Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [118]
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.
Twenty-five
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