The Last Guardian

“Unknown.”

  They hurried down the retro corridor toward the clinic’s courtyard. Butler outstripped the group and held open the old-fashioned hinged door with its stained window depicting a thoughtful doctor comforting a weeping patient.

  “Are we taking the Stick?” asked the bodyguard, his tone suggesting that he would rather not take the Stick.

  Holly walked through the doorway. “Sorry, big man. Stick time.”

  Artemis had never been one for public transport, human or fairy, and so asked, “What’s the stick?”

  The Stick was the street name for a series of conveyor belts that ran in parallel strips along Haven City’s network of blocks. It was an ancient and reliable mode of transport from a less litigious time, which operated on a hop-on/hop-off basis similar to certain human airport-walkway systems. There were platforms throughout the city, and all a person had to do was step onto a belt and grab hold of one of the carbon-fiber stalks that sprouted from it. Hence the name Stick.

  Artemis and Butler had of course seen the Stick before, but Artemis had never planned to use such an undignified mode of transport and so had never even bothered to find out its name. Artemis knew that, with his famous lack of coordination, any attempt to hop casually onto the belt would result in a humiliating tumble. For Butler, the problem was not one of coordination or lack of it. He knew that, with his bulk, it would be difficult just to fit his feet within the belt’s width.

  “Ah, yes,” said Artemis. “The Stick. Surely a green cab would be faster?”

  “Nope,” said Holly, hustling Artemis up the ramp to the platform, then poking him in the kidneys at just the right time so that he stepped unconsciously onto the belt, his hand landing on a stick’s bulbous grip.

  “Hey,” said Artemis, perhaps the third time in his life he had used a slang expletive. “I did it.”

  “Next stop, the Olympics,” said Holly, who had mounted the belt behind him. “Come on, bodyguard,” she called over her shoulder to Butler. “Your principal is heading toward a tunnel.”

  Butler shot the elf a look that would have cowed a bull. Holly was a dear friend, but her teasing could be relentless. He tiptoed onto the belt, squeezing his enormous feet onto a single section and bending his knees to grasp the tiny stick. In silhouette, he looked like the world’s bulkiest ballerina attempting to pluck a flower.

  Holly might have grinned had Opal Koboi not been on her mind.

  The Stick belt trundled its passengers from the Argon Clinic along the border of an Italian-style piazza toward a low tunnel, which had been laser-cut from solid rock. Fairies lunching alfresco froze with forkfuls of salad halfway to their mouths as the unlikely trio passed by.

  The sight of a jumpsuit-clad LEP officer was common enough on a Stick belt, but a gangly human boy dressed like an undertaker and a troll-sized, buzz-cut man-mountain were quite unusual.

  The tunnel was barely three feet high, so Butler was forced to prostrate himself over three sections, flattening several handgrips in the process. His nose was no more than a few feet from the tunnel wall, which he noticed was engraved with beautiful luminous pictograms depicting episodes from the People’s history.

  So the young fairies can learn something about their own heritage each time they pass through. How wonderful, thought Butler; but he suppressed his admiration, as he had long ago disciplined his brain to concentrate on bodyguard duties and not waste neurons being amazed while he was belowground.

  Save it for retirement, he thought. Then you can cast your mind back and appreciate art.

  Police Plaza was a cobbled crest into which the shape of the Lower Elements Police acorn insignia had been painstakingly paved by master craftsmen. It was a total waste of effort as far as the LEP officers were concerned, as they were not generally the type who were inclined to gaze out of the fourth-floor windows and marvel at how the sim-sunlight caught the rim of each gold-leafed cobble and set the whole arrangement a-twinkling.

  On this particular day it seemed that everyone on the fourth floor had slid from their cubicles like pebbles on a tilted surface and gathered in a tight cluster by the Situation room, which adjoined Foaly’s office/laboratory.

  Holly made directly for the narrowest section of the throng and used sharp elbows to inch through the strangely silent crowd. Butler simply cleared his throat once and the crowd peeled apart as though magnetically repelled from the giant human. Artemis took this path into the Situation room to find Commander Trouble Kelp and Foaly standing before a wall-sized screen, raptly following unfolding events.

  Foaly noticed the gasps that followed Butler wherever he went in Haven, and glanced around.

  “May the fours be with you,” the centaur whispered to Artemis—his standard greeting/joke for the past six months.

  “I am cured, as you well know,” said Artemis. “What is going on here?”

  Holly cleared a space beside Trouble Kelp, who seemed to be morphing into her former boss, Commander Julius Root, as the years went on. Commander Kelp was so brimfull of gung-ho attitude that he had taken the name Trouble upon graduation and had once tried to arrest a troll for littering, which accounted for the sim-skin patch on the tip of his nose, which glowed yellow from a certain angle.

  “Haircut’s new, Skipper,” Holly said. “Beetroot had one just like it.”

  Commander Kelp did not take his eyes from the screen. Holly was joshing because she was nervous, and Trouble knew it. She was right to be nervous. In fact, outright fear would have been more appropriate, given the situation that was being beamed in to them.

  “Watch the show, Captain,” he said tightly. “It’s pretty self-explanatory.”

  There were three figures onscreen, a kneeling prisoner and two captors; but Holly did not place Opal Koboi right away because she was searching for the pixie among the standing pair. She realized with a jolt that Opal was the prisoner.

  “This is a trick,” she said. “It must be.”

  Commander Kelp shrugged. Watch it and see.

  Artemis stepped closer to the screen, scanning the picture for information. “You are sure this is live?”

  “It’s a live feed,” said Foaly. “I suppose they could be sending us a pre-record.”

  “Where is it coming from?”

  Foaly checked the tracer map on his own screen. The call line ran from a fairy satellite down to South Africa and from there to Miami and then on to a hundred other places, like the scribble of an angry child.

  “They jacked a satellite and ran the line through a series of shells. Could be anywhere.”

  “The sun is high,” Artemis mused aloud. “I would guess by the shadows that it is early noon. If it is actually a live feed.”

  “That narrows it down to a quarter of the planet,” said Foaly caustically.

  The hubbub in the room rose as, onscreen, one of the two bulky gnomes standing behind Opal drew a human automatic handgun, the chrome weapon looking like a cannon in his fairy fingers.

  It seemed as though the temperature had suddenly dropped in the Situation room.

  “I need quiet,” said Artemis. “Get these people out of here.”

  On most days Trouble Kelp would argue that Artemis had no authority to clear a room, and would possibly invite more people into the cramped office just to prove his point—but this was not most days.

  “Everybody out,” he barked at the assembled officers. “Holly, Foaly, and the Mud Boy, stay where you are.”

  “I think perhaps I’ll stay too,” said Butler, shielding the top of his head from lamp burn with one hand.

  Nobody objected.

  Usually the LEP officers would shuffle with macho reluctance when ordered to move, but in this instance they rushed to the nearest monitor, eager not to miss a single frame of unfolding events.

  Foaly shut the door behind them with a swing of his hoof, then darkened the window glass so there would be no distraction from outside. The remaining four stood in a ragged semicircle before the wall screen, watching what would
appear to be the last minutes of Opal Koboi’s life. One of the Opal Kobois, at any rate.

  There were two gnomes onscreen, both wearing full-face anti-UV party masks that could be programmed to resemble anyone. These had been modeled on Pip and Kip, two popular kitty-cat cartoon characters on TV, but the figures were still recognizable as gnomes because of their stocky barrel torsos and bloated forearms. They stood before a nondescript gray wall, looming over the tiny pixie who knelt in the mud tracks of some wheeled vehicle, waterline creeping along the legs of her designer tracksuit. Opal’s wrists were bound and her mouth taped, and she seemed genuinely terrified.

  The gnome with the pistol spoke through a vox-box in the mask, disguising his voice as Pip the kitty-cat.

  “I can’t make it any plainer,” he squeaked, and somehow the cartoon voice made him seem more dangerous. “We got one Opal, you got the other. You let your Opal go, and we don’t kill this one. You had twenty minutes; now you have fifteen.”

  Pip the kitty-cat cocked his weapon.

  Butler tapped Holly’s shoulder.

  “Did he just say–?”

  “Yeah. Fifteen minutes, or Opal’s dead.”

  Butler popped a translator bud into his ear. This was too important to trust to his dubious grasp of Gnommish.

  Trouble Kelp was incredulous. “What kind of deal is that? Give us a terrorist, or we kill a terrorist?”

  “We can’t just let someone be murdered before our eyes,” said Holly.

  “Absolutely not,” agreed Foaly. “We are not humans.”

  Artemis cleared his throat.

  “Sorry, Artemis,” said the centaur. “But you humans are a bloodthirsty bunch. Sure, we may produce the occasional power-crazed pixie, but by and large the People are peace-loving folk. Which is probably why we live down here in the first place.”

  Trouble Kelp actually snarled, one of his leadership devices—which not many people could carry off, especially when they stood barely more than three feet high in what Artemis was sure were stacked boots. But Trouble’s snarl was convincing enough to stifle the bickering.

  “Focus, people,” he said. “I need solutions here. Under no circumstances can we release Opal Koboi, but we can’t just stand by and allow her to be murdered either.”

  The computer had picked up the references to Koboi onscreen and had elected to run her file on a side screen, in case anyone needed their memory refreshed.

  Opal Koboi. Certified genius pixie industrialist and inventor. Orchestrated the goblin coup and insurrection. Cloned herself to escape prison and attempted to lead the humans to Haven. Responsible for the murder of Commander Julius Root. Had human pituitary gland implanted to manufacture growth hormone (subsequently removed). Younger version of Opal followed Captain Short from the past and is currently at large in present time line. It is assumed she will attempt to free her incarcerated self and return to her own time stream. Opal is in the unprecedented position of occupying places one and two on the LEP Most Dangerous list. Categorized as highly intelligent, motivated, and psychotic.

  This is a bold move, Opal, thought Artemis. And with potentially catastrophic repercussions.

  He felt rather than saw Holly at his elbow.

  “What do you think, Artemis?”

  Artemis frowned. “My first impression is to call it a bluff. But Opal’s plans always take into account first impressions.”

  “It could be a ruse. Perhaps those goblins would simply shoot her with a blank?”

  Artemis shook his head. “No. That would deliver no payoff other than momentary horror on our part. Opal has planned this so that she wins whatever the eventuality. If you free her, then she’s free. If the younger Opal dies, then…Then what?”

  Butler weighed in. “You can do all sorts of things with special effects these days. What if they computer-graphic her head to explode?”

  Artemis was disappointed in this theory, which he felt he had already discounted. “No, Butler. Think. Again, there’s nothing to gain.”

  Foaly snorted. “At any rate, if they do kill her, we will know very soon whether this whole thing is real or not.”

  Artemis half laughed. “True. We will certainly know.”

  Butler groaned. This was one of those times when Artemis and Foaly were aware of something sciencey and assumed that everyone else in the room also had all the facts. Moments like this were guaranteed to drive Holly crazy.

  “What are you talking about?” shouted Holly. “What will we know? How will we know whatever it is?”

  Artemis stared down at her as though waking from a dream. “Really, Holly? You have two versions of the same individual occupying a time stream, and you are unaware of the ramifications?”

  Onscreen, the gnomes stood like statues behind the shivering pixie. The armed one, Pip, occasionally checked a wristwatch by tugging his sleeve with his gun barrel, but otherwise they waited patiently. Opal pleaded with her eyes, staring at the camera lens, fat tears streaming down her cheeks, sparkling in the sunlight. Her hair seemed thinner than usual and unwashed. Her Juicy Couture tracksuit, purchased no doubt from the children’s section of some exclusive store, was torn in several places, the rips caked in blood. The picture was super-high-def and so clear that it was like looking through a window. If this was a spurious threat, then young Opal did not know it.

  Trouble pounded the desk, an affectation of Julius Root’s that he had adopted.

  “What are the ramifications? Tell me?”

  “Just to be clear,” said Artemis, “do you wish to be told what the word ramifications means? Or to know what the ramifications are?”

  Holly elbowed Artemis in the hip, speeding him along. “Artemis, we’re on a clock here.”

  “Very well, Holly. Here is the problem …”

  “Come on,” pleaded Foaly. “Let me explain. This is my kingdom, and I will be simple and to the point, I promise.”

  “Go on, then,” said Trouble, who was known for his love of simple and to the point.

  Holly laughed, a single harsh bark. She could not believe everyone continued to act like their everyday selves even though a life was at stake.

  We have become desensitized, like the humans.

  Whatever Opal had done, she was still a person. There had been dark days when Holly had dreamed of hunting the pixie down and issuing a little Mud Man justice, but those days were gone.

  Foaly tugged at his outrageously coiffed forelock.

  “All beings are made of energy,” he began in the typical pompous imparting important info voice that he used at times like this. “When these beings die, their energy slowly dissipates and returns to the earth.” He paused dramatically. “But what if a being’s entire existence is suddenly negated by a quantum anomaly?”

  Trouble raised his arms. “Whoa! Simple and to the point, remember?”

  Foaly rephrased. “Okay. If young Opal dies, then old Opal cannot continue to exist.”

  It took Trouble a second, but he got it. “So, will it be like the movies? She will fizzle out of existence, and we will all look a bit puzzled for a moment, then forget about her?”

  Foaly snickered. “That’s one theory.”

  “What’s the other theory?”

  The centaur paled suddenly, and uncharacteristically yielded the floor to Artemis.

  “Why don’t you explain this bit?” Foaly said. “I just flashed on what could actually happen, and I need to start making calls.”

  Artemis nodded curtly. “The other theory was first postulated by your own Professor Bahjee over five centuries ago. Bahjee believes that if the time stream is polluted by the arrival of the younger version of a being and that younger version subsequently dies, then the present-tense version of the being will release all its energy spontaneously and violently. Not only that, but anything that exists because of the younger Opal will also combust.”

  Violently and combust were words that Commander Kelp understood well.

  “Release its energy? How violently?” br />
  Artemis shrugged. “That depends on the object or being. Matter is changed instantaneously into energy. A huge explosive force will be released. We could even be talking about nuclear fission.”

  Holly felt her heart speed up. “Fission? Nuclear fission?”

  “Basically,” said Artemis. “For living beings. The objects should cause less damage.”

  “Anything Opal made or contributed to will explode?”

  “No. Just the things she influenced in the past five years of our time line, between her two ages, though there will probably be some temporal ripples on either side.”

  “Are you talking about all of her company’s weapons that are still in commission?” asked Holly.

  “And the satellites,” added Trouble. “Every second vehicle in the city.”

  “It is just a theory,” said Artemis. “There is yet another theory that suggests nothing at all will happen, other than one person dying. Physics trumps quantum physics, and things go on as normal.”

  Holly found herself red-faced with sudden fury. “You’re talking as though Opal is already dead.”

  Artemis was not sure what to say. “We are staring into the abyss, Holly. In a short time, many of us could be dead. I need to stay detached.”

  Foaly looked up from his computer panel. “What do you think about the percentages, Mud Boy?”

  “Percentages?”

  “Theory-wise.”

  “Oh, I see. How likely are the explosions?”

  “Exactly.”

  Artemis thought about it. “All things considered, I would say about ninety percent. If I were a betting man and there were someone to take this kind of bet, I would put my last gold coin on it.”

  Trouble paced the small office. “We need to release Opal. Let her go immediately.”

  Now Holly was uncertain. “Let’s think about this, Trubs.”

  The commander turned on her. “Didn’t you hear what the human said? Fission! We can’t have fission underground.”

  “I agree, but it could still be a trick.”

  “The alternative is too terrible. We turn her loose and hunt her down. Get Atlantis on the line now. I need to speak to the warden at the Deeps. Is it still Vinyáya?”