Free Artemis Fowl 08 - The Last Guardian by Eoin Colfer

you.
    Then the bolt from Pip’s weapon hit her in the chest, scorched her jacket, and knocked her from the tower.
    Oro of the Berserkers felt a moment of doubt.
    Perhaps this anticipation of freedom is merely a yearning, he thought.
    No. This was more than his own longing. The key was coming. He could feel the rush of power as it approached their tomb.
    Gather yourselves, he sent down to his warriors. When the gate is open, take whatever shape you must. Anything that lives or has lived can be ours.
    Oro felt the earth shake with the roar of his warriors.
    Or perhaps that was mere yearning.

Tara Shuttleport, Ireland
    When Captain Holly Short attempted to dock in her assigned shuttle bay, she found Tara’s electromagnetic clamps to be inoperable and so was forced to improvise a landing in the gate’s access tunnel. This was more or less what the Tara shuttleport supervisor would write in his Extraordinary Incident report when he got out of rehab, but the sentence did not convey the sheer trauma of the situation.
    For their entire approach, Holly’s instruments had assured her that everything was hunky-dory; and then, just as she swung the Silver Cupid ’s tail around to dock with the clamps, Tara’s flight-control computer had made a noise like raw meat hitting a wall at speed, then shut itself down, leaving Holly with no choice but to reverse into the shuttleport’s access tunnel and pray that there were no unauthorized personnel in there.
    Metal crumpled, Plexiglas shattered, and fiber-optic cables stretched like warm toffee and snapped. The Silver Cupid ’s reinforced hide took the punishment, but the hood ornament flew off like its namesake and would be found three months later in the belly of a soda machine, corroded to a barely recognizable stick figure.
    Holly hauled on the brake as sparks and shards rained down, pockmarking the windshield. Her pilot’s gyro harness had absorbed most of the shock meant for her body, but Artemis and Butler had been tossed around like beads in a rattle.
    “Everybody alive?” she called over her shoulder, and the assortment of groans that wafted back confirmed her passengers’ survival, if not their intact survival.
    Artemis crawled out from under Butler’s protective huddle and checked the shuttle’s readings. Blood dripped from a slit on the youth’s brow, but he appeared not to notice.
    “You need to find a way out, Holly.”
    Holly almost giggled. Driving the Cupid out of here would mean willfully destroying an entire LEP installation. She would not just be tearing up the rulebook; she would be shredding the pages, then mixing them with troll dung, baking the concoction, and tossing the biscuits on a campfire.
    “Dung biscuits,” she muttered, which made no sense if you didn’t know her train of thought.
    “You may be making dung biscuits of the rulebook,” said Artemis, who could apparently track trains of thought, “but Opal must be stopped for all our sakes.”
    Holly hesitated.
    Artemis capitalized on her hesitation. “Holly. These are extraordinary circumstances ,” he said urgently. “Do you remember Butler’s phrase? Kill box. That’s where my brothers are at this moment. In the kill box. And you know how much Juliet will sacrifice to save them.”
    Butler leaned forward, grasping a hanging hand-grip loop and pulling it from its housing in the process.
    “Think tactically,” he said, instinctively knowing how to galvanize the fairy captain. “We need to proceed under the assumption that we are the only small force standing between Opal and whatever form of world domination her twisted mind has cooked up in solitary. And remember, she was prepared to sacrifice herself. She planned for it. We need to go. Now, soldier! ”
    Butler was right, and Holly knew it.
    “Okay,” she said, punching parameters into the Cupid ’s route finder. “You asked for it.”
    A sprite in a hi-vis jacket was flying down the access tunnel, wings tapping the curved walls