Free Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex by Eoin Colfer Page A

forgotten all about it for a minute. “Five ten fifteen.”
    He pointed all of his fingers at the ship, wiggling them furiously.
    A ten-finger salute. Surely that will vaporize this vision.
    And it seemed as though the fingers were having an effect. The four discus-shaped engines, which had been trailing behind the main body like helpless puppies tethered to their spooked master, suddenly flipped and began emitting anti-grav pulses that lolloped toward the ground in fat bubbles, slowing the ship’s descent faster than seemed possible for a craft of such inelegant dimensions.
    “Hah!” crowed Artemis. “I control my own reality. Did you see that?”
    Holly knew that, far from controlling anything, Artemis was actually witnessing a fairy probe’s landing sequence. She had never actually piloted a deep-space probe herself, but nevertheless knew that standing underneath such a behemoth while it was dropping anti-grav bubbles was more than enough to get a person killed, and wiggling fingers like a sideshow magician was not going to change that.
    I have to get up, she thought.
    But the injury in her legs held her down like a lead blanket.
    I think my pelvis is broken, she realized. Maybe an ankle too .
    Holly’s magic had an unusual potency, thanks to a couple of boosts from her friend the demon N o 1 (who was turning out to be the most magical warlock the university had ever enrolled). The magic was setting to work on her injuries, but not fast enough. Artemis had a couple of seconds before one of those anti-grav blobs tore him apart or the ship itself actually landed on his head. And you didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what would happen then, which was just as well, as Artemis didn’t seem to be a genius anymore.
    “Assistance,” she called weakly into her com set. “Someone. Anyone?”
    There was no one. Anyone who had been inside the shuttle was beyond magic, and Foaly was still upended in the snowdrift.
    Even if there were somebody, it’s too late.
    Large crack patterns bloomed in the ice like hammer blows as the anti-grav pulses impacted on the surface. The cracks spread across the glacier with a noise like snapping branches, dropping large sinkholes through to the subterranean caverns below.
    The ship was as big as a grain silo and seemed to be fighting against the pull of its tethered engines, throwing off waves of steam and jets of fluid. Rocket fuel drenched Artemis, making it difficult to ignore the fact that the rocket was real. But if there was one thing Artemis had not lost it was his stubbornness, and so he stood his ground, refusing to yield to his final squeak of good sense.
    “Who cares?” he muttered.
    Holly somehow heard the last two words and thought,
    I care . Desperate situations call for desperate solutions.
    Nothing to lose, thought Holly, flapping at the holster on her thigh.
    She swept her pistol from its home in a slightly more erratic arc than usual. The gun was synced with her visor, but even so, Holly did not have time to check the settings. She simply held down the command sensor with her thumb, then spoke clearly into the microphone at the side of her mouth.
    “Gun.” [Pause for beep.] “Non lethal. Wide-bore concussive.”
    “Sorry, Artemis,” she muttered, then fired a good three-second blast at her human friend.
    Artemis was ankle deep in slush and in full-rant mode when Holly pulled the trigger.
    The beam hit him like a slap from a giant electric eel.
    His body was lifted and tossed through the air a moment before the probe clattered to a bone-crushing landing, obliterating the spot where he had been standing.
    Artemis dropped into a crater like a sack of kindling and disappeared from Holly’s sightline. That’s not good, thought Holly, then saw her own magical sparks hover before her eyes like inquisitive amber-tailed fireflies.
    Shutdown, she realized. My magic is sending me to sleep so that I can heal .
    From the corner of her eye, Holly saw a door open in the