"Artemis Fowl 02 - The Arctic Incident" - читать интересную книгу автора (Colfer Eoin)

Holly dropped through the hatch, rappelling to the tunnel floor. She ducked behind a statue of Frond, the first elfin king. Chix was lying on a mound of rubble across the avenue. It didn't look good. The side of his helmet had been bashed in by the jagged remains of a low wall, rendering his corn-system completely useless.
She needed to reach him soon or he was a goner. Sprites only had limited healing powers. They could magic away a wart, but gaping wounds were beyond them.
'I'm patching you through to the commander,' said Foaly's voice in her ear. 'Standby.'
Commander Root's gravelly tones barked across the airwaves. He did not sound in the best of moods. No surprises there.
'Captain Short. I want you to hold your position until back-up gets there.'
'Negative, Commander. Chix is hit. I have to reach him.'
'Holly. Captain Kelp is minutes away. Hold your position. Repeat. Hold your position.'
Behind the helmet's visor, Holly gritted her teeth in frustration. She was one step away from being booted out of the LEP, and now this. To rescue Chix she would have to disobey a direct order.
Root sensed her indecision. 'Holly, listen to me. Whatever they're shooting at you, it punched straight through Verbil's wing. Your LEP vest is no good. So sit tight and wait for Captain Kelp.'
Captain Kelp. Possibly the LEP's most gung-ho officer, famous for choosing the name Trouble at his graduation ceremony. Still, there was no officer Holly would have preferred to have at her back going through a door.
'Sorry, sir, I can't wait. Chix took a hit in the wing.You know what that means.'
Shooting a sprite in the wing was not like shooting a bird. Wings were a sprite's largest organ and contained seven major arteries. A hole like that would have ruptured at least three.
Commander Root sighed. Over the speakers it sounded like a rush of static.
'OK, Holly. But stay low. I don't want to lose any of my people today.'
Holly drew her Neutrino 2000 from its holster, flicking the setting up to three. She wasn't taking any chances with the snipers. Presuming they were goblins from the B'wa Kell triad, on this setting the first shot would knock them unconscious for eight hours at the very least.
She gathered her legs beneath her and rocketed out from behind the statue. Immediately a hail of gunfire blew chunks from the structure.
Holly raced towards her fallen comrade, projectiles buzzing around her head like supersonic bees. Generally, in a situation of this kind, the last thing you do is move the victim, but with gunfire raining down on them, there was no choice. Holly grabbed the private by his epaulettes, hauling him behind a rusted-out delivery shuttle.
Chix had been out there a long time. He was grinning feebly. 'You came for me, Cap. I knew you would.'
Holly tried to keep the worry from her voice. 'Of course I came, Chix. Never leave a man behind.'
'I knew you couldn't resist me,' he breathed. 'I knew it.' Then he closed his eyes. There was a lot of damage done here. Maybe too much.
Holly concentrated on the wound. Heal, she thought, and the magic welled up inside her like a million pins and needles. It spread through her arms and ran down to her fingers. She placed her hands on Verbil's wound. Blue sparks tingled from her fingers into the hole. The sparks played around the wound, repairing the scorched tissue and replicating spilt blood. The sprite's breathing calmed, and a healthy green tinge started to return to his cheeks.
Holly sighed. Chix would be OK. He probably wouldn't fly any more missions on that wing, but he would live. Holly laid the unconscious sprite on his side, careful not to put pressure on the injured wing. Now for the mysterious grey shapes. Holly upped the setting on her weapon to four and ran without hesitation towards the chute entrance.
On your very first day in the LEP Academy, a big hairy gnome, with a chest the size of a bull troll, pins each cadet to a wall and warns them never to run into an unsecured building during a firefight. He says this in a most insistent fashion. He repeats it every day until the maxim is etched on every cadet's brain. Nevertheless, this was exactly what Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon Unit proceeded to do.
She blasted the terminal's double doors, diving through to the shelter of a check-in desk. Less than four hundred years ago, this building had been a hive of activity, with tourists queuing for above-ground visas. Paris had once been a very popular tourist destination. But inevitably, it seemed, humans had claimed the European capital for themselves. The only place fairies felt safe was in Disneyland, Paris, where no one looked twice at diminutive creatures, even if they were green.
Holly activated a motion-sensor filter in her helmet and scanned the building through the desk's quartz security panel. If anything moved, the helmet's computer would automatically flag it with an orange corona. She looked up, just in time to see two figures loping along a viewing gallery towards the shuttle bay. They were goblins all right, reverting to all fours for extra speed, trailing a hover trolley behind them. They were wearing some kind of reflective foil suits, complete with headgear, obviously to fox the thermal sensors. Very clever.Too clever for goblins.
Holly ran parallel to the goblins, one floor down. All around her, ancient advertising hoardings sagged in their brackets. TWO-WEEK SOLSTICE TOUR. TWENTY GOLD GRAMS. CHILDREN UNDER TEN TRAVEL FREE.
She vaulted the turnstile gate, racing past the security zone and duty-free booths. The goblins were descending now, boots and gloves flapping on a frozen escalator. One lost his headgear in his haste. He was big for a goblin, over a metre. His lidless eyes rolled in panic, and his forked tongue flicked upwards to moisten his pupils.
Captain Short squeezed off a few bursts on the run. One clipped the backside of the nearest goblin. Holly groaned. Nowhere near a nerve centre. But it didn't have to be. There was a disadvantage to these foil suits. They conducted neutrino charges. The charge spread through the suit's material like fiery ripples across a pond. The goblin jumped a good two metres straight up, then tumbled, unconscious, to the foot of the escalator. The hover trolley spun out of control, crashing into a luggage carousel. Hundreds of small cylindrical objects spilled from a shattered crate.
Goblin Number Two fired a dozen rounds Holly's way. He missed, partly because his arms were jittery with nerves. But also because firing from the hip only works in the movies. Holly tried to take a screen shot of his weapon with her helmet camera for the computer to run a match on, but there was too much vibration.
The chase continued down the conduits and into the departure bay itself. Holly was surprised to hear the hum of docking computers. There wasn't supposed to be any power here. LEP Engineering would have dismantled the generators. Why would power be needed here?
She already knew the answer. Power would be needed to operate the shuttle monorail and Mission Control. Her suspicions were confirmed as she entered the hangar. The goblins had built a shuttle!

It was unbelievable. Goblins had barely enough electricity in their brains to power a ten-watt bulb. How could they possibly build a shuttle? Yet there it was, sitting in the dock like a used-craft seller's worst nightmare. There wasn't a bit of it less than a decade old, and the hull was a patchwork of weld spots and rivets.
Holly swallowed her amazement, concentrating on the pursuit. The goblin had paused to grab a set of wings from the cargo hold. She could have taken a shot then, but it was too risky. She wouldn't be surprised if the shuttle's nuclear battery was protected by nothing more than a single layer of lead.
The goblin took advantage of his reprieve to skip down the access tunnel. The monorail ran the length of the scorched rock to the massive chute. This chute was one of many of the natural vents that riddled the Earth's mantle and crust. Magma streams from the planet's molten core blasted up through these chutes towards the surface at irregular intervals. If it wasn't for these pressure releases, the Earth would have shaken itself to fragments aeons ago. The LEP had harnessed this natural power for express surface shots. Recon officers rode the magma flares in titanium eggs in times of emergency. For a more leisurely trip, shuttles avoided the flares, ascending the chutes on hot-air currents to the various terminals around the world.
Holly slowed her pace. There was nowhere for the goblin to go. Not unless he was going to fly into the chute itself, and nobody was that crazy. Anything that got caught up in a magma flare got fried right down to sub-atomic level.
The chute's entrance loomed ahead. Massive and ringed by charred rock.
Holly switched on the helmet's PA. 'That's far enough,' she shouted over the howl of core wind. 'Give it up. You're not going into the chute without science.'
Science was LEP-speak for technical information. In this case, science would be flare-prediction times. Accurate to within a tenth of a second. Generally.
The goblin raised a strange rifle, this time taking careful aim. The firing pin dropped, but whatever this weapon was firing, there wasn't any left.
'That's the problem with non-nuclear weapons, you run out of charge,' quipped Holly, fulfilling the age-old tradition of firefight banter, even though her knees were threatening to fold.
In response, the goblin hefted the rifle in Holly's direction. It was a terrible throw, landing five metres short. But it served its purpose as a distraction. The triad member used the moment to fire up his wings. They were old models Ч rotary motor and a broken muffler. The roar of the engine filled the tunnel.
There was another roar, behind the wings. A roar that Holly knew well from a thousand logged flight hours in the chutes. There was a flare coming.
Holly's mind raced. If the goblins had somehow managed to hook up the terminal to a power source, then all the safety features would have been activated. Including ...
Captain Short whirled, but the blast doors were already closing. The fireproof barriers were automatically triggered by a thermo sensor in the chute. When a flare passed by below, two-metre-thick steel doors shut off the access tunnel from the rest of the terminal. They were trapped in there, with a column of magma on the way. Not that the magma would kill them Ч there wasn't much overspill from the flares. But the super-heated air would bake them drier than autumn leaves.
The goblin was standing on the tunnel's edge, oblivious to the impending eruption. Holly realized that it wasn't a question of the fugitive being crazy enough to fly into the chute. He was just plain stupid.
With a jaunty wave, the goblin hopped into the chute, rising rapidly from view. Not rapidly enough. A seven-metre-long jet of roiling lava pounced on him like a waiting snake, consuming him completely.
Holly did not waste time grieving. She had problems of her own. LEP jumpsuits had thermal coils to disperse excess heat, but that wouldn't be enough. In seconds, a wall of dry heat would roll in there, and raise the temperature enough to crack the walls.
Holly glanced up. A line of reinforced ancient coolant tanks were still bolted to the tunnel roof. She slid her blaster to maximum power and began sinking charges into the belly of the tanks. This was no time for subtlety.
The tanks buckled and split, belching out rancid air and a few trickles of coolant. Useless. Thev must have bled out over the centuries, and the goblins had never bothered replacing them. But there was one left, untouched. A black oblong, out of place among the standard green LEP models. Holly positioned herself directly underneath and fired.