Chapter Text
As the shuttle broke out of the silver cloud layer, its controls came easily into Commodore Holly Short’s hands. She pulled the nose into a lazy turn, bleeding off altitude and airspeed, and running pre-landing checks all the while. Holly couldn’t help but smile. Like putting on a pair of well-worn gloves. That is, gloves which hadn’t been used in a while and smelled of long-dried sweat.
This particular shuttle was an old brute that originally served LEPRetrieval, which explained the smell. But instead of a contingent of twelve meatheads in the back, there was cargo. Mostly a large crate filled with Frond-knows-what in terms of scientific equipment. All Foaly had deigned to drum into her head was that it was expensive. And that it was destined for that lonely ship that pierced the Arctic waves ahead of her. Artemis’s lonely ship. Its fat blue hull and bright white superstructure contrasted the grey waves of the Arctic Ocean.
“Research vessel Daidalos, this is Speedbird 15,” Holly transmitted, dropping the landing flaps and spooling up the vertical engines.
“Speedbird 15, this is Daidalos,” Butler’s voice intoned over the radio. “I have you on a five mile final to the pad. How was the trip?”
Holly scoffed. “Hardest part was getting them to let me do it,” she said, trimming out the shuttle and tuning in to the Daidalos’s radio-nav frequency. A crosshair appeared on the windscreen, slewing all the way up, down, left, right, and staying in the bottom right corner. “But there was no way I was missing Christmas again.”
“Ah, yelled everyone into submission?”
“Come on, you remember how that went last year. No, I went with bribery this time. Spent like three ingots on chocolates.”
Butler whistled. “That’s a lot of money.”
“They were nice chocolates, Butler.”
“Well, fill out an expense form later.”
“That’s—come on, not necessary.”
“Trust me, we can afford it. Two mile final, in the groove, VLAS active. Cleared to land on the pad.”
“To the pad for Speedbird 15,” Holly confirmed, and a moment later, the crosshair snapped to attention, lining up perfectly with the ship. “VLAS alive. See you in a minute.”
She’d been on Daidalos before, of course. Even in a moderate sea like the one which had started to leave spray on her windscreen, the ship was rock-steady, thanks both to its sheer bulk and a quite ingenious active stabilization system that Artemis had explained to her on at least three occasions. All of which she’d fallen asleep during. That was to say, even under these grey skies, landing a shuttle on the ship was a cinch, even if it seemed like a toy bobbing in the world’s biggest bathtub.
One by one, the events of a shipborne landing ticked off like clockwork. One mile final, airbrakes out, hover thrust. Hold the crosshair on target, tick down the airspeed, float over the stern rail a little faster than a jog. A little nose-up to bleed off the last few kilometres per hour, and half a metre above the deck, power down, thunk, captured.
The shuttle’s engines wound down, and Holly killed the master switch before popping out of the cockpit to the door. She pushed it open, and there he was. Artemis Fowl the Second, standing unceremoniously on the exposed deck of his ship. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he looked like he was about to pitch a second self-winding rocket. Instead, he strode up to her and took her hand, as if helping her disembark a limousine instead of an old, worn-out boxcar of a shuttle.
“It’s lovely to see you,” he said with a smile that was so genuine that Holly was immediately suspicious.
“What did you do this time?” she asked, eyes narrowed to slits.
“Nothing yet,” Artemis said innocently, and he took advantage of her being on the steps to plant a gentle peck on her cheek. “Come on inside. The drones can unload the cargo, and I know how little elves care for the cold.”
Holly reeled, her breath twirling away in the Arctic breeze. “Artemis, you’re scaring me.”
His brow scrunched up. “It’s rare that anything confuses me, but here we are,” Artemis said dramatically. “What on earth do you mean?”
Holly scoffed. “The last time you were this nice to me was right before you told me you accidentally blew up a kraken.”
“Before I deliberately blew up a kraken,” Artemis corrected, crossing his arms. “The accident was in disturbing one of the People’s seismographic sensors, which I should remind you Foaly didn’t feel the need to tell me about. And, of course, a local fishing trawler nearly snagging it in their nets. Which I solved. And you have to admit, it did wonders for the ecology of that reef.”
Holly shot a narrowed glare at him. “You’re not exactly selling me, Arty.”
“Besides, I’m quite sure the last time I was this nice to you was at dinner three weeks ago. I seem to recall you rather enjoyed yourself.”
“You’re never getting me drunk again,” Holly replied immediately. “That was a difficult morning after.”
“Yes, well, I didn’t hear you disagree.” Artemis sighed. “In any case, you have nothing to fear. But we do have something to discuss. Come with me.”
#
Holly followed Artemis through the sleek, fluorescently lit corridors of the ship. It pitched and rolled ever so slightly underfoot in the swell, and the walls thrummed with the steady whir of turbines, interspersed with the odd dull thump as waves broke over the bows.
“So, what was in my shuttle?” she asked nonchalantly, fingers brushing a bulkhead as she stepped through. “No one seemed to know, except Foaly, and he told me he wanted it to be a surprise.”
“A high-sensitivity magnetometer. A very high-sensitivity one, at that.” He led her into the rec room amidships and pulled out a chair for her at the main table. The air was stale in that sterile way, like it always seemed out the end of a heater. As she sat down, he continued. “You see, we’re hunting a submarine.”
Holly shifted in her chair. “A submarine?” she repeated, sparing a glance at the table itself. It was adorned with a massive pile of maps and notes, the topmost of which appeared to be fifty years old and covered in Russian scribbles.
“Yes. In 1967, the Soviet November-class nuclear attack submarine K-183 was lost with all hands in the Barents Sea. Despite quite a bit of searching—” Artemis gestured to the topmost map. A grid search pattern. “—the vessel was never found. And the People never searched for it at all.”
“Really? A submarine vanished without a trace?”
“Yes, with its two fully fuelled seventy-megawatt nuclear reactors.”
It was only then that Holly twigged to the other part Artemis said. “Wait, we never looked for it?” She scoffed. “I find that hard to believe. My mother spent her life protecting the seas from this kind of pollution.”
Artemis leaned forward on the table, hands steepled. “I found no record. If it exists, it is very well-classified.”
Holly counted years on her fingertips. “1967 is…like, the 7780s, so…yeah, when she was in Marine. They tracked nuclear subs, cargo ships, all kinds of sea traffic constantly.” A sudden darkness fell over her face. “It was what killed her.”
“I don’t think you ever told me that story.”
Truthfully, Holly hadn’t meant to share this story, but she was in it now. “It’s not a long story. She was a doctor,” Holly said, staring out the porthole to the outdoors. Flecks of snow mingled with the spray off the bow, tangoing to the barely audible metallic groans of the hull as it shifted aside hundreds of tons of ocean. “Her submarine was shadowing a tanker near, um, Vladivostok, and it dumped a ton of radioactive waste overboard. You know what radiation does to fairies.”
“I’m sorry,” Artemis said after a moment, looking her up and down. Evaluating, she realised. “Perhaps we have an opportunity to continue her work.”
“Perhaps.” Holly wasn’t looking at Artemis. She was focused rather on a growing awareness of every little noise the ship made as the Arctic ocean battered it.
“Now, seeing as the Techno-Crash has left LEPMarine entirely unable to follow up on old ghost stories like the K-183, I thought I, or now we, might lend a hand.” He swapped the pages on the table to some technical schematic. “When we find it, we can seal off the wreck using this drop-in containment structure to prevent heavy metals or nuclear radiation from leaching out. A noble goal, I think you’d agree.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Admittedly, I also thought that having an actual mission to accomplish would help you convince your superiors to allow you to stay long enough to celebrate Christmas,” Artemis added.
Holly snorted. “That’s a long way to go for an excuse, Arty,” she said, shaking her head. She slapped her knees. “Okay. Let’s find a Soviet submarine.”
“Brilliant.” Artemis stood up. “Let me show you to your quarters.”
“My…quarters?” Holly repeated.
“Yes.” Artemis studied her face. “Is there a problem?”
“N—no, not at all,” Holly said quickly.
“Very good.” Artemis nodded and gestured to follow. He led her up the stairs to the upper superstructure, then to a door on the port side of the corridor. “This is you. I’m at the end of the hall, just up ahead. Butler is opposite you on the starboard side.”
“Isn’t there anyone else?” Holly asked.
“I can recall two separate occasions on which I explained, at length, the autonomous systems running the ship. And the maintenance drones doing those tasks which require physical manipulations.” He pushed open the door and ushered her inside. “We are the only people aboard.”
The room was spacious, at least to an elf. She figured a human might think it cramped. There were some benefits to being small, it turned out. It was, like the rec room, sparsely adorned, with vinyl flooring and plain white walls interrupted only by a closet and desk on the right, and a rather large window looking out over the Daidalos’s port beam. The bed was tucked in to a militaristic tightness, and there was not a speck of dust to be spied anywhere.
“This is…nice,” Holly said, having searched for—and having failed to find—a more endearing word.
“Yes, well, most of the budget went into developing the powerplant,” Artemis admitted. “Nuclear power is expensive, even to me.”
“I like it. Reminds me of my barracks back at the Academy.” She ran a finger along the trimmed desk edge. Plastic and cheerful.
“To me, that is not the compliment you think it is,” Artemis grumbled.
“I know it’s not.” She knocked his side playfully. “Why do you think I said it?”
Artemis straightened with a grumble. “Well. Butler and I will be unloading and configuring the magnetometer. Take the time to settle in, and meet us on the bridge in an hour.”
Holly nodded. “Yeah, let me just…” She slightly untucked the blanket. Just enough to categorically ruin the perfection of the room by the introduction of a singular crease in the sheets. “That’s better.”
She watched Artemis’s eye twitch with no small amount of satisfaction. “Right.” He walked off, shaking his head.
Holly took out her communicator and dialled her favourite—and also least favourite—centaur.
“Holly. Did you break my sensors?”
“No, but you’re about to break my attendance streak,” Holly said, hopping onto what was decidedly a far-too-soft bed. “I’m going to be here a while.”
“Ah, and you need some v-mails to get lost?”
“For the next few weeks, yeah. Any chance there could be some unfortunate technical issues?”
“I don’t know, I have standards to upkeep.”
“Maybe I’ll take Caballine on another one of those spa retreats she seemed to so enjoy,” Holly coaxed. It was no small offer. Haven’s mudpit spas were outrageously expensive.
“You would?” Foaly’s tone betrayed a sheer awe. “You must really want to do this. Consider Lieutenant Daffy’s report lost.”
“Appreciate you, Foaly. Bye for now.”
“Yeah, tell Fowl to return the thing in one piece. When I loaned him my NMR spectro—”
“I will,” Holly said, and hung up before Foaly could utter any further science mumbo-jumbo.
Some four thousand kilometres away in Haven, a disgruntled centaur stared at his communicator. “Rude,” he grumbled, before setting to work nuking the inbox of one Commodore Short, LEPLogistics.
#
Over the next hour, Artemis and Butler wasted no time in setting up the most advanced magnetometer in their half of the world for a deep sea trawl. With the amount of iron in a November-class submarine’s hull, they’d be sure to pick it up. Daidalos was making some twenty knots on the way to their first search site, and the aft A-frame crane was loaded with Foaly’s precious sensor when Artemis and Butler met Holly in the bridge.
The nerve centre of the Daidalos was an inky black room with a central console straight out of Star Trek. A myriad of buttons and lights from every colour of the rainbow adorned the panels, and a dozen monitors showed data on everything from reactor condition to turbine RPM to geographic location. There were ancillary stations, of course. To Holly’s untrained eye, they appeared to be for operating auxiliary systems like cranes or firefighting cannons. Although, knowing Artemis Fowl, they could well have been for actual cannons.
Artemis spread out another paper map, at which Holly frowned. “What’s with all the paper?”
“Unhackable, untraceable,” Artemis said. “If the People have no record I could access on the K-183, it means they either didn’t look for it, or they didn’t want anyone else looking for it. The first is doubtful, but I won’t have some quack in Haven take my work and present it as their own. As to the second, well, one can never be too careful.” He bowed his head slightly to Butler. “A lesson hard learned, and one I’m not keen to forget.”
Holly crossed her arms. “Why would the People not want this Soviet submarine to be found? It goes against our mission.”
“Like I said,” Artemis said testily, “one can never be too careful. It’s quite easy to fall afoul of Section Eight, and quite a headache to fix it.”
“Fair enough.” She jutted her chin at the map. “I see two big red Xs. X marks the spot?” Artemis frowned harshly. “What?”
Butler chortled deeply, a low rumble that mingled with the hum of the ship. “He had quite a lecture rehearsed for you,” he said with a knowing grin.
Artemis adjusted his tie. “Yes, X marks the spot,” he finally said pithily. “It’s the reason why that is more interesting. Both locations have an unusually high concentration of iron ore. K-183’s last known location is here, where she reported in on the 23rd of May, 1967. She missed her check-in on the 30th of May. While the Soviets did not consider her missing until the 6th of June, I believe she had already been lost by the time she missed that check-in.”
“Right, and so obviously the Soviets looked for their sub, and they didn’t find it.”
“They looked very thoroughly. They scoured every inch of the sea between here and Murmansk, and they found nothing. At first they presumed it had attempted to defect, but when no news came, well…” Artemis grinned. “A veritable ghost ship.”
“Boat,” Holly corrected. “Ship means surface. Submarines are always boats.” Butler chuckled.
“Ghost boat doesn’t have the same ring to it.” Artemis waved her off. “At typical subsurface cruise speeds, she can’t have gotten much further than this radius of about 1,700 nautical miles. Which, you’ll notice, includes both of these scars of iron ore.” Artemis jabbed the map at the two Xs.
“And you think the Soviets missed it because it happened to go down on one of them.”
“Precisely. Their instruments were too crude. They couldn’t possibly have distinguished a submarine on the ocean floor against that background. But perhaps ours will.”
“Question,” Holly said. “Why not fly the sensor on a shuttle? We could cover a lot more ground.”
Artemis trotted over to the starboard auxiliary control station. “Firstly, your shuttle is in my hangar, which means it isn’t talking to the People’s tracking constellation. Flying it obviously changes that. Secondly, we will need to be incredibly detailed in the search. Even with a sensor this good, we are still looking for a disturbance within a disturbance.”
Butler cleared his throat. “And thirdly, I thought the whole point here was to take our time,” he said.
“Exactly,” Artemis said, snapping his fingers into a gun pointed right at the manservant.
Holly nodded slowly. “Okay, I can accept that. So…what are we waiting for?”
“To get to the first X,” Butler said flatly. “We’ll probably enter the area mid-morning tomorrow.”
“So I should’ve arrived tomorrow,” Holly said with a chuckle.
Butler shrugged. “No, we need to run some integration tests. And I would prefer that you get seasick today, rather than tomorrow when we will be staring at some very interesting graphs of perfectly parallel magnetic field lines,” he said in a characteristic deadpan.
Holly turned to Artemis. “So what do you want me to do?”
Artemis grinned, and Holly knew instantly that she would come to regret asking the question. “I thought you’d never ask.”
#
Back in her quarters, Holly stared cross-eyed at a massive textbook on her desk. Introduction to Geomagnetic Fields. “What is this?”
“A primer,” Artemis said with a grin. “How will you find K-183 without knowing what to look for?”
Holly groaned. “You said this was supposed to be a vacation.”
“Yes.”
“Do you normally read textbooks on vacation, Artemis?”
“No.”
“Exactly—”
“I usually write textbooks on vacation.”
Holly let out an exasperated groan and deflated onto the book. “I should have just crashed my shuttle.”
“Oh, you don’t mean that,” Artemis chided. “If you’d like, I can stay with you.” He sat on the desk chair next to her.
Holly stared at Artemis’s lap. She knew what she wanted to do. She also knew she ought not to do it. “Don’t you and Butler have integration testing to do?”
“Butler has integration testing to do,” Artemis corrected. “Or is that your way of trying to get rid of me?”
“Do you really think I’d need to get rid of you with insinuation?” Holly asked, tapping a threatening fist on his chest.
“Touché.”
Holly decided that she no longer cared about such trifles as what she ought not to do and hopped up on his lap. “Oh yeah, that’s better.” She took his arm and wrapped it around her. “That’s much better.”
Artemis sighed, but he was already smiling. “Right, so when we use a magnetometer, we’re looking at the local magnetic field…”
The next few hours were a blur of a bit of fundamental theory that Holly could just about wrap her head around, some practical work reading data that Holly could very much wrap her head around, and quite a lot of resting her increasingly weary head on Artemis’s arm.
“…and that’s how we can use magnetometers to find things like shipwrecks,” Artemis said. When he was met with silence, he jostled Holly ever so slightly. “Did you catch that?”
“Mmf,” Holly replied, which even she realised was a rather useless answer. She yawned. “That…was a lot of words to explain ‘we’re looking for squiggles where it should be smooth.”
Artemis frowned. “That’s reductive,” he said. “It’s important that you understand on some level—”
“Okay, Frond, Arty,” Holly groaned, rolling over on him like a housecat until her joints started to crack. “I get it, okay? A submarine is like a super-high-purity iron ore vein, so it’s a really abrupt, small size anomaly. Our target will look like a really bright pixel on a bright screen, except, like, in field line squiggle form.”
Artemis stared at her through narrowed eyes. “…you’re impossible,” he grumbled. Holly rolled off him and ambled over to the dresser, which she’d populated earlier with her packed clothes. Of course, she always intended to stay. But Foaly was easier to get on side when these things seemed spur-of-the-moment. She picked out a tank top.
“You love it,” she said. “Now, I’m tired. So am I sleeping alone, or is this a cuddle night sort of affair?” She turned around, and took no small satisfaction in seeing a momentary look of surprise on Artemis’s face. That reaction was more addictive than anything in LEPNarcotics’ evidence locker.
“You’re right, I do love it.” Artemis circled around her and went down on one knee to hug her from behind. “The latter, I think.” And so it was.
#
Holly had never before slept so soundly on a ship. Then again, she hadn’t exactly been blessed with many opportunities. Even so, waking up with warmth at her back and arms wrapped around her was a sorely missed experience, and it was the only thing that could bring her ‘five more minutes’ half to overcome her ‘get up you lazy elf’ half.
That is, until Butler battered open the door.
“Wake up, lovebirds,” he said grumpily. “We’ve got a submarine to find.” He rather looked the part, with a dashing captain’s cap and binoculars dangling from a lanyard.
Holly was up and out of bed before Butler’s second sentence had finished. That Academy training again, like flipping a switch. “Nothing happened,” she said, and immediately wondered why she felt the need to clarify.
Butler raised his hand. “Ah! I don’t need to know,” he said, then gestured at Artemis. “Just…make sure he gets up. You know how dramatic he can get.”
Holly spared Artemis a glance as Butler closed the door. The genius had already come up with a solution: he’d buried his head under a pillow. “Yup,” she said simply. She shook him until he sat up, and gave him a glare that said don’t you dare fall back asleep.
Breakfast was a hash brown and coffee in the rec room. Artemis stumbled in some ten minutes later than her, looking rather more disheveled than the day before.
“Good morning, Arty,” Holly said, sipping on her black coffee.
“It is not,” Artemis replied drily, grabbing eggs and bacon from the automated kitchen.
“I noticed you got to replacing Butler in the kitchen,” Holly noted with a smirk. “Machines will replace us all, I guess.”
“Only here. His expertise is much more useful on the bridge,” Artemis said, ignoring the joke.
Holly raised her mug to him as he sat down. “To our first day on the hunt.”
“Indeed,” Artemis said, and tucked in a handkerchief.
“Seriously?”
“What?”
“It’s breakfast, not a seven-course meal.”
Artemis rolled his eyes. “That does not give me leave to act like a barbarian.”
Holly made a point of eating her hash brown noisily after that.
Before long, both had joined Butler on the bridge, and while Artemis flew the subsurface probe housing the magnetometer, Holly started staring at lines.
“Okay, looks like we’re definitely in the ore field,” she said, staring at the lines which had gone all wobbly. Was this going to be her life?
Artemis cleared his throat. “Remember, we’re looking for—”
“A sharp signature in all the waves, I know,” Holly finished. “You’ve only told me like four times.”
For the next four hours, Daidalos chugged north through the first site, and Holly took turns with Artemis flying or watching the lines. Not a single hint of a long-lost nuclear submarine, but they’d probably be here a week before covering the field.
“It’s funny, this is what I always end up doing,” Holly said as she remotely flew the probe some one hundred metres below the surface.
“Hmm?” Artemis looked up from the field line readout.
“Cleaning up a human’s mess.” She grinned at him.
Artemis rolled his eyes. “You chose this.”
“I know,” Holly said, and thought of her mother. “And I would again.”
This was the routine for the next three days. Holly regularly found herself going cross-eyed staring at the field lines, and had taken to roaming the bow, letting the sea spray her to shock her back to life. With each passing day, the cold became less biting, whether or not the sun was out, and whether or not the sea was high. Perhaps there was something to the whole acclimatisation thing. There was something relieving about being so far away from Haven, as well. Perhaps all those people saying she really needed a vacation were right after all.
All of this changed on day number four, when Holly saw a sharp change in the contours. “No way,” she murmured.
“What? Do you see something?” Artemis was at her side in an instant.
“I think so,” Holly said, tracing a kink in the field line. “Worth a look?”
“Oh, yes,” Artemis said. “Such a definite discontinuity has to be something of at least geological interest.”
“Great,” Holly muttered. “The rock scientists will be thrilled.” But despite her flippant remarks, she watched with no small curiosity as the remotely operated drone, which Artemis had called Ikaros, was tossed over the railing by the side A-frame crane. If the little drone was indeed descending towards an open reactor core in the middle of the Barents Sea, even after all these years, it would be an apt name.
Half an hour into the descent, Holly broke the silence. “What do you think we’ll find?”
“A crushed pressure hull,” Artemis said.
“Probably just a nothing field of iron ore,” Butler said. “But maybe there’ll be a submarine. Maybe it’ll even be intact, which it will be if it went down to uncontrolled flooding.”
“That’d be something,” Holly said. “It would be nice if it was intact. More dignified, somehow.”
The tension that followed was palpable. None dared utter a word, save for Artemis steadily reading out depths. Two hundred metres, three hundred metres, and at four hundred metres Artemis hit the floodlights. They could illuminate an entire mall parking lot, and instead they illuminated something none of them had expected. There should’ve been a hull. What there was, was a debris field. Two halves of what once might have been a crowning achievement of the Red Fleet lay at opposite ends of a debris field some five hundred metres across. Artemis brought the drone down near the bow half, which had been torn to shreds just aft of the sail. Hull plating had ripped outwards like tinfoil, and even the pressure hull had been tortured out of shape—but outwards, not inwards like would be seen in an implosion.
Holly let out a shaky breath. “It looks like someone set off a bomb,” she murmured.
Artemis flicked the drone’s dosimeter on, and it clicked like a metronome. “There’s no doubt about it. This is a nuclear submarine.” He swapped to the radionucleide instrumentation. “The decay particles match Soviet reactor fuel.”
Butler, meanwhile, was still focused on the magnetometer’s output. “Hmm,” he murmured.
Holly traced the bulbous bow of the submarine on the screen. “They never had a chance.”
“It’s strange,” Artemis said.
“What is?”
“For a VM-A reactor to fail so catastrophically—and it must’ve done, the fuel is scattered across the seabed—the cooling would need to have been stopped entirely, and they couldn’t have had the chance to shut it down.” He manoeuvred the drone over the sail. “And you see? The escape trunk’s hatch is closed. Whatever happened, must have happened quickly. They didn’t even try to abandon the submarine.”
Butler cleared his throat. “Artemis, do you see that?” He traced what looked like a second disturbance in the field lines.
“…fascinating,” Artemis said. “Let’s investigate, shall we?”
The drone began to move away from the wreck of K-183.
“What do you think the odds are of two submarines wrecking in basically the same spot?” Holly opined. “It’s got to be small, right?”
“Microscopic,” Artemis agreed. “Unless they’re linked. Perhaps a training accident?”
“That would be the mother of all training accidents,” Butler said. “Maybe an American submarine.”
“Maybe.”
As they approached the second signature, a ghostly shape faded into view, and Holly’s stomach dropped. It was almost frighteningly perfect in its appearance. Just a little rust, but it sat upright on its keel, with no obvious damage but for some missing sections that Holly knew were where escape pods once belonged.
The LEPMarine logo still stood proudly on the shark-nose bow of the submarine.
“Well,” Artemis said, sitting back. “That is interesting.”