milking cold in there real fast, and until the blowout was patched, no heat
or air would be forthcoming.
There were emergency suits in disaster lockers, of course, mostly thin
vac suits with limited air supplies, but no way to tell how many people
could get to those.
From a Kubaz transport shuttle pilot, Den got an updated body count. At
least twenty-six frozen corpses were pinwheeling through space in the
vicinity of Med-Star. "It been one major 'plosion t' 'ject dat many, you
bet," the pilot said, his trunk curling up and down in horror.
And that was pretty much all he could get that was of substance. There
were a few people from this Rimsoo up there, card-playing friends like Tolk
and Merit, and for all Den knew they could be two of the many trapped-or
worse, twisted and ruptured ice sculptures orbiting the damaged ship. Den
was a reporter; he'd seen friends and acquaintances killed in brush wars all
over the galaxy, but that never made it any easier. He had to shift into his
objective mode, turn off his personal feelings, if he was to do his job. But
of late, that had been getting harder and harder to do. When Zan Yant died,
it had hurt, more than he'd thought possible. It was one thing to play the
cynic for the people around him, to shrug it all off with a what-can-you-do?
attitude, but when it was just him, alone, with nobody watching, it wasn't
as easy as it had been back when he'd been young and full of himself and
going to live forever.
Den sat and tossed down Bantha Blasters like there was no tomorrow,
wondering how many people he knew for whom that was literally true. Despite
the latest influx of wounded, the cantina was full of people who had nowhere
else to be, waiting to hear news, be it good or bad.
Teedle rolled up. "Need a refill, sweets?"
"No. I'm good."
As the little droid rolled away, Den stared at his mug,
Good-that was a word he was finding less and less useful and fitting
when talking about himself.
Maybe it was time to get out of the field. Just find a nice quiet
planet somewhere, work the local news beat, and leave the war zones to the
young ones who still thought it glorious and exciting. Yeah, the big stories
could be found, even on worlds like Drongar, supposedly far from the "main
action," but more and more they were all starting to sound the same: war.
Lots of beings dead, maimed, injured, all for the greater glory of the
Republic. Details in the full 'cast, coming up ...
He raised a hand, signaled Teedle. Maybe he did need another shot. At
least these shots you can walk away from. Well, up to a point. . .
Barriss entered, brushing snow from her robe, and saw Den sitting alone
at a table, staring into his empty mug. She moved toward him. "Mind some
company?"
He smiled tipsily at her, waved at the chair across from him. "What's
your pleasure, Jedi? I'm buying."
"Thanks, but no." She sat. "I have to get back to the OT soon. What's
the latest?"
He told her, and Barriss nodded. When it had happened, she hadn't felt
a disturbance in the Force, and that bothered her immensely. There were days
when, during battles on the planet's surface, she had read the swirling
ethereal currents with uncanny detail. Master Yoda was said to be able to
sense major disturbances parsecs away-even, sometimes, of things yet to
happen, though Barriss wasn't sure if she believed that part. But of the
explosion on the orbiting frigate, she had not gotten even a glimmer. She
was but a Padawan, true, but still she counted her insensitivity as a
personal failing. She felt certain that Obi-Wan Kenobi or Anakin Skywalker
would have sensed it immediately. She had lived with the Force as long as
she could remember-certainly longer than Anakin. How could she not have felt
the event?
"You okay?" Den asked.
She nodded. No reason to burden him-there was nothing he could do to
help. The little Sullustan shook his head, as if he knew better, but said
nothing.
Then, perhaps because she was not expecting it, the Force abruptly rose
her: The explosion on MedStar bad not been an accident.
The reporter must have seen her reaction in her face. "What?"
Barriss breathed deeply, trying to regain her center, The absolute
certainty of the insight had left her shaken, unable for a moment to speak.
She had to do something with this knowledge. She had to tell somebody.
Not Den, not a reporter, but somebody, Someone who was in a position to do
something about it.
It was the same conviction she had felt when the transport had blown up
months ago, before the relocation. They had never found out who had been
responsible for that. She had reported her feelings to Colonel Vaetes, who
had been polite but dismissive, obviously preferring to rely on more solid
evidence than what he considered mysticism. Perhaps he would be bit more
open-minded this time. This act of sabotage was a thousand times worse than
the last one. Something had to be done.
15
Jos, exhausted but still too worried about Tolk to rest, wandered
through the medical ward. The surgical patients in recovery were all as
stable as they were going to get, and the operating tables were empty, for
the time being. The thought of going back to his kiosk, of being by himself
in the cold silence, was anathema. He needed something to do.
Ahead, one of The Silent stood impassively near one wall, a faint cloud
of breath-fog issuing from within the cow! at slow and regular intervals. It
was cooler here than in the OT, but at least they had enough blankets and
heat-paks to keep the patients warm. The Silent seemed unaffected by the
cold.
Barriss stood next to the bed of a trooper who had some new kind of
infection. One of the local microbes had apparently undergone a mutagenic
shift and become deadly, a cause of considerable concern. What could afflict
one trooper could afflict them all.
"Hey," Jos said.
Barriss looked away from the sick trooper, who was either asleep or in
a coma. "Hello," she said.
"How is he?"
"No change. None of our antibiotics, antivirals, or an-timycotics seems
to be working."
"Spectacillin?" Spectacillin was the current reigning champ, a
broad-spectrum RNA polymerase inhibitor capable of stomping on the most
virulent of the Drongaran bugs.
She shook her head. "He's got a fever we're barely keeping down with
analgesic suppressors and coma induction, a white blood cell count off the
charts, and his kidneys are starting to shut down. He's got fluid in his
lungs, an erratic heartbeat secondary to cardiac tampon-ade, and his liver
is working overtime and getting tired. Only good thing is, he doesn't seem
to be shedding pathogens, so he's not contagious."
Jos moved in, looking at the patient, whose chart identified him as
CT-802. "Fast as everything mutates here,it might cure itself."
"It better hurry, if it doesn't want to kill its ho
st. I've done what I
can, but it isn't enough. I've been keeping him stable by working on him
through the Force, but I can't keep that up forever." Barriss's voice was
calm and even, in contrast to her strained and haggard expression. "I don't
think he'll see another sunrise, Jos."
Jos stood there for a moment, remembering a conversation he'd had with
Zan Yant in this same room. He hadn't known Barriss that long, but here in
the swamps, among the dead and dying, fast kinships were established among
the medics. The war was the problem, and they all did their best to be part
of the solution, any way they could, as little as that might be.
He took a deep breath. "There might be something else we can try."
She looked away from the patient to him, her gaze questioning.
When Zan had died, it had fallen to Jos to clean out his friend's
belongings. He had packed up most of the stuff-the quetarra, clothes, book
readers, and the like- and had it shipped to Zan's family, back on Talus.
But hidden away under Zan's cot had been something he hadn't included in the
personal effects package: Zan's supply of processed bota.
It was illegal to possess the stuff here. All the harvested and
stabilized bota went to other worlds and systems, where it was worth its
weight in precious gems. Like out-world plantations where the locals
produced fruit and crops too expensive for them to eat, or firestone pits
where every day miners found stones worth more than a year of their pay, or
anyplace else where those who did the scut work reaped none of the rewards,
bota was deemed too valuable to waste on troopers.
But Zan hadn't accepted that. He'd managed to get hold of a small
amount of the miracle growth and field-tested it as much as was feasible,
given the necessarily clandestine nature of his protocols. Even under
less-than-ideal conditions, bota had cured every resistant infection a
Fett-clone had developed on this world. The irony of being on a planet where
the plant grew like a weed and not able to use it to save lives had not been
lost on either Zan or Jos. Zan had risked his career and liberty to secretly
treat patients with it. Jos hadn't been willing to go that far, but he had
turned a blind eye to his friend's illegal actions.
He became aware that he had been standing there too long without
responding. Time to make a decision, Jos. Can you do anything less than what
your friend did?
"Wait here," he said. "I'll be right back."
He left the ward and headed for his kiosk. The snow was knee-deep and
still falling, but some of the maintenance droids had been set to clearing
walkways, so it wasn't that big a problem-yet. Of far more immediate concern
was the lack of warm clothing for everyone. Jos was an ectomorph, tall and
thin; his body radiated heat very effectively, which was useful in a
tropical climate, But right now the temperature under the dome was about ten
degrees less than either of the planetary poles, and for the first time in
his life he found himself regretting his lack of body fat. He was wearing
practically his entire wardrobe: two pairs of army-issue pants and socks, a
heavy shirt, a durnis-hide vest, and a blanket as a makeshift poncho. He had
two surgeon's caps keeping his head warm, a sweatband worn low to cover his
ears, three pairs of thinskin gloves, and he was still cold.
If that harmonic malfunction wasn't fixed soon ...
On his way to his quarters Jos noticed several members of Revoc's
retinue heading for the cantina. He waved, and they waved back. Most of them
were taking the unexpected exile fairly well. Trebor and the other
headlin-ers had been bivouacked in a quickly constructed barracks, and there
they had mostly stayed. No one had been allowed to evacuate yet, either to
another Rimsoo or to MedStar, because the more the malfunctioning dome was
attenuated to allow transports through, the more dis-combobulated the
harmonics seemed to become. The majority of the incoming lifters were being
rerouted to Rimsoos Five and Fourteen, the closest nearby units, but they
could only handle so many extra cases, so some still had to be allowed
through here.
Zan's supply of processed bota was now under Jos's cot. He'd kept it,
not quite sure what to do with it. Now he knew that, on some level, he'd
been waiting for an opportunity like this.
What the Republic didn't know wouldn't hurt them, and it could save a
trooper's life-a life that Jos now knew was worth as much as anyone's. At
some point, you had to start taking a stand. Jos wasn't certain of much in
his life, but he knew one thing for sure: letting a man die when you could
save him was wrong. And vac take anybody who said otherwise. "Jos?"
He looked up and saw Vaetes approaching. His blood went icy faster than
a cryovascular transfusion. He tried to steel himself for the news that Tolk
had been in the wrong place at the wrong time on MedStar, that they had
confirmed the ID, that he would never see her smile again- "Tolk's okay. I
just got word."
Jos' relief was so great that he almost sobbed. He felt like the
legendary world-carrying giant Salta must have felt when he had transferred
his burden to a pedestal of platinum cast for him by his brother Yorell.
"Thank you" was all he could manage. Alive! Tolk was alive!
"She won't be coming back down anytime soon, I'm afraid. The explosion
took out four decks in the ventral hull area, including, as I'm sure you
know, the docking bays. She's helping tend to the injured." "Doesn't
matter," Jos said. "As long as she's safe." "Merit's okay, too."
"I knew he was off base," Jos said. "Didn't know he'd gone upstairs."
He noticed then that the colonel still wore a grim expression. "What?"
"I recently spoke with Jedi Offee, and, based on some tests we ran
pursuant to her suggestions, we've confirmed that this was not an accident.
It was sabotage. Probably the same person or persons who blew up the
transport."
Jos stared at him, unable to process, for a moment, what Vaetes had
just said. Sabotage? Again? They'd never found out who had destroyed the
bota transport, and now the same thing had happened, this time on a much
larger scale.
The news was shocking. There were supposed to be some rules, some
accords, even in war. Hospital ships had heen considered inviolate ever
since the Great Hyper-space War. Even though the orbiting ships were easy
targets, the concept of damaging or destroying one was anathema to civilized
beings.
Or had been, until now . . .
16
Den seemed to be spending pretty much all his time in the cantina
lately. He wasn't 100 percent okay with that, although it had its
advantages. For one thing, it was the warmest place in the Rimsoo, by far.
For another, it was the easiest place to meet people, and people were
usually the starting points for the kind of stories that he did best.
And third, of course, there were the drinks.
It took a lot to get a Sullustan drunk-truly, seriously,
falling-down-and-missing-the-floor drunk. Jos had tried to explain the
physiology of it to him once, using a lot of jawbreaking words like
glycolysis, mitochondria, and polymorphic chemisorption-the gist of it all
being that his body's cells were very selective about which molecules they
used and how. Which meant that an amount of liquor that would have most
carbon-based species sitting with arms or tentacles around each other's
shoulders, singing old Corellian drinking songs, merely gave him a pleasant
buzz.
He was buzzed now, and saw no reason not to get a little bit more so.
He'd cleared his bar tab when the payment for his last story-the puff piece
for Beings holozine on Uli Divini, Boy Surgeon-had come in. Now he signaled
Teedle, who rolled over to his table. "Another Johrian whiskey, Teedle-on
the rocks."
"You got it, hon." She wheeled away, and Den shouted after her, "And I
mean ice" He'd learned the hard way that the serving droid's idiomatic
programming in Basic was not as extensive as it could have been.
Teedle shot back over her shoulder, "I suppose you want it in a glass,
too?"
Den laughed. The comeback had been unexpected- whoever'd initiated her
neural programming had at least had a sense of humor.
He glanced at the remnants of green liquid in his glass and swirled it
about, thinking about recent conversations he'd had with both Jos and
I-Five. The droid had said once that all of his kind had a sense of humor.
Den wondered how much of Teedle's personality had been programmed in, and
how much was intrinsic. There was supposedly a very simple test, developed
centuries ago, which postulated that if one could carry on a conversation
with another, unseen entity and not be able to tell if that entity was
organic or cybernetic, then said entity had to be considered self-aware.
He'd never really heard of any droid being put to that test-at least,
not in a widely publicized way. Which wasn't surprising-after all, if you're
the CEO of a huge manufacturing corporation like Cybot Galactica or
Industrial Automaton, you don't want your product suddenly thinking it has
the same rights as a sentient organic.
He was sure I-Five could pass the test easily. Perhaps Teedle could,
too.
Teedle brought his drink. "On the rocks, hon. Solid H2O."
Den took a sip of the whiskey. It was cold and yet fiery, warming his