“What can we do?”
“I need to keep us up here in the air lanes with all the human traffic. We stay subsonic and don’t draw attention to ourselves. Then at the last moment we make a break for Fowl Manor. It won’t matter if Opal sees us then, because by the time she catches us, we’ll be back in the time stream.”
Mulch Diggums poked his head through from the mail box. “Nothing much in here. A few gold coins. What say I keep them? And did I hear someone mention Opal Koboi?”
“Don’t worry about it. Everything is under control.”
Mulch guffawed. “Under control? Like Rathdown Park was under control. Like the leather souk was under control.”
“You’re not seeing us at our best,” Artemis admitted. “But in time you will come to respect Captain Short and me.”
Mulch’s expression doubted it. “I’d better go and look up respect in the dictionary, because it mustn’t mean what I think it means, eh, Jayjay?”
The lemur clapped his delicate hands and chattered with what sounded like laughter.
“It looks like you’ve found an intellectual equal, Mulch,” said Holly, returning to her instruments. “It’s a pity he isn’t a girl; then you could marry him.”
Mulch imitated shock. “Romance outside your species. Now that’s disgusting. What kind of weirdo would kiss someone when they weren’t even part of the same species?”
Artemis massaged his suddenly pounding temples.
It’s a long way to Tipperary, he thought. And then a few more miles to Dublin.
“A shuttle?” said Opal. “A fairy shuttle?”
The Koboi craft was hovering at an altitude of thirty miles, tipping the border of space. Starlight winked on the hull of their matte-black shuttle, and the earth hung below them wearing a stole of clouds.
“That’s what the sensors show,” said Mervall. “An old mining model. Not much under the hood, and zero firepower. We should be able to catch it.”
“Should?” said Opal, stretching an ankle to admire her new red boots. “Why should?”
“Well, we had her for a while. Then she went subsonic. I would guess their pilot is riding the human flight lanes until they feel safe.”
Opal smiled devilishly. She liked a challenge.
“Okay, let’s give ourselves every advantage. We have the speed and we have the weapons. All we need is to point ourselves in the right direction.”
“What an incrediferous idea.” Descant smirked.
Opal was pained. “Please, Descant. Use short words. Don’t force me to vaporize you.”
This was a hollow threat, as Opal had not been able to produce so much as a spark since the compound. She still had the basics—mind control, levitation, that kind of thing—but she would need some serious bed rest before she could muster a lightning bolt. The Brills did not need to know that, though.
“Here’s my idea. I ran the lab tapes through voice recognition and got a regional match. Whoever that Mud Boy is, he lives in central Ireland. Probably Dublin. I want you to get us down there as fast as you can, Descant, and when that mining shuttle drops out of the air lanes”— Opal closed her tiny fingers around an imaginary ant, squeezing the blood from its body—“We will be waiting.”
“Fabulicious,” said Descant.
Fowl Manor, Dublin, Ireland
The sun had risen and was sinking again by the time Holly had dragged the spluttering shuttle over the Fowl Estate wall.
“We’re close to the deadline, and this piece of junk is close to dead,” she said to Artemis. Holly placed a hand on her heart. “I can feel No1’s spark dying inside, but there’s still time.”
Artemis nodded. The sight of the manor somehow made his mother’s plight seem even more urgent.
I have to go home.
“Well done, Holly. You did it. Set us down in the rear courtyard. We can access the house by the kitchen door.”
Holly pressed a few buttons. “Around the back it is. Scanning for alarms. Found two and a sneaky third. Motion sensors, if I’m not mistaken. Only one alarm is being remotely monitored, and the other two are self-contained. Should I disable the remote alarm?”
“Yes, Holly, please disable the alarm. Anybody home?”
Holly checked the thermal imaging. “One warm body. Top floor.”
Artemis sighed, relieved. “Good. Just Mother. She will have taken her sleeping tablets by now. Little me can’t be back yet.”
Holly set the shuttle down as gently as she could, but the gears were stripped and the suspension bags were drained. There were dents in the stabilizers, and the gyroscope was spinning like a weather vane. The landing gear stripped a channel of cobblestones from the courtyard surface, tumbling them like bricks of turf before the plow.
Artemis gathered Jayjay in his arms.
“Are you ready for more adventures, little man?”
The lemur’s round eyes were filled with anxiety, and he looked to Mulch for reassurance.