Текст книги "Inherit the Earth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Back in the early twenty-first century the precursors of today’s self-styled continental engineers had enjoyed a honeymoon of fashionability by virtue of the greenhouse effect and the perceived threat of a significant rise in the world’s sea level. When global warming hadn’t produced a new Deluge, even in Shanghai and the South Seas, they’d deflected the results of their research into building artificial islands aimed at the tourist trade. Such islands had initially had to be anchored to subsurface structures by mechanical holdfasts because Leon Gantz’s techniques of biotech cementation hadn’t been around in those days, but anyone who cared to employ gantzers on a sufficiently lavish scale could now make better provision. Building mountains underwater was just as easy as building them anywhere else. The ocean hereabouts was full of deep trenches but it wasn’t uniformly deep, and even if it were it would only make the task of securing new land more expensive, not more difficult in technical terms.

Even natural islands, Damon knew, had often been personal property back in the buccaneering days of classical capitalism—but allthe artificial islands had been owned by the corps or individuals who had put them in place, and probably still were. That didn’t exclude them from the Net, and hence from the global village, but it made them relatively easy to protect from spy eyes and the like. If there was anywhere on Earth that secrets could be kept in reasonable safety, this was probably one of them.

The plane came down on an airstrip even tinier than the one from which it had taken off, gantzed out of dark earth in a narrow clearing between dense tropical thickets.

When Steve Grayson came back to release Damon from the trick harness he was carrying a gun: a wide-barreled pepperbox. If it was loaded with orthodox shot it would be capable of inflicting widespread but superficial injuries, but it couldn’t be classed as a lethal weapon. Were it to go off, Damon would lose a lot of blood very quickly, and it would certainly put him out of action for a while, but his nanomachines would be able to seal off the wounds without any mortal damage being done.

“No need to worry, Mr. Hart,” the stout man said. “You’ll be safe here until the carnival’s over.”

“Safe from whom?” Damon asked as politely as he could. “What exactly is the carnival?Who’s doing all this?”

He wasn’t surprised when he received no answers to any of these questions—but the expression which flitted across Grayson’s face suggested that the pilot wasn’t just tormenting him. Damon wondered whether Grayson had any more idea than he did why he had been paid to bring his prisoner here, or what might be going on.

Damon wondered whether his streetfighting skills might be up to the task of knocking the gun out of the Australian’s hand and then kicking the shit out of his corpulent form, but he decided not to try. He didn’t know how to activate and instruct the plane’s automatic systems, let alone fly it himself, so he had no way of escaping the island even if he could disarm and disable the man.

The air outside the plane was oppressively humid. Damon allowed himself to be guided across the landing strip. A jeep, very similar to the one Karol had used to drive him to the airstrip on Molokai, was parked in the shadow of a thick clump of trees.

A man was waiting in the driving seat of the jeep. He was as short as the pilot but he was much slimmer and—if appearances could be trusted—much older. His skin was the kind of dark coffee color which most people who lived in tropical regions preferred. He didn’t have a gun in his hand, but Damon wasn’t prepared to assume that he didn’t have one at all.

“I’m truly sorry about this, Mr. Hart,” the man in the jeep said, in what seemed to Damon to be an overly punctilious English accent, “but we weren’t sure that we could persuade you to come here of your own accord and the matter is urgent. Until we can get to the people who have Arnett everyone connected with your family may be in danger.” Turning to the pilot he added: “You’d better go quickly, Mr. Grayson. Take the plane to Hilo—then make yourself scarce, just in case.”

“Who are you?” Damon demanded as the Australian obediently turned away and headed back to his cockpit.

“Get in, Mr. Hart,” the thin man said. “My name is Rajuder Singh. I’ve known your foster parents for a long time, but I doubt that any of them ever mentioned me. I’m only support staff.”

“Did Karol Kachellek arrange this?”

“It’s for your own protection. I know how you must feel about it, but it really is a necessary precaution. Please get in, Mr. Hart.”

Damon climbed into the passenger seat of the vehicle and settled himself, suppressing his reflexive urge to offer violent resistance to what was being done to him. The jeep glided into a narrow gap in the trees and was soon deep in a ragged forest of neocycads, thin-boled mock conifers, and a dozen other species that Damon couldn’t classify at all. The road was narrow but it didn’t seem to have any potholes. The island was presumably equipped with a ready supply of men with shovels and buckets, although none was in evidence now.

The forest was quiet, after the fashion of artificially regenerated forests everywhere; the trees, genetically engineered for rapid growth in the unhelpful soil, were not fitted as yet to play host to the overelaborate fauna which ancient tropical forests had entertained before the logger holocaust. A few tiny insects splashed on the windshield of the jeep as it moved through the gathering night, but the only birds whose cries could be heard were seabirds.

“You mustn’t blame Dr. Kachellek, Mr. Hart,” Rajuder Singh told him blandly. “He had to make a decision in a hurry. He didn’t expect you to come to Molokai. Our people should be able to bring the situation under control, given time, but we don’t yet know who we’re up against and things have moved a little too fast for comfort. He wasright to do what he did—I’m afraid that you’re in more danger than you know, and it might not have been a good idea for you to arrive in Los Angeles on a scheduled flight. I’ll show you why in a few minutes’ time.”

“Who, exactly, are our people?” Damon wanted to know.

Rajuder Singh smiled. “Friends and allies,” he said unhelpfully. “There aren’t so many of us left, nowadays, but we still keep the faith.”

“Conrad Helier’s faith?”

“That’s right, Mr. Hart. You’d be one of us yourself, I suppose, if you hadn’t chosen to digress.”

“To digress?That assumes that I’ll be back on track, someday.”

Rajuder Singh’s only answer to that was a gleaming smile.

“Are you saying that there’s some kind of conspiracy involving my foster parents?” Damon asked, unable to keep the aggression from filtering back into his voice. “Some kind of grand plan in which you and Karol and Eveline are all involved?”

“We’re just a group of friends and coworkers,” the dark-skinned man replied lightly. “No more than that—but someone seems to be attacking us, and we have to protect our interests.”

“Might Surinder Nahal be involved with the people attacking you?”

“It’s difficult to believe that, but we really don’t know yet. Until we do know, it’s necessary to be careful. This is a very bad time—but that’s presumably why our unknown adversaries chose this particular moment for their assault.”

Damon remembered that Karol Kachellek had been equally insistent that this was a “very bad time.” Why, he wondered again, was the present moment any worse than any other time?

The sun had climbed high into the clear blue sky and Damon was finding its heat horribly oppressive by the time the vehicle reached its destination. The destination in question was a sizable bungalow surrounded by a flower garden. Damon was oddly relieved to observe that the roof was topped by an unusually large satellite dish. However remote this place might be it was an integral part of the Web; all human civilization was its neighborhood. The flowers were reassuring too, by virtue of the orderly layout of their beds and the sweet odors they secreted. There were insects aplenty here, including domestic bees.

Rajuder Singh showed Damon through the double door of the bungalow into a spacious living room. When Damon opened his mouth to speak, though, the slim man held up his hand. He swiftly crossed the room to a wall-mounted display screen, beckoning Damon to follow.

“This is the same netboard which carried Operator one-oh-one’s earlier messages,” Rajuder Singh said while his nimble fingers brought the screen to life.

Damon stared dumbly at the crimson words which appeared there, reading them three times before he accepted, reluctantly, that they really did say what they seemed to say.

He had not known what to expect, but he could never have expected this. It was as terrible as it was absurd.

The message read:

CONRAD HELIER IS NOT DEAD

CONRAD HELIER NOW USES THE NAME “DAMON HART”

“DAMON HART” IS NAMED AN ENEMY OF MANKIND

FIND AND DESTROY “DAMON HART”

—OPERATOR 101

Fourteen

M

adoc Tamlin had had no alternative but to return to his apartment to gather the equipment he needed for his expedition, but he had known that the necessity was unfortunate.

“I want to go with you,” said Diana Caisson, in a tone which suggested that she intended to have what she wanted no matter what objections Madoc Tamlin might raise. “You owe me that. Damonowes me that.”

“I really need someone here to man the phone,” Madoc lied. “This business is moving too fast and it’s getting seriously weird. If you want to help Damon, here’s where you’d be most useful.”

“I’ve been manning your stupid phone for two solid days,” Diana told him. “What’s the point if you’re always out of touch? This is the first time I’ve clapped eyes on you since we went to visit that idiot boy in the hospital, and I don’t intend letting you out of my sight until I get an explanation of what’s going on and a chance to help. You owe—”

“I don’t owe you anything!” Madoc protested, appalled by her temerity. “Not even explanations. I only let you stay here for old time’s sake—you were supposed to be gone by now. You don’t have any claim on me at all.”

Diana wasn’t impressed. “ Damon Hartowes me explanations. I lived with him for nearly two years. I never knew that he was Conrad Helier’s son, and I certainly never knew that he was Conrad Helier himself, and an enemy of mankind. The day after I gave up trying to make our relationship work I found out I’d been living with a trunkful of mysteries, and they’ve been getting stranger and stranger with every hour that passes. Two years, Madoc! I want to know what I wasted my two years on, and if you’re Damon’s legman in Los Angeles you’re the one who has to start paying me off. Wherever you go, I want to go—and whatever you find out, I want to know.”

“This wasn’t part of the deal,” Madoc told her. “I let you stay for a couple of nights when you walked out on Damon—that’s not the same as taking you into partnership. One of the things Damon is paying me for is discretion. He doesn’t want anyoneknowing what I find out, and he’d certainly include you in that company.”

“It’s okay for me to carry his messages,” she pointed out. “It’s okay for me to pass on messages from your pet streetfighter. What’s notokay for me to know? What is it that your apprentice Webwalkers have turned up that even Interpol isn’t supposed to know?”

The problem, Madoc knew, was time. What Interpol didn’t know yet, they might very soon find out—and they’d find out all the sooner if he were fool enough to start blabbing to Diana Caisson, even in the privacy of his apartment or his car. It was easier for him to turn up evidence of work done through illegal channels than it was for officers of the law, but this case was now a triple disappearance, with a rich icing of crazier-than-usual Eliminator antics. The police would be making a very big effort now, even if they hadn’t before. Whoever had stirred up this hornet’s nest had done a thorough job. He had no time to argue with Diana, and the only way to shut her up was to give in on something.

Anyway, he rationalized, if he forced her to stay behind that would only increase the danger that she might do something really inconvenient by way of getting her own back—like calling up the LAPD and sending them after him.

“It could be dangerous,” he said, knowing that it wouldn’t serve as a deterrent.

“It’ll probably be less dangerous,” she countered, “if we both know exactly what we’re trying to do. What have you found?”

Before answering, Madoc collected the last of the crude mechanical tools he’d come back to gather. The men who had broken into Silas Arnett’s house hadn’t needed cutting gear and crowbars, but Madoc hadn’t got the kind of technical backup they must have had, and he was heading for a different kind of house. If it was a fortress, it was likely to be a brutefortress, not a sophisticated affair of anxious eyes, clever locks, and mazy software. He was able to shut Diana up with a gesture—but only because the gesture implied that he’d pick up the conversation later.

Finally, he led her to the door of the apartment and let her follow him out. He signaled once again that he couldn’t speak, for fear of the eyes and ears with which the walls were undoubtedly sown, and she had perforce to wait until they got into the car. Even then, he insisted on bringing the vehicle out into the street before relaxing slightly.

It was midmorning and the traffic was well below its daytime peak, but it didn’t matter—he wasn’t headed downtown.

When Diana was certain that he had run out of excuses she repeated her last question, richly salted with seething impatience.

“An address way out east,” he told her. “It’s not a million miles away from the alleys, but it’s not gang turf. Above the ground it still looks derelict, but the word is that some heavy gantzing’s been done underneath by way of excavation. The hole’s been set up for use as a black-box drop site, supposedly untraceable. Nothing’s authentically untraceable, but no one’s had a reason yet to send hooks into this one. Harriet’s boys tipped her off that something was on, though, and she dug up some background on it, working back from the cowboy contractors who did the gantzing.”

“I thought the idea of gantzing was to raise buildings up,” Diana objected, “not to dig holes.”

“The neobacteria that cement walls together are only part of the gantzing set,” Madoc told her wearily. “You have to have others that can unstick things, else you wouldn’t be able to shape the product. Moleminers use the unstickers to burrow through solid rock. It’s not the ideal way to dig out a permanent cellar or tunnel but it does the trick—and you can use the cementers to harden the walls and ceilings, making sure they’ll bear the load. Anyway, that’s not the point. Even moonlight labor has to be paid for. The title deeds to the property are locked up tight, but there’s a trail leading back from the people who worked on it to one of the people Damon told me to ask about: the one who can’t be located in San Diego, Surinder Nahal.”

“You think these underground workings might be where Silas Arnett’s being held? The Praill girl too?”

“Maybe. Maybe it’s something else entirely. All I know is that I need to take a look, and there aren’t any spy eyes I can use. The Old Lady dug up some information about the security they installed, but being gantzers rather than silicon men it’s mostly solid. Not much of a challenge to a man of my talents, but I guess they didn’t want to bring in state-of-the-art stuff because putting a top-quality electronic fence around a supposedly derelict building would look suspicious in itself.”

“So we’re going to break in and look around?” Diana said, stressing the weto make sure that he understood that she had no intention of waiting in the car.

“If we can.”

“Suppose weget into trouble? Is anybody going to come looking for us? Will anyone know where to look?”

“It’s not that kind of deal, Di—but if we wereto vanish from human ken, the Old Lady would put two and two together. She’d tell Damon.”

“Damon? Not the police.”

“He’s the man who’s paying us—and one of the things he’s paying for is discretion.”

“What else have you found out?”

“Like I said,” Madoc retorted obstinately, “one of the things he’s paying for is discretion.”

“If he’d been discreet enough not to use my body in his porno-tapes, I wouldn’t be here,” Diana said, “but he did and I am. When he talked to me he said it was no big secret, but that was probably a lie. IsDamon really Conrad Helier, like the last notice said?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Madoc said. “I knew him when he was barely starting to shave and I nursed him practically day by day from his first fight to his last. Believe me, I’ve seen enough of him over the last ten years to know that he isn’t a hundred and thirty-seven years old trying to pass for twenty-six. He’s exactly what he appears to be—and that includes the fact that he’s Damon Hart and not Damon Helier anymore. If Operator one-oh-one wants some lunatic to take a shot at Damon, it’s not because anyone thinks he’s an enemy of mankind unworthy of immortality—it’s because Operator one-oh-one now thinks Damon may be dangerous to him. Maybe he knows that the Old Lady and I have been sniffing around—maybe he thinks that I’m getting too close for comfort.”

“If he thinks that,” Diana pointed out, suffering a sudden attack of logic, “we’re probably riding straight into a trap.”

“Do you want to get out?” Madoc asked. “If you do, better do it now. The badlands start at the end of the street.”

“I’m sticking to you like gantzing glue,” she told him stiffly. She didn’t believe what he’d said about the Operator getting spooked because he and the Old Lady had got too close. Neither did he—but he’d had to say something, to cover up the fact that he hadn’t the slightest idea why anyone would draw Damon into the game and then make a show of setting him up for target practice.

As they passed from the well-tended streets into an unreclaimed district Madoc slowed down slightly and checked for signs of pursuit—but when he found none he speeded up again. If Damon hadn’t sent an e-mail canceling the instruction that Madoc should meet him at the airport Madoc would have been in a quandary about whether to delay the adventure, but since Damon had decided to stay away for a while longer Madoc felt that the whole burden of action was on his shoulders, and that he had to press on as quickly as possible.

“I’m here because I care, you know,” Diana said defensively. “I walked out on Damon because he hurt me, but it was as much for his good as for mine—to make him see what’s happening to him. I still love him.”

“I’d never have guessed,” Madoc muttered, with savage irony.

“You don’t understand,” she said flatly.

“That’s a matter of opinion. I should have left you tied and gagged at my place. If I had any sense . . .”

“If you had any sense, Maddie,” she told him, “you’d have a nice safe job with PicoCon—an honest job, with prospects. There’s no real profit in living on the edge, you know. It might be more fun, but it won’t take you anywhere in the long run. The day of the buccaneers is long gone.”

This new argumentative tack was even more irritating than the one she’d set aside. “Did Damon tell you that?” Madoc said acidly. “Did you consider the possibility that he might have been trying to convince himself? There’s alwaysscope for buccaneers. Rumor has it that the best and boldest of the old ones are still alive, if not exactly kicking. Adam Zimmerman never died, so they say—and if Conrad Helier didn’t, my bet is that he’s sleeping right next door.” He realized, belatedly, that he had been so concerned to score the debating point—off Damon rather than Diana—that he had let discretion slip a little.

Diana didn’t seem to realize that she’d just got a partial answer to her question about what else he’d found out while digging on Damon’s behalf. “Who’s Adam Zimmerman?” she asked, attacking the more basic question.

“The guy who set up the Ahasuerus Foundation. Known in his own day—or shortly thereafter—as the Man Who Cornered the Future or the Man Who Stole the World. Born some time before the turn of the millennium, vanished some time after.”

“But he’d be more than two hundred years old,” Diana objected. “The oldest man alive only passed a hundred and sixty a year or two back—the news tapes are always harping on about the record being broken.”

“The record only applies to those alive and kicking,” Madoc told her. “Back in the twentieth century, people who wanted to live forever knew they weren’t going to make it to the foot of the escalator. Some elected to be put in the freezer as soon as they were dead, looking forward to the day when it would be possible to resurrect them and give them back their youth. Multimillionaires who couldn’t take it with them sometimes spent their dotage pouring money into longevity research, stone-age rejuve technologies and susan—that’s short for suspended animation. Long-term freezing did a lot of damage, you see—very difficult to thaw out tissues without mangling all or most of the cells. The tale they tell is that Zimmerman tried to ride a susan escalator to the foot of the emortality escalator, commissioning the foundation he established to keep him alive and ageless by whatever means they could, until the time becomes ripe for him to wake up and drink from the fount of youth. Now that’sbold buccaneering, wouldn’t you say.”

“And you think Conrad Helier went to Ahasuerus in search of a similar deal?” Diana said, picking up the point which he shouldn’t have let fall. “You think he mightbe still alive, and that if he is, that’s where Ahasuerus comes in.”

“I don’t think anything,” Madoc said, wishing that he could sound more convincing, “but if there’s some kind of interesting link between Ahasuerus and Helier, that would be a candidate. It’s impossible to say—Ahasuerus is stitched up very tight indeed. They’re verykeen on privacy. It’s partly a hangover from the days when they faced a lot of hostility because of their founder’s reputation, but it’s more than just a habit. Who knows how many famous men might be lurking in the vaults, sleeping their way to immortality because they were born too early to make it while awake? I’d be willing to bet that there wouldn’t be one in ten that the Eliminators would consider worthy of immortality.”

For once, Diana had no reply ready. She seemed to be thinking over the implications of this intriguing item of urban folklore, which obviously hadn’t come her way before. It hadn’t come Madoc’s way either, but the Old Lady had a long memory.

It was perhaps as well, Madoc thought, that Diana had finally fallen silent. There was work to be done, and if she intended to play her part she’d need to keep her head.

Madoc stopped the car, then checked the deserted street and its glassless windows very carefully, searching for signs of movement or occupation. There was no sign that anything was amiss. At night there would have been rats, cats, and dogs roaming around, but at noonday those kinds of scavengers stayed out of sight.

He reached under his seat to pick up the bag he’d brought from the apartment, opening it briefly to pull out a couple of the items he’d stashed within it.

“Are we here?” Diana asked—and then, without waiting for an answer, added: “Is that a crowbar?” Obviously she’d had her mind on higher things while he’d been getting the stuff together.

“No,” he said, “and yes. That is, no, we still have a couple of blocks to walk, on tiptoe—and yes, it’s a crowbar. Sometimes scanners and slashcards are second best to brute force. You doknow how to tiptoe, don’t you?”

“I can be as quiet as you,” she assured him, “but it seems silly to tiptoe in broad daylight.”

“Just go carefully,” Madoc said, with a slight sigh, “and carry this.” He gave her a flamecutter, refusing to listen to her protest that it was at least three times as heavy as the crowbar and twice as heavy as whatever remained in the bag.

Madoc got out of the car and closed the door quietly. Diana did likewise. He set off along the rubble-littered pavement, treading as carefully as he could. She followed, matching his studied quietness.

When they got to the particular ruin that he was looking for, Madoc set about examining its interior with scrupulous patience. There were no obvious signs of recent gantzing on the crumbling walls, but a host of tiny details inside the shell revealed to Madoc’s forewarned eye that this was not the rubble heap it pretended to be. In a corner of the room that was furthest away from the street he found the head of a flight of stone steps leading down into what had been a cellar, and once he’d eased aside the charred planks that were blocking the way down it was easy enough to see that the door at the bottom was perfectly solid. When he’d tiptoed down to it he found that it had two locks, one of which was electronic and one of which was crudely mechanical. Madoc put the crowbar aside for the moment and set to work with a scanner.

It took two minutes of wizardry to release the electronic lock, and five of patient leverage to dislodge the screws holding the mechanical lock. Madoc eased the door open and stepped gingerly inside, checking the corridor within before letting Diana in behind him. No attempt had been made to conceal the fact that the walls had been recently gantzed.

When Diana had pulled the door closed behind her Madoc plucked a flashlight from his satchel and switched it on. The flashlight showed him that the corridor was at least twenty meters long, and that it had another door at the further end. There were several alcoves let into the walls, which might or might not hide further doors. Fixing the field of illumination on the floor ahead of him, Madoc began to move deeper into what now seemed to him to be an unexpectedly complex network of cellars. He figured that all the inner doors would be locked at least as securely as the one through which they’d come, and that it might require considerable effort to locate the one behind which the excavation’s real treasures were concealed. As things turned out, however, the first shadowy covert let into the corridor wall turned out to have no door within it—it was simply a portal giving uninterrupted access to a room about three meters by four.

The floor of the room was even more glittery than the sand-gantzed exterior of the PicoCon building; it looked almost as if it had been compounded out of broken glass. Stretched out on the gleaming surface, with both arms awkwardly outstretched, was a blackened humanoid shape which Madoc mistook at first for some kind of weird sculpture. It was, in fact, Diana who first leaped to the more ominous conclusion, which Madoc deduced when her sharp intake of breath hissed in his right ear.

“Oh shit,” he said. He had seen dead bodies before—he had even seen burned bodies before—but he had never seen human remains as badly charred as these. A little of the ash that had once been flesh had dusted onto the floor, as if the pitch-dipped skeleton had shed an eerie shadow. On the corpse’s tarry breast, however, was something innocent of any fire damage: a VE pak, placed atop the dead man’s heart. If it had been resting on a tabletop, Madoc would have whisked it away into an inside pocket without a moment’s delay, but he hesitated to take it from where it had been so carefully set. It looked uncomfortably like bait in a trap.

“Do you think that’s Silas Arnett?” Diana asked. Her voice fractured as she spoke the words, so that the whisper became louder than she had intended.

“I hope not,” Madoc said—but he had no idea who to hope it might be instead. He might have hoped that it was an ancient corpse which had lain undiscovered for years, but his nose would have told him otherwise even if the floor on which it lay and the object set upon it had not been products of contemporary technology.

They were both still hovering in the doorless entrance, uncertain as to whether they dared to approach and crouch down to examine the body, when the door at the far end of the corridor opened with a considerable crash. Madoc instantly stepped back, using the flashlight to see what was happening.

Two men had come through the door: men with guns in their hands.

By the time he heard their warnings and recognized the weapons they were holding out before them, Madoc’s panic had already been leavened by a certain relief. It could have been worse. It couldhave been the people who had killed the poor bastard stretched out on the floor and torched his corpse. Compared with men capable of such an act as that, the police could only seem gentle. Madoc had been under arrest a dozen times before, and had survived every time.

Obediently, he dropped the flashlight on the floor of the corridor, and the tool kit too. He even raised his hands before stepping back into the room from which he’d just emerged.

“Well,” he muttered to Diana, who was trying to see over his shoulder, “you wanted in, and you’re in. I only hope you can talk your way out again.”

The two cops moved confidently forward to complete the arrest. As soon as they had relaxed, Madoc grabbed Diana, maneuvered her through the empty doorway, and shoved her with all the force he could muster along the corridor toward the on-coming cops. She had raised her own arms, and her hands grappled for purchase as she cannoned into the two men and tried to stop herself falling.

While the cops tried to catch her, and to save themselves from being bowled over, Madoc plucked the VE pak off the chest of the blackened corpse with his left hand while the right groped for the crowbar. Once he had both items securely within his grip he moved forward with a ruthless determination befitting the trainer and master of the best streetfighters in the city.

As he had told Diana, gentler methods were sometimes second best to simple brute force. He hoped that this would prove to be one of those times.