Brian Stableford - Inherit the Earth

He wasn’t surprised when there was no reply. He had nothing but his powers of reason to aid him, and he had not enough data to work with. Furious thought merely served to multiply the questions facing him. If Karol Kachellek had instructed the pilot to kidnap him, what motive could he possibly have? Was he trying to hide Damon away, either to keep him from harm or to keep him from asking awkward questions? If the pilot was working under orders from elsewhere, who might be interested in kidnapping him? The people who already held Silas Arnett? If so, why? Did they think he had information which could be used to supplement what they had supposedly winkled out of Silas? Did they intend to force some kind of confession out of him by similar means?

It was difficult to be patient, but in the end there was no alternative. The journey wasn’t significantly longer than it should have been but they overflew Lanai and headed for a much smaller island beyond it, dominated by a single volcanic peak. The plane came down just as the Sun had begun to slide beyond the horizon.

When the pilot came back to release Damon from the trick harness he was carrying a gun: a wide-barreled pepper-box calculated to inflict widespread but superficial injuries. Were it to go off, Damon would lose a lot of blood very quickly, but his nanomachines would be able to seal off the wounds without mortal damage being done.

“No need to worry, Mr. Hart,” the stout man said. “Nobody means to do you harm. You’ll be safe here until carnival’s over.”

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

He wasn’t surprised when he received no answers to any of these questions.

The air outside the plane seemed oppressively humid. Damon allowed himself to be guided across the landing-strip to a jeep parked in the shadow of a thick clump of trees. The man waiting in the driving seat was as short as the pilot but much slimmer and—if appearances could be trusted—much older. His skin was the kind of dark coffee colour that most people who lived in tropical regions preferred. He wasn’t carrying a gun.

“I’m sorry about this, Mr. Hart,” he said, “but we weren’t sure that we could persuade you to come here of your own accord. Until we can get to the people who have Arnett, everyone connected with your family is in danger.” To the pilot he said: “You can go now. Take the plane down to Hilo, just in case.”

“Who are you?” Damon demanded.

“Get in, Mr. Hart,” the old man said. “My name, for what it’s worth, is Rajuder Singh. I knew your father and your foster-parents, long ago, but I doubt that any of them ever mentioned my name. Karol Kachellek still keeps in touch.”

“Did Karol arrange this?”

“It’s for your own protection. Please get in, Mr. Hart.”

Damon climbed into the vehicle. The jeep glided into the trees and was soon deep in a ragged forest of thin-boled conifers. The forest was very 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 rich fauna which ancient natural forests had once entertained. A few tiny insects splashed on the windshield of the jeep as it moved through the gathering night but there was no sound of birdsong. The road was rough and far from straight, but the driver evidently knew it well.

“Did Karol Kachellek instruct the Australian to bring me here?” Damon asked, again.

“Yes he did,” Singh said, blandly. “He had to make a decision in a hurry—he didn’t expect you to come to Molokai. Our people will bring the situation under control in time, but things have moved a little too fast. I’m afraid that you’re in more danger than you know, Mr. Hart—I’ll show you why in a few minutes’ time.”

“Who, exactly, are our people? ”

Rajuder Singh smiled. “Friends and allies,” he said, unhelpfully. “Not many of us left, nowadays—but we keep the faith.”

“Conrad Helier’s faith?”

“That’s right, Mr. Hart. You’d be one of us yourself, I dare say, if you hadn’t chosen a different path.”

“Are you saying that there’s some kind of conspiracy involving my foster-parents? Some kind of grand plan in which you and Karol and Eveline are involved?”

“Just a group of friends and co-workers,” the other replied, lightly. “No more than that—but someone seems to be attacking us, and we have to look after our own.”

“You think that Surinder Nahal is attacking you?”

“We really don’t know—yet. For now, it’s necessary to be careful. This is a bad time, but that’s presumably why our unknown adversary chose it.”

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

The twilight was so brief that the stars were shining long before the vehicle reached its destination, which was a sizeable bungalow set in a clearing. Damon was oddly relieved to observe that it was topped by an unusually large satellite-dish; however remote this place might be it was part of the Web; all human civilization was its neighbourhood.

Rajuder Singh showed him into a spacious living-room. When Damon opened his mouth to speak he held up his hand, and swiftly crossed the room to a wall-mounted display-screen. “This is the same netboard which carried Operator 101’s earlier messages,” he said, while his fingers brought the screen to life.

Damon stared dumbly at the words which appeared there.

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”

“It was dumped shortly before you boarded the plane at Kaunakakai,” Singh told Damon, when the import of the words had had time to sink in. “Karol thought you might be inclined to argue if he showed it to you there and then. He seems to think that you always do the opposite of anything he suggests.”

Damon could understand why Kachellek might have formed that impression. “It’s crazy,” he said, referring to the message. “It’s completely crazy.”

“Yes it is,” said the other. “I can’t understand why anyone would want to attack you in this way. Can you?” It occurred to Damon that the people he had ordered Madoc Tamlin to investigate might resent the fact—and might possibly be scared that the buying-power of Conrad Helier’s inheritance might pose a greater threat to their plan than Interpol or the friends and allies of Conrad Helier himself.

“Unfortunately,” Singh observed, “such slanders can sometimes take effect before convincing rebuttals can be assembled. You see why we thought it best to remove you from harm’s way. I’m sorry that you’ve been caught up in all this—it really has nothing to do with you.”

“What has it to do with?” Damon asked, his voice taut with frustration. “What are you people up to? Why is this such a bad time for all this to blow up?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Singh said, with a note of apology in his voice that almost sounded sincere.

“I’ll find out anyway,” Damon told him—but he was wary enough not to let bravado lead him to give too much away. It might be inadvisable to boast about Madoc Tamlin’s capabilities to people who might be just as reluctant to be found out as Operator 101.

The words displayed on Singh’s screen suddenly disappeared, to be replaced by an urgently-flashing message which simply said: READ NOW. The system had undoubtedly been programmed with nets set to trawl the cyberspatial sea for items of a particular kind, and one of them had just made contact. “Excuse me,” Singh murmured, as he moved to claim his prize.