhered to a wall panel.
“Not yet,” said Foaly. “How long till we get there?”
“Two minutes,” replied the bot.
“Can’t you shave a minute off that time?”
“I could, if I run over a few pedestrians.”
Foaly considered it. “No. Better not. Wasn’t there a plasma cannon back here somewhere?”
“No. You donated that to the orphanage.”
Foaly did not waste time wondering why he would have donated a plasma cannon to an orphanage but instead kept digging through the junk in the van.
If I had an hour I could assemble something, but two minutes?
Fiber optics. Inside-outers. Voodoo mannequins. Cameras.
Nothing useful.
At the very back of the van Foaly found an old obsolete lithium-ion magic battery that he should have drained years ago. He patted the large cylinder fondly.
We set off the famous time-stop at Fowl Manor with a series of you guys.
Foaly froze. A time-stop!
He could set off a time-stop, and everyone inside would be stuck there until the battery ran out.
But time-stops required complicated calculations and precise vectors. You couldn’t set off a time-stop in the suburbs.
Normally, no. But these were not normal circumstances.
It would need to be concentrated. Almost pure magic, with a diameter no wider than the property itself.
“I see you looking at that magic battery,” said the nav-bot. “You’re not thinking of setting off a time-stop, are you, dude? You need a few dozen permits before you can do that.”
Foaly synched the battery’s timer with the nav computer, something Holly couldn’t have done in a million years.
“No,” he said. “I’m not setting it off. You are.”
Caballine’s hide was scorched and there were bite marks on her hind legs, but she would not allow herself to give up. More than a dozen goblins surrounded her now, gnashing the air, their eyeballs rolling wildly, being driven crazy by something. There were more on the roof, chewing their way through, and every window and door was a mass of wriggling bodies.
I never got to say good-bye, thought Caballine, determined to take down as many of these lizards as possible before they buried her under sheer numbers.
Good-bye, Foaly, I love you, she thought, hoping the sentiment would somehow reach him.
Then her husband crashed his van through the side of the house.
The nav-bot understood his instructions immediately.
“It’s an insane plan,” said the artificial intelligence. “But it’s what I would do.”