Inherit the Earth (36 page)

Damon shrugged again. “Maybe I should go to Lagrange-Five, then, and make my peace with Eveline. She might have been a lousy mother, but she’s the only one I have left . . . and
she
must know what all this is about, whether my father’s alive or not.”

“Nobody needs mothers anymore,” Madoc opined. “All that went out with the sterility plagues—but if you choose your friends wisely, they’ll be with you all the way. Whether you use the money or not, you can still be Damon Hart. If you and I stick together, we can still take on the world.”

Damon knew that they were talking at cross-purposes—that Madoc’s anxieties weren’t connecting with his at all. Even so, the underlying substance of Madoc’s argument was closer to the heart of the matter than Madoc probably knew.

Damon was still trying to figure out what his next step ought to be when the door buzzer went.

“Shit!” said Madoc, immediately moving to hit a combination of keys on the console of Lenny Garon’s display screen.

The camera mounted in the outside of the door dutifully showed them two men standing in the corridor, waiting for an answer to their signal. Damon couldn’t put a name to either one of them, but one of them was unusually tall—and he was sporting an ugly and very obvious bruise.

Damon echoed Madoc’s expletive.

“Who are they?” Madoc asked, having picked up the note of recognition in Damon’s tone.

“Probably cops,” Damon said. “The big one followed me from my building. I thought I’d put him out of it—I hit him hard enough to stop any ordinary man tailing me. Must be tougher or smarter than I thought.”

The man with the bruise was already growing impatient. “Mr. Tamlin?” he said. “It’s all right, Mr. Tamlin—we’re not the police. We just want—”

Mr. Tamlin?
Damon echoed silently, wondering why on earth they were addressing themselves to Madoc rather than to him. Before he had time to focus on the seemingly obvious inference, however, the tall man’s attempted explanation was brutally cut short. Something hurtled into him from beyond the limits of the picture frame and sent him cannoning into his companion.

“Oh,
shit
!” said Madoc, with even more feeling than before—but he was already diving for the door to wrestle it open.

Damon, for once, was much slower to react. He was still trying to piece together the logic of what was happening.

Lenny Garon had obviously not gone far when Madoc had suggested that he take a walk. Indeed, he had evidently taken it upon himself to stand guard somewhere along the corridor. As soon as he had seen the two strangers press his door buzzer, he had decided that Damon and Madoc were in dire need of his protection—and he had thrown himself at the two visitors with little or no regard for his own safety. If they were telling the truth about not being the police, Lenny might be in very grave danger
indeed; he didn’t have the kind of IT which could pull him through a
real
fight.

Madoc had the door open by now, and he hardly paused to take stock of the situation before throwing himself at the tall man’s companion, who was already struggling to his feet.

The man with the bruise had knocked Lenny aside, but wasn’t going after him. Instead, he was backing up toward the far wall of the corridor, holding his arms out as if he were trying to calm everything down. He had opened his mouth, probably to shout “Wait!” but he choked on the syllable as he looked into the open doorway and caught sight of Damon. The shock in his eyes seemed honest enough. He really had come looking for Madoc Tamlin, not knowing that Damon would be here too.

Damon still hesitated, but Lenny Garon didn’t. Lenny had already committed himself and he was sky-high on his own adrenalin. The boy went after the tall man like a ferret after a rat, and his adversary had no alternative but to turn his placatory gesture into a stern defense.

Cop or not, the man with the bruise was certainly no innocent in the art of self-defense, and he had already been knocked down too often to tolerate being put down again. He blocked Lenny’s lunging blows and hit the boy, then grabbed him and smashed him into the wall as hard as he could—hard enough to break bones.

That made Damon’s mind up. He went after the tall man for a second time, determined to amplify the bruises he had already inflicted. As he charged through the doorway he didn’t even look to see what had become of Madoc and the second man; he trusted Madoc’s streetfighting instincts implicitly.

Again the man with the bruise tried to avoid the fight. He backed up the corridor as rapidly as he could, and this time he actually managed to shout: “Wait! You don’t—”

Damon didn’t wait for the “understand”—he kicked out at the knee he’d already weakened in the alley. The tall man yelped in agony and dropped to one knee, but he was still trying to scramble away, still trying to put a halt to the whole fight.

Damon figured that there’d be plenty of time for discussion once he and Madoc had the two men safely under control in Lenny’s capsule, so he didn’t stop. He slashed at the man’s throat exactly as he had done before, and made some sort of connection before something slammed into his back and pitched him forward onto his knees.

His instinct was to lash out backward, on the assumption that someone had charged into him, but there was no one there—and the pain in his back grew and grew with explosive rapidity, giving him just time to realize that he had been shot yet again: hit by some kind of dart whose poison was making merry hell with his nervous system. His IT was undoubtedly fighting the effect, and the pain soon slackened to crawling discomfort—but he didn’t lose consciousness. His rigid body hit the ground with a sickening thud, but the dart hadn’t been loaded with the kind of poison that would force his senses to switch off.

As the two men snatched him up and scuttled toward the stairs, though, he began to wish that it had.

D
amon never did lose consciousness, but the consciousness he kept had little in reserve for keeping track of what was happening to his paralyzed body. He knew that he had been loaded into the back of a car which roared off at high speed, and he knew that when the car eventually stopped he was taken out again and bundled into a helicopter—but the only part of the journey that really
commanded
his attention was the time they tried to force his paralyzed limbs into a different configuration so that they could strap him into one of the helicopter’s seats. He heard a great deal more than he saw, but most of what he heard was curses and oblique complaints from which he wouldn’t have learned anything worth a damn even if he’d been able to concentrate.

What he
was
conscious of, to the expense of almost everything else, was the battle inside his body for control of his neurones. He knew that the sensation of being occupied by hundreds of thousands of ants burrowing their way through his tissues wasn’t
really
the movement of his nanomachines, but it was hard to imagine it any other way. It wasn’t especially painful, but it was severely discomfiting, both psychologically and physically. He was reasonably certain that he would come through it safely and sanely, but it was an ordeal nevertheless.

Damon found a little time to wonder whether the two hit
men—which was what they presumably were, given that they certainly didn’t seem to be cops—knew what effect the weapons they carried might have on moderately IT-rich victims, and whether they cared, but it wasn’t until he began to recover fully possession of himself that he was able to pay close attention to their conversation. By that time, the thrum of the helicopter’s rotors had bludgeoned them into taciturnity—a taciturnity that might have lasted until they landed had not the man he’d ambushed in the alley noticed that Damon was recovering from the effects of the shot. That was enough to restart the catalogue of complaints; his luckless pursuer obviously had a lot of grievances to air.

“You’ve got a real problem, you know that?” the tall man said. “You hear me? A real problem.”

Damon fought for the composure necessary to move his head from side to side and blink his eyes. When he eventually succeeded in clearing his blurred vision, he was surprised to see that the bruise on the man’s face was in better condition than it had any right to be. Somewhere along the line, he’d slapped some synthetic skin over it to provide his resident nanotech with an extra resource. The expression surrounding the bruise was one of whiney resentment.

Damon was sitting in a seat directly behind the helicopter’s pilot. The shorter man who’d come to Madoc’s apartment with the man with the fading bruise was sitting beside the pilot; the copter only had the four seats. Reflexively, Damon moved his reluctant hand toward the lock on his safety harness, but the tall man reached out to stop him.

“Careful!” he said. “You got me in enough trouble as it is. Anything else happens to you, I’ll be out of a job for sure.
Please
sit tight. None of this was supposed to happen. If you’d just given me time to
talk
. . . like I said, you got a real problem, lashing out like that all the time. It’s crazy!”

Damon felt an impulse to laugh, but he wasn’t yet in any shape to act on it. He tried to edge sideways so that he could look out of the porthole beside his seat, but the effort proved too much.
Beyond the pilot, though, he could see dark green slopes and snow-capped peaks as well as sky. He thought he recognized Cobblestone Mountain directly ahead of the copter’s course, although it was difficult to believe that they’d come so far in what had not seemed to be a long time.

“It isn’t funny,” the tall man complained, having deciphered the attempted laugh. “I guess I might have asked for it, the first time, waiting till you were in the alley before I tried to catch up and not realizing you’d gone in there to jump me—but what was all that stuff at the kid’s apartment? We
told
you we weren’t the police. Stupid kid could have got himself badly hurt.”

By the time this speech was finished Damon had got his head far enough up to take a peep through the porthole, but it didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know. They were in the hills, heading for the Sespe Wilderness.

“What happened to Madoc?” Damon asked weakly.

“We left him laid out on the kid’s bed, with the VE pak cradled in his arms. The police will have them both by now—and don’t blame us for having to do it that way. All we wanted was to get the tape to where it was always supposed to go. We would have let Tamlin go his own way if you hadn’t practically started a war. The kid’s in hospital again, but he’ll be okay. You’ll have to talk to him about his attitude—he doesn’t have the IT for that kind of action.”

“You didn’t know I was there, did you?” Damon whispered, just to make sure. “I
thought
I left you in no shape to follow me.”

“Damn right. Dirty trick, kicking a guy in the head when he’s down. When I woke up I had to get new instructions. I was told to go get the tape, so that we could deliver it to Interpol, just as we intended when we left it with the burned-out body. You really are a nuisance, you know that? Thanks to you, I am having the worst day of my
life
. All I wanted to do was
talk
to you—and now you’ve
really
messed things up.”

“You followed me into the alley because you wanted to talk to me?”

“Sure. Once you’d got rid of Yamanaka’s bugs my employers
figured it was safe to have a private word. You could have had it in town and been free and clear by dinnertime, if you hadn’t taken it into your fool head to start a shooting match in a public corridor.”

“
You
started a shooting match,” Damon pointed out. “Lenny only started a brawl.”

“Either way,” the tall man said in an aggrieved tone, “the cops will have dug out every bug in the walls by now and run the tapes. Your face, my face . . . and the face of my colleague here, who had no option but to pull his gun before your friend carved him up. All you had to do was let us in, but you had to wade in and we had to defend ourselves any way we could. Violence escalates—and now we’re
all
in Yamanaka’s file. You could have cost us our
jobs
.”

“How sad,” Damon muttered. “Who exactly
is
your employer?”

“I can’t answer that,” the tall man complained. “All I wanted was a quiet word, and now I’m up for kidnapping. They have my
face
. They never got my face before, but who knows what’ll happen now? I could be in real trouble.”

“Why?” Damon wanted to know. “How many kidnappings did you do
before
they got a picture of your face?”

His captor wasn’t about to answer that one either.

“Why didn’t your
employer
have his quiet word before he turned me loose last time?” Damon demanded, allowing his tone to declare that
he
was the one who had the serious grievance, even though he no longer felt as if he were a fleshy ants’ nest. “Why come after me again, after a mere matter of hours?”

“Something else went wrong,” the tall man muttered. “You Heliers are absolute hell to deal with, I’ll give you that.”

“What?”

The man with the bruise shrugged his shoulders impatiently. “We were monitoring an eye at the place we left Arnett,” he said. “We were expecting hugs all round when your people came to get him—but that wasn’t the way it went. They shot him! Can
you believe that? They
shot
him. Next thing we know, he’s been dumped in the road!”