“Very well. Fourteen will have to do. Please, Holly, sit. Let me tell you about the project.”

Holly backed up slowly, searching Artemis’s face for the cockiness that usually dwelled in his smirk lines. It was not there.

Whatever this project is, she thought, it’s big.

Artemis placed his case on the table, popped it open, and spun the lid to reveal a screen inside. For a moment his delight in gadgetry surfaced, and he even managed a faint grin in Foaly’s direction. The grin stretched his lips no more than an inch.

“Look. You’ll like this little box.”

Foaly snickered. “Oh my stars! Is that. . could that possibly be. . a laptop? You have shamed us all with your brilliance, Arty.”

The centaur’s sarcasm drew groans from everyone.

“What?” he protested. “It’s a laptop. Even humans can’t expect anyone to be impressed by a laptop.”

“If I know Artemis,” said Holly, “something impressive is about to happen. Am I right?”

“You may judge for yourself,” said Artemis, pressing his thumb against a scanner on the case.

The scanner flickered, considering the proffered thumb, then flashed green, deciding to accept it. Nothing happened for a second or two, then a motor inside the case buzzed as though there were a small satisfied cat stretching in the case’s belly.

“Motor,” said Foaly. “Big deal.”

The lid’s reinforced metal corners suddenly detached, blasting away from the lid with a squirt of propellant, and suckered themselves to the ceiling. Simultaneously, the screen unfolded until it was more than three feet square with speaker bars along each edge.

“So it’s a big screen,” Foaly said. “This is just grandstanding. All we needed were a few sets of V-goggles.”

Artemis pressed another button on the case, and the metal corners suckered to the ceiling revealed themselves to be projectors, spewing forth streams of digi-data that coalesced in the center of the room to form a rotating model of the planet Earth. The screen displayed the Fowl Industries company logo surrounded by a number of files.