“Good,” said Foaly, settling himself into the passenger seat harness. “Because you’ll be doing it.”
“I love you, dude,” said the little bot, a gelatinous tear rolling down its cheek.
“Calm down, program,” said Foaly. “I’ll see you in a minute.”
Caballine didn’t really understand what happened next until her mind had time to flick through the images. Her husband’s work van jackknifed into the house, swatting half a dozen goblins. The driver’s door was open with its harness extended, and Caballine did not have time to register this before she was scooped up, backward, and dumped facedown into the hindquarter’s cradle.
“Hi, honey,” said Foaly, an attempt at jauntiness that was belied by the nervous sweat on his brow.
The van’s conduit section was torn asunder as the rear section braked and the front careened on through the opposite wall.
“My house!” said Caballine into the padded seating, as masonry thunked against the doors and sparks fizzled on the windshield.
Foaly had intended to manually steer the front section to a gradual halt a safe distance from the house, but battered vehicles are unpredictable, and this one insisted on flipping onto its side and skidding into the yard, dipping its wheel into the family compost heap, which contained several of Foaly’s ancestors.
The goblins were flummoxed for a moment; then their poor tortured senses picked up the hated sonic signature on Caballine’s hand, and their heads turned toward the van’s front section. There were so many goblins on the house now that it resembled one giant, green-scaled creature. Each goblin inflated its chest to hurl a fireball.
“Nice rescue. Shame it wasn’t a total success,” said Caballine. “But I appreciate the gesture.”
Foaly helped her up. “Wait for it,” he said.
Before a single fireball could be launched, a bolt of blue magic burst through the rear section of the van, shot twenty feet straight up, then mushroomed into a hemisphere of gelatinous ectoplasm that dropped neatly over the Foaly residence.
“I take it back,” said Caballine. “That was a spectacular rescue.”
Foaly had just sealed Caballine’s hand inside a hazmat glove and assured the assembled neighbors that the emergency was past when the time-stop fizzled out, revealing a large group of docile goblins.
“Foaly!” shouted Caballine. “The blue force field is dead.”
“Don’t worry,” said Foaly. “Your hand was driving them crazy, but I smothered the signal. We’re safe now.”
Caballine shielded her husband with her own body as the goblins wandered, dazed, from the ruins of her house. “They’re still criminals, Foaly.”
“They’ve done their time,” said Foaly. “That was a concentrated time-stop. Almost a hundred percent pure. Five seconds for us was five years for them.”
“So they’re rehabilitated?” asked Caballine.
Foaly picked his way around the small fires and piles of rubble that were all that was left of his family home.
“As rehabilitated as they’ll ever be,” he said, guiding confused goblins toward the remaining posts of his front gate. “Go home,” he told them. “Go to your families.”
There wasn’t much left of the van’s rear section, just the bones of a chassis and some mangled tread. Foaly poked his head inside the door frame and a voice said:
“Dude, I’ve missed you. It’s been a long time. How did we do?”
Foaly smiled and patted a coms box. “We did good,” he said, and then added, “Dude.”
Fowl Manor
Myles had grown suddenly exhausted after his ordeal with Gobdaw and was tucked into bed with his laminated copy of the periodic table clutched to his chest.
“Possession can take a lot out of a person,” said Holly. “Believe me, I know. He’ll be fine in the morning.”
The three sat around Artemis’s desk like a war council, which in a very real way they were.
Butler took inventory. “We have two fighters and no weapons.”
Artemis felt he should object. “I can fight if need be,” he said, not even convincing himself.
“We have to presume the worst about Mulch,” continued Butler, ignoring Artemis’s limp objection. “Though he does have a way of spectacularly cheating death.”
“What’s our objective, specifically?” asked Holly. This question was directed at Artemis, the planner.
“The Berserker Gate. We need to shut it down.”
“What are we going to do? Write a harsh letter?”
“Normal weapons won’t penetrate Opal’s magic; in fact, she would absorb the energy. But if we had a super-laser, it might be enough to overload the gate. It would be like putting out a fire with an explosion.”
Holly patted her pockets. “Well, what do you know? I seem to have left my super-laser in another pocket.”
“Even you can’t build a super-laser in an hour,” said Butler, wondering why Artemis was even bringing this up.
For some reason, Artemis looked suddenly guilty. “I might know where there is one.”
“And where would that be, Artemis?”