The Time Paradox

He was tempted, for the merest fraction of a moment, just to flee, but he didn’t.

 

Have I changed utterly? Artemis asked himself. He realized that he was running out of palatable crimes. Not so long ago, nearly all crime had been acceptable to him.

 

No, he decided. There were still people who deserved to be stolen from, or exposed, or dropped in the deep jungle with only flip-flops and a spoon. He would just have to put more effort into finding them.

 

Artemis activated the wing cameras. There was one such person on the avenue below. A megalomaniacal, cold-hearted pixie. Opal Koboi. Artemis could see her striding toward the manor, jamming Holly’s helmet down over her ears.

 

I was afraid of that. She thought to take the helmet. A most valuable tool.

 

Still, he had no alternative but to attract her attention. The lives of his family and friends were at stake. Artemis took the Cessna down a hundred feet, following Opal’s path to the manor. She may not hear the engine, but the sensors in Holly’s helmet would throw up a dozen red lights.

 

On cue, Opal stopped in her tracks, throwing her gaze skyward and capturing the small plane in her sights.

 

Come on, Opal, thought Artemis. Take the bait. Run a thermal.

 

Opal strode purposefully toward the manor until she snagged the toe of one LEP boot under the heel of another.

 

Stupid tall elf, she thought furiously, righting herself. When I am queen . . . No . . . when I am empress, all tall fairies will have their legs modified. Or better still, I will have a human pituitary gland grafted to my brain so that I shall be the tall one. A giant among fairies, physically and mentally.

 

She had other plans too: An Opalesque cosmetic face mold that could give any of her adoring fans the Koboi look in seconds. A homeopathic hoverchair covered in massage bars and mood sensors that would read her humor and spray whatever scents were needed to cheer her up.

 

But those plans could wait until she was empress. For now the lemur was her priority. Without its brain fluid, it could take years to accomplish her plans. Plus, magic was so much easier than science.

 

Opal slotted Holly’s helmet onto her head. Pads inside the helmet automatically inflated to cradle her skull. There was some coded security, which she contemptuously hacked with a series of blinks and hand movements. These LEP helmets were not half as advanced as the models in her R&D department.

 

Once the helmet’s functions were open to her, the visor’s display crystals fizzled and turned scarlet. Red alert! Something was closing in. A 3-D radar sweep revealed a small craft overhead, and recognition software quickly pegged it as a human-built Cessna.

 

She quickly selected the command sequence for a thermal scan, and the helmet infrared detector analyzed the electromagnetic radiation coming from inside the aircraft. There was some waffle from the solar panels, but the scan isolated an orange blob in the pilot’s seat. One passenger only. The helmet’s biometric reader conveniently identified the pilot as Artemis Fowl, and dropped a 3-D icon over his fuzzy figure.

 

“One passenger,” murmured Opal. “Are you trying to decoy me away from the house, Artemis Fowl? Is that why you fly so low?”

 

But Artemis Fowl knew technology; he would anticipate thermal imaging.

 

“What do you have up your sleeve?” wondered the pixie. “Or perhaps up your shirt.”

 

She magnified Artemis’s heart and discovered a second heat source superimposed over the first, distinguishable only by a slightly cooler shade of red.

 

Even at that desperate moment, Opal could not help but admire this young human, who had attempted to mask the lemur’s heat signature with his own.

 

“Clever. But not ingenious.”

 

And he would need to be ingenious to defeat Opal Koboi. Bringing back the second Artemis had been a neat trick, but she should have caught it.

 

I was defeated by my own arrogance, she realized. That will not happen again.

 

The helmet automatically tuned into the Cessna’s radio frequency, and so Opal sent Artemis a little message.

 

“I am coming for the lemur, boy,” she said, a pulse of magic setting the suit’s wings aflutter. “And this time there will be no you to save you.”

 

Artemis could not feel or see the various waves that probed the Cessna, but he guessed that Opal would use the helmet’s thermal imager to see how many hot bodies were on the plane. Perhaps she would try X-ray too. It would seem as though he was trying to hide Jayjay’s heat signature with his own, but that was a transparent ploy and should not fool Opal for more than a heartbeat. When the pixie was satisfied that her prize was escaping, then how could she not follow?

 

Artemis banked starboard to keep Opal in the camera eye, and was satisfied to see a set of wings sliding from the slots in Holly’s suit.

 

The chase is on.

 

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