The Arctic Incident

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 three feet. His lidless eyes rolled in panic, and his forked tongue flicked upward 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 center. But it didn’t have to be. There was a disadvantage to those 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 six feet 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 area 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. The chutes were natural vents that riddled the earth’s mantle and crust. Magma streams from the planet’s molten core blasted toward the surface at irregular intervals. If it wasn’t for these pressure releases, the earth would have shaken itself to fragments aeons since. The LEP had harnessed this natural power for express surface shots. Recon officers rode the flares in titanium eggs in times of emergency. For a more leisurely trip, shuttles ascended 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 the subatomic level.

The chute’s entrance loomed ahead. Massive and ringed by charred rock.

Holly switched on the helmet’s microphone.

“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 nonnuclear 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 heaved the rifle in Holly’s direction. It was a terrible throw, landing fifteen feet short. But it served its purpose as a distraction. The B’wa Kell triad member used the moment to fire up his wings. They were old models: 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, six-foot-thick steel doors shut the access tunnel off from the rest of the terminal. They were trapped in here, with a column of magma on the way. Not that the magma would kill them, there wasn’t much overspill from the flares. The superheated air would bake them drier than autumn leaves.