Bellico rallied her troops and hurried in pursuit, but none could match the troll’s pace except the hound, who latched on to Mulch’s back, trying to dislodge him.
Mulch was insulted that a dog would interfere in what was possibly the most valiant rescue attempt ever, so he locked its head in the crook of one elbow and shouted into the animal’s face.
“Give it up, Fido! I am invincible today. Look at me, riding a troll, for heaven’s sake. How often do you see that anymore? Never! That’s how often. Now, you have two seconds to back off, or I am going to have to eat you.”
Two seconds passed. The dog shook its head, refusing to back off, so Mulch ate him.
It was, he would later tell his fellow dwarf fugitive Barnet Riddles, proprietor of Miami’s Sozzled Parrot bar, a terrible waste to spit out half a dog, but it’s difficult to look heroic with a mutt’s hindquarters hanging out of yer mouth.
Seconds after the live hound disagreed with Mulch to his face, the dead dog disagreed with his stomach. It may have been the Berserker soul that caused the onset of indigestion, or it may have been something the dog ate before something ate him—either way, Mulch’s innards were suddenly cramped by a giant fist wearing a chain-mail glove.
“I gotta trim,” he said through gritted teeth.
If Gruff had realized what Mulch Diggums was about to do, he would have run screaming like a two-year-old pixette and buried himself underground till the storm had passed, but the troll did not speak grunted Dwarfish and so followed the last command given, which had been: Push downhill.
The solar plane picked up speed as it ran down the clay ramp with the Berserkers in quick pursuit.
“We are not going to make it,” said Artemis, checking the instruments. “The gear is shot.”
The runway’s end curved before them like the end of a gentle ski jump. If the plane went off with insufficient speed, it would simply plummet into the lake, and they would be sitting ducks alongside the actual ducks that were probably inhabited by Berserkers and would peck them to death. Artemis was almost reconciled to the fact that he was going to die in the immediate future, but he really did not want his skull to be fractured by the bill of a possessed mallard. In fact, Death by aggressive aquatic bird had just rocketed to number one on Artemis’s Least Favorite Ways to Die list, smashing the record-breaking dominance of Death by dwarf gas, which had haunted his dreams for years.
“Not ducks,” he said. “Please, not ducks. I was going to win the Nobel Prize.”
They could hear commotion from underneath the fuselage: animal grunting and buckling metal. If the plane did not take off soon, it was going to be shaken to pieces. This was not a strong craft, stripped back as it was to increase the power-to-weight ratio necessary for sustainable flight.
Outside the solar plane, Mulch’s entire body was twisted in a cramped treeroot of pain. He knew what was going to happen. His body was about to react to a combination of stress, bad diet, and gas buildup by instantaneously jettisoning up to a third of his own body weight. Some more disciplined dwarf yogis can invoke this procedure at will and refer to it as the Once a Decade Detox, but for ordinary dwarfs it goes by the name Trimming the Weight. And you do not want to be in the line of fire when the weight is being trimmed.
The plane reached the bottom of the slope with barely enough momentum to clear the ramp.
Water landing, thought Artemis. Death by ducks.
Then something occurred. A boost of power came from somewhere. It was as if a giant forefinger had flicked the plane forward into the air. The tail rose, and Artemis fought the pedals to keep it down.
How is this happening? Artemis wondered, staring befuddled at the controls, until Holly punched his shoulder for the second time in as many minutes.
“Air start!” she yelled.
Artemis sat bolt upright. Air start! Of course.
The solar plane had a small engine to get the craft off the ground, and after that the solar panels kicked in; but without a battery the engine could not even turn over, unless Artemis hit the throttle at the right time, before the plane began to lose momentum. This might buy them enough time to catch a thermal for a couple of hundred feet, enough to clear the lake and outfly the arrows.
Artemis waited until he sensed the plane was at the apex of its rise, then opened the throttle wide.
Bellico and her remaining troops ran hell-for-leather down the runway, hurling any missiles in their arsenal after the plane. It was a bizarre situation to be involved in, even for a resurrected spirit occupying a human body.
I am chasing a plane being pushed down a runway by a troll-riding dwarf, she thought. Unbelievable.
But nevertheless it was true, and she’d best believe it, or her quarry would escape.
They cannot go far.
Unless the vehicle flew as it was designed to.
It won’t fly. We have destroyed the battery.