Douglas Hill - The Last Legionary 03 by Day Of The Starwind

Author:Day Of The Starwind
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

A vast weight, which seemed to have a polished metal surface, was pressing down upon him, crushingly, irresistibly. He felt no pain – only a deathly numbness, a near-paralysis., so that his arms and legs moved as if held by thick, clinging glue. Yet still he tried to struggle against the pressure that was seeking to kill him. Somewhere near by a reedy, nasal voice was muttering, the words not clear. With a supreme effort he pushed upwards at the monstrous weight – and miraculously it lifted, as if plucked away by some godlike hand. And now the words of the reedy voice were plainer…

‘We’ll know soon,’ it was saying. ‘The knife will tell.’

Keill opened his eyes, coming out of the dream into immediate full alertness. Yet it seemed that not all of the dream had been left behind. The gluey restriction still held his body, so that it was an effort even to move his eyes.

He was lying on a hard, narrow bed. His uniform and boots had been removed, and he was ‘wearing only a thigh-length bed-kilt of a light material. There were synthaskin bandages on his injured left hand, and elsewhere on his body – where the rock fall must have gashed his flesh. And around him was a medical clinic of some sort, with banks of high-technology equipment lining the sterile white walls.

He tried to move, to lift himself, but without success. Every cell of his body seemed to ache, as if his body were one oversee bruise. And the feeling of being immersed in glue impaired every movement. He wondered miserably if the rock fall had damaged his nervous system, left him paralysed…

With a huge effort he shifted his eyes further to one side and saw the owner of the reedy voice. A medic, in the usual white tunic – a narrow, bony man whose eyes and teeth protruded just as his hair and chin receded. The medic was making adjustments to a laser scalpel, and Keill remembered the words he had heard upon waking.

‘If you touch me with that,’ Keill said evenly, ‘you’ll regret it.’ His words sounded slow and far away in his own ears.

The medic jerked his head up, eyes bulging further. ‘Ha! Awake? Sooner than you should.’ The thin voice and staccato speech seemed designed to grate on the nerves, Keill thought. ‘But you can’t threaten. The injection will hold for hours.’

Injection? With some relief Keill realised that his body seemed half-paralysed because he had been drugged. The medic read the look in his eyes and nodded, with an unsettling titter. ‘Nerve relaxant. Blocks the brain’s messages. Slows you down, holds you back, keeps you quiet.’

‘While you cut me open?’

The medic glanced at the scalpel in his hand, and set it down with another titter. ‘A small incision. Exploratory. You’re very strange. Dragged out from under half a ton of rock – should have smashed you like an egg. Like poor Miclas. But you – abrasions and contusions. Not so much as a finger broken.

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