The elevator cube flashed downward through a hundred yards of soft sandstone to a small chamber composed entirely of hyperdense material harvested from the crust of a neutron star.
Opal guessed they had arrived at the chamber, and giggled at the memory of a stupid gnome in her high school who had asked what neutron stars were made of.
Neutrons, boy, Professor Leguminous had snapped. Neutrons! The clue is in the name.
This chamber held the record for being the most expensive room per square inch to construct anywhere on the planet, though it looked a little like a concrete furnace room. At one end was the elevator door; at the other were what looked like four missile tubes; and in the middle was an extremely grumpy dwarf.
“You are bleeping joking me?” he said, belly thrust out belligerently.
The jumbo pixies dumped Opal on the gray floor.
“Orders, pal,” said one. “Put her in the tube.”
The dwarf shook his head stubbornly. “I ain’t putting no one in a tube. Them tubes is built for rods.”
“I do believe,” said the second pixie, very proud of himself for remembering the information he was about to deliver, “that one of them reactor sites is depleted so the tube do be empty.”
“That sounded pretty good, Jumbo, except for the do be at the end,” said the dwarf, whose name was Kolin Ozkopy. “But even so, I need to know how the consequences of not putting a person in a tube are worse than the consequences of putting them in one?”
A sentence of this length would take a jumbo pixie several minutes to digest; luckily, they were spared the embarrassment of being pressed for an explanation when Kolin’s phone rang.
“Just a sec,” he said, checking caller ID. “It’s the warden.”
Kolin answered the phone with a flourish. “Y’ello. Engineer Ozkopy here.”
Ozkopy listened for a long moment, interjecting three uh-huhs and two D’Arvits before pocketing the phone.
“Wow,” he said, prodding the radiation suit with his toe. “I guess you’d better put her in the tube.”
Police Plaza, Haven City, The Lower Elements
Pip waggled his phone at the camera.
“You hear anything? Because I don’t. No one is calling this number, and I’ve got five bars. One hundred percent planetary coverage. Hell, I once took a call on a spaceship.”
Holly swiped the mike sensor. “We’re moving as fast as we can. Opal Koboi is in the shuttle bay right now. We just need ten more minutes.”
Pip adopted a singsong voice.
“Never tell a lie, just to get you by.
Never tell a tale, lest you go to jail.”
Foaly found himself humming along. It was the Pip and Kip theme song. Holly glared at him.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
Artemis grew impatient with the fruitless wrangling. “This is futile and, frankly, embarrassing. They have no intention of releasing Opal. We should evacuate now, at least to the shuttle bays. They are built to withstand magma flares.”
Foaly disagreed. “We’re secure here. The real danger is in Atlantis. That’s where the other Opal is. You said, and I concur, that the serious explosions, theoretical explosions, only occur with living beings.”
“Theoretical explosions are only theoretical until the theory is proven,” countered Artemis. “And with so many—” He stopped mid-sentence, which was very unlike him, as Artemis detested both poor grammar and poor manners. His skin tone faded from pale to porcelain, and he actually rapped his own forehead.
“Stupid. Stupid. Foaly, we are both imbeciles. I don’t expect lateral thinking from the LEP, but from you…”
Holly recognized this tone. She had heard it during previous adventures, generally before things went catastrophically wrong.
“What is it?” she asked, afraid of the answer, which must surely be terrible.
“Yeah,” agreed Foaly, who always had time to feel insulted. “Why am I an imbecile?”
Artemis pointed an index finger diagonally down and southwest in the approximate direction they had come from the J. Argon Clinic.
“The oxygen booth has addled my senses,” he said. “The clone. Nopal. She’s a living being. If she explodes, it could go nuclear.”
Foaly accessed the clone’s file on Argon’s Web site, navigating with blurred speed to the patient details.
“No. I think we should be okay there. Opal harvested her own DNA before the time line split.”
Artemis was angry with himself all the same for momentarily forgetting the clone.
“We were minutes into this crisis before the clone’s relevance occurred to me,” he said. “If Nopal had been created at a later date, my slow thinking could have cost lives.”
“There are still plenty of lives at stake,” said Foaly. “We need to save as many as we can.”
The centaur popped a Plexiglas cover on the wall and pressed the red button underneath. Instantly a series of Evac sirens began to wail throughout the city. The eerie sound spread like the keening of mothers receiving the bad news of their nightmares.