Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex by Eoin Colfer Read Free Book Online

Artemis’s lack of belief in its existence, shunting shock waves before it. For a memory, it certainly seemed very real, each panel richly textured by the tribulations of space travel. Long jagged striations were etched into the nose cone like scars from lightning bolts, and buckshot dents peppered the fuselage. A ragged semicircular chunk was missing from one of the three fins, as though a deep-space creature had taken a bite from the passing craft, and strangely colored lichen was crayoned in the square patch vacated by a hull plate.
    Even Artemis had to admit it. “That doesn’t seem particularly ethereal. I must have a more vivid imagination than I had thought.”
    Two of the ship’s silencers blew out in rapid succession, and engine roar filled the bowl of gray sky.
    Artemis pointed a rigid finger at the craft. “You are not real!” he shouted, though even he did not hear the words. The ship was low enough now for Artemis to read the message written in several scripts and pictograms across the nose cone.
    “‘I come in peace,’” he mumbled, and thought: Four words. Death.
    Holly was thinking too, images of tragedy and destruction flashing past like the lights of a train carriage, but there was one other notion holding steady through the chaos.
    I can’t reach him from this rooftop. Artemis is going to die, and there’s nothing I can do but watch.
    And then a hysterical afterthought.
    Butler is going to kill me.

CHAPTER 2
THE JADE PRINCESS
AND CRAZY BEAR
    Cancún, Mexico; The Night Before
    The man in the rental Fiat 500 swore loudly as his broad foot mashed the tiny brake and accelerator pedals, stalling the tiny car for the umpteenth time.
    It might be a little easier to drive this miniature vehicle if I could sit in the backseat so my knees were not jammed under my chin, the man reasoned. And with that thought he pulled over sharply onto the verge bordering Cancún’s spectacular lagoon. In the reflected light of a million twinkling luxury-suite balcony lamps, he performed an act of vandalism on the Fiat that would definitely cost him his deposit and possibly send him rocketing to number one on the Hertz blacklist.
    “Better,” grunted the man, and tossed the driver’s seat down the verge.
    Hertz only has itself to blame, he thought, on a reasoning roll. This is what happens when you insist on giving a toy car to a man of my proportions. It’s like trying to load fifty-caliber rounds into a Derringer boot gun. Ridiculous .
    He crammed himself into the vehicle and, navigating from the backseat, pulled into the flow of cars, which even at close to midnight were packed together tighter than train carriages.
    I’m coming, Juliet, he thought, squeezing the steering wheel as though it were a threat to his little sister somehow. I’m on my way.
    The driver of this carelessly remodeled Fiat was of course Butler, Artemis Fowl’s bodyguard, though he had not always been known by that name. In the course of his career as a soldier of fortune, Butler had adopted many a nom de guerre to protect his family from recriminations. A band of Somali pirates knew him as Gentleman George, he had for a time hired himself out in Saudi Arabia under the name Captain Steele (Artemis had later accused him of having a touch of the screeching melodramas), and for two years a Peruvian tribe, the Isconahua, knew the mysterious giant who protected their village from an aggressive logging corporation only as El Fantasma de la Selva, the ghost of the jungle. Of course, since becoming Artemis Fowl’s bodyguard, there was no more time for side projects.
    Butler had traveled to Mexico at Artemis’s insistence, though insistence had hardly been necessary once Butler had read the message on his principal’s smartphone. They had been in the middle of a mixed martial-arts session earlier in the day when the phone rang. A polyphonic version of Morricone’s “Miserere,” which signified the arrival of a message.
    “No phones in the