Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [22]
Amazingly, Lenny Garon managed to stick Brady in the gut while the experienced fighter was arrogantly playing a teasing game of cat and mouse with him—which made Brady understandably furious. It was immediately clear to Damon that the older boy wasn’t going to settle for some token belly wound as a reprisal; he wanted copious bloodshed. That would be more than okay by Madoc Tamlin, so long as the cuts didn’t do too much damage to the recorders. Lenny Garon would suffer more than he had anticipated, perhaps more than he had thought possible, and for far longer—but it probably wouldn’t put him off. In all probability, he would be all the more enthusiastic to work his way up to something really heavy, in order to pay for the nanotech that would make him as good as new and keep him that way no matter what injuries his frail flesh might sustain.
Madoc had, of course, taken note of Damon’s reluctance to join in the loud exhortations of the crowd. “Don’t get all stiff on me, Damon,” he said. “You may be in the Big World now, but you’re still too young to get rigor mortis. Are you worried about splitting with Diana? She’s at my place now, but it isn’t permanent. I could help fix things up if you want me to.” Damon took the inference that Madoc had found Diana’s sudden reintroduction into his life burdensome.
“Interpol paid a call on me yesterday,” Damon told him, thinking that it was time to get down to business. No one was likely to be listening to them while the fight was on. “Silas Arnett has been snatched by persons unknown. They seem to think that I might be a target too.”
Madoc put on a show of astonishment. “I can’t believe that,” he said. “Eliminators only go after the older generation—and they use bombs and bullets. They’re all loners, and losers too. If they had any real organization they’d have been busted long ago. A snatch takes planning—not their style at all. What’s it got to do with you, anyhow? I thought you didn’t talk to your family.”
“I don’t, but it is Silas—the nearly human one. I don’t suppose you know anything at all about a particular loner who calls himself Operator one-oh-one? He’s said to be local.”
“Not my territory,” Madoc said with a shrug. “You want me to ask around, right?”
“It’s more complicated than that. The Operator in question named Conrad Helier as an enemy of mankind. When you’re through, okay?”
Madoc looked at him sharply before nodding. Even Diana Caisson didn’t know that Damon Hart had once been Damon Helier, and Madoc knew how privileged he was to have been let in on the secret. He’d probably have found out anyway—Madoc knew some very light-footed Webwalkers, first-rate poachers who had not yet turned gamekeeper—but he hadn’t had to go digging. Damon had trusted him, and obviously trusted him still. Damon knew that he could rely on Madoc to do everything he could to help, for pride’s sake as well as anything else he might be offered.
Lenny Garon was in real trouble now. The crowd were baying for blood, and getting it. Damon kept his own eyes slightly averted as Madoc turned back to concentrate fully on the business in hand, but he couldn’t turn away. He could feel the stir and surge of his own adrenalin, and his muscles were tensing as he put himself in the shoes of the younger fighter, trying to urge the boy on with his body language.
It didn’t work, of course.
A roar went up from the watchers as Brady finally rammed home his advantage. Poor Lenny was on the ground, screaming. The blade had gone deep, but the wound wasn’t mortal.
Damon knew that it would all be feeding into the template: the reflexes and convulsions of pain; the physical dimensions of the shock and the horror. It would all be ready digitized, ripe for manipulation and refinement. The tape doctor would take a little longer to tease it into proper shape than the real doctor would take to stitch up the fighters, but once the