Space Viking H. Beam Piper (life books to read .TXT) 📖

caught and folded it. He stepped forward and draped the Trask colors over her shoulders, and then took her in his arms. The cheering broke out again, and some of Sesar Karvall’s guardsmen began firing a pom-pom somewhere.

It took a little longer than he had expected to finish with the toasts and shake hands with those who crowded around. Finally, the exit march started, down the long walkway to the landing stage, and the Duke and his party moved away to the rear to prepare for the wedding feast at which everybody but the bride and groom would celebrate. One of the bridesmaids gave Elaine a huge sheaf of flowers, which she was to toss back from the escalator; she held it in the crook of one arm and clung to his with the other.

“Darling; we really made it!” she was whispering, as though it were too wonderful to believe.

Well, wasn’t it?

One of the news cars⁠—orange and blue, that was Westlands Telecast & Teleprint⁠—had floated just ahead of them and was letting down toward the landing stage. For a moment, he was angry; that went beyond the outer-orbit limits of journalistic propriety, even for Westlands T & T. Then he laughed; today he was too happy for anger about anything. At the foot of the escalator, Elaine kicked off her gilded slippers⁠—there was another pair in the car; he’d seen to that personally⁠—and they stepped onto the escalator and turned about. The bridesmaids rushed forward, and began struggling for the slippers, to the damage and disarray of their gowns, and when they were half way up, Elaine heaved the bouquet and it burst apart among them like a bomb of colored fragrance, and the girls below snatched at the flowers, shrieking deliriously. Elaine stood, blowing kisses to everybody, and he was shaking his clasped hands over his head, until they were at the top.

When they turned and stepped off, the orange and blue aircar had let down directly in front of them, blocking their way. Now he was really furious, and started forward with a curse. Then he saw who was in the car.

Andray Dunnan, his thin face contorted and the narrow mustache writhing on his upper lip; he had a slit beside the window open and was tilting the barrel of a submachine gun up and out of it.

He shouted, and at the same time tripped Elaine and flung her down. He was throwing himself forward to cover her when there was a blasting multiple report. Something sledged him in the chest; his right leg crumpled under him. He fell⁠—

He fell and fell and fell, endlessly, through darkness, out of consciousness.

V

He was crucified, and crowned with a crown of thorns. Who had they done that to? Somebody long ago, on Terra. His arms were drawn out stiffly, and hurt; his feet and legs hurt, too, and he couldn’t move them, and there was this prickling at his brow. And he was blind.

No; his eyes were just closed. He opened them, and there was a white wall in front of him, patterned with a blue snow-crystal design, and he realized that it was a ceiling and that he was lying on his back. He couldn’t move his head, but by shifting his eyes he saw that he was completely naked and surrounded by a tangle of tubes and wires, which puzzled him briefly. Then he knew that he was not on a bed, but on a robomedic, and the tubes would be for medication and wound drainage and intravenous feeding, and the wires would be to electrodes imbedded in his body for diagnosis, and the crown-of-thorns thing would be more electrodes for an encephalograph. He’d been on one of those robomedics before, when he had been gored by a bisonoid on the cattle range.

That was what it was; he was still under treatment. But that seemed so long ago; so many things⁠—he must have dreamed them⁠—seemed to have happened.

Then he remembered, and struggled futilely to rise.

“Elaine!” he called. “Elaine, where are you?”

There was a stir and somebody came into his limited view; his cousin, Nikkolay Trask.

“Nikkolay; Andray Dunnan,” he said. “What happened to Elaine?”

Nikkolay winced, as though something he had expected to hurt had hurt worse than he had expected.

“Lucas.” He swallowed. “Elaine⁠ ⁠… Elaine is dead.”

Elaine is dead. That didn’t make sense.

“She was killed instantly, Lucas. Hit six times; I don’t think she even felt the first one. She didn’t suffer at all.”

Somebody moaned, and then he realized that it had been himself.

“You were hit twice,” Nikkolay was telling him. “One in the leg; smashed the femur. And one in the chest. That one missed your heart by an inch.”

“Pity it did.” He was beginning to remember clearly, now. “I threw her down, and tried to cover her. I must have thrown her straight into the burst and only caught the last of it myself.” There was something else; oh, yes. “Dunnan. Did they get him?”

Nikkolay shook his head. “He got away. Stole the Enterprise and took her off-planet.”

“I want to get him myself.”

He started to rise again; Nikkolay nodded to someone out of sight. A cool hand touched his chin, and he smelled a woman’s perfume, nothing at all like Elaine’s. Something like a small insect bit him on the neck. The room grew dark.

Elaine was dead. There was no more Elaine, nowhere at all. Why, that must mean there was no more world. So that was why it had gotten so dark.

He woke again, fitfully, and it would be daylight and he could see the yellow sky through an open window or it would be night and the wall-lights would be on. There would always be somebody with him. Nikkolay’s wife, Dame Cecelia; Rovard Grauffis; Lady Lavina Karvall⁠—he must have slept a long time, for she was so much older than he remembered⁠—and her brother, Burt Sandrasan. And a woman with dark hair, in a white smock with a gold caduceus on her