I will not be beaten by this so soon.

And to prove it, he deliberately composed a sentence with four words.

“I will be fine.”

“Oooh,” said Mulch, who always had trouble grasping the gravity of situations. “Four. Scary.”

The first thing was to get them down to the crash site, as it seemed obvious to everyone except Mulch that the space probe did not navigate its way through the atmosphere with pinpoint accuracy just to accidentally crash into a prison shuttle. With Holly at the controls, the stolen ship was soon slicing through the Atlantic depths, trailing intertwining streams of air bubbles.

“There’s something afoot here,” mused Artemis, gripping the fingers of his left hand tightly to stop them from shaking. “Vinyaya was taken out to hobble the LEP, then the probe gives up its own position, and someone phones in a tip allowing the Atlantis authorities just enough time to evacuate, and then the probe lands on a shuttle. Bad luck for the occupants?”

“Is that one of those rhetorical questions?” wondered Mulch. “I can never get the hang of those. Also, while we’re on the subject, what’s the difference between a metaphor and a simile?”

Holly snapped her fingers. “Somebody wanted everybody in the shuttle dead.”

“Somebody wanted us to think that everyone in the shuttle was dead,” corrected Artemis. “What a way to fake your own death. It will be months before the LEP can put the pieces together, if ever. That’s a nice head start for a fugitive.”

Holly turned to Foaly. “I need to know who was on that prison shuttle. Do you have an inside guy in Police Plaza?”

Butler was surprised. “Inside guy? I thought you guys were the inside guys.”

“We’re a little on the outside at the moment,” admitted Holly. “I’m supposed to be detaining Artemis.”

Juliet clapped her hands. “Have you ever actually obeyed an order?”

“It was kind of a non-order, and anyway I only obey orders when they are sound. In this case, it would be ridiculous to sit around for an hour in a burned-out pod while our enemy, whoever it is, gets on with phase two.”

“I agree,” said Artemis, keeping his voice level.

“How can we be sure there is a phase two?” Butler asked.

Artemis smiled grimly. “Of course there is phase two. Our opponent is fiendish and clever—there will never be a better time to drive home his advantage. It’s what I would have done, a few years ago.” His normal calm shattered for a moment, and he snapped at Foaly. “I need that list, Foaly. Who was on that prison shuttle?”

“Okay, okay, Mud Boy. I’m working on it. I need to go the long way around so my enquiries don’t land on Trouble’s desk. This is technical, complicated stuff.”

What the centaur would never admit was that he was actually asking his gifted nephew Mayne to hack into the police live site and text him the list in return for an extra-large ice-cream cone when he returned home.

“Okay. I have it, from my . . . eh . . . source.”

“Just tell me, Foaly.”

Foaly projected a screen from his phone to the wall. Beside each name there was a link to a data charge that would tell you everything about the prisoner right down to the color of his underpants, if that’s what you really wanted to know, and fairy psychologists were becoming more and more convinced that undergarment coloring was a vital part of a person’s development. Mulch spotted a name he knew, and it wasn’t a criminal.

“Hey, look. Old Vishby was piloting. They must have given him his license back.”

“Do you know him, Mulch?” asked Holly sharply.

For such a hardened ex-criminal, Mulch had a soft center. “Hey, why so crabby? I’m trying to help out here. Of course I know him. It would be pretty weird me saying ‘Hey, look, old Vishby, they gave him his license back’ if I didn’t know him.”

Holly took a breath, reminding herself how Mulch had to be handled. “You’re right, of course. So how do you know old Vishby?”

“Funny story, really,” replied Mulch, smacking his lips, wishing he had a chicken leg to go along with the story. “I escaped from him a few years ago when you were in the frame for murdering Julius. He never got over it. He still hates me, hates the LEP too for taking his licence. Sends me abusive mails occasionally. I send him back little vid boxes of myself laughing. Drives him crazy.”

“Someone with a grudge,” said Artemis. “Interesting. The perfect inside man. But who’s running him?”

Holly turned to study the projected list.

“This sprite, Unix. I took him in. He’s one of Turnball Root’s boys. A cold-blooded killer.” Holly paled. “Bobb Ragby is on here too. And Turnball himself. All these guys are Turnball’s. How in the name of the gods did he get his entire gang on one shuttle? This would have raised a dozen flags on the computer.”

“Unless . . .” said Artemis, scrolling down the list on Foaly’s screen. He tapped the data charge beside Bobb Ragby. His picture and file opened on a separate window, and Artemis quickly scanned it. “Look, there’s no mention of Turnball Root. According to this, Ragby was arrested for mail fraud and has no known affiliations or accomplices.” He tapped another link and read aloud. “‘File updated by . . . Mr. Vishby.’”

Holly was in shock. “It’s Turnball Root. He set this up.”

Holly herself had been responsible for the capture of Julius’s brother during her Recon initiation exercise. It was a story she had told Foaly many times.

“It would appear that Turnball is our adversary, which is not good news. But even taking his intellect and his hold over this Vishby person into account, we still don’t know how he commandeered a space probe.”

“It’s just not possible,” said Foaly, adding an equine harrumph to lend weight to a statement that even he did not believe.

“Possible or not, we’ll have to talk about it later,” said Holly, leveling the craft to just off horizontal. “We’re at the crash site.”

Everyone was relieved that the stolen ship had made it down in one piece. The mercenaries had probably stripped out much of what they didn’t need, to save weight, and, more than likely, they had been a little reckless with the crowbars as they’d gone about it. One loose rivet or cracked weld line would have been enough to allow a few atmospheres to squirt out, and the ship would have been crushed like a soda can in the hand of a giant who was immensely strong and didn’t like soda cans.

But the ship held its integrity in spite of an ominous rippling along the fuselage, which appeared suddenly.

“Who cares?” said Mulch, as usual failing to see the big picture. “It’s not even our ship. What are those mercenaries going to do, sue?” But even as he spoke, Mulch’s humor was tinged with loss.