kid!"
Vaetes looked at him mildly, as if they'd been discussing the weather.
"Feel better now? Good. The exit's behind you. Just turn around, take a
couple steps to trip the sensor. And you might want to hurry along,
because-"
"I hear them," Jos said in disgust. At least two medlifters were
approaching. "But we're not done with this, D'Arc."
"Hey, drop by anytime. My door's always open. Well, except when it's
closed. Which you can see to on the way out."
Jos stalked out of the colonel's office into the wet and smothering
Drongaran afternoon.
This is just what I need, he thought. A youngling more naive than a
freshly decanted clone. The kid might think he was ready for fieldwork, but
those were long odds, in Jos's opinion. True, things could get intense in
any big medcenter, but he'd seen hardened veterans with years of experience
in all the myriad ways that sentients could die have to bolt from a Rimsoo
OT to keep from upchucking in their masks.
"Mimn'yet surgery," they called it, after a meat dish of questionable
origin popular with the bloodthirsty rep-tiloids of Barab I. It was a vivid
metaphor, illustrating the fast and furious patchwork pace that they had to
follow. Stop the bleeding, slap a synthflesh patch or spray a splint, and
move on. No time for niceties like regen-stim; if someone wound up with a
livid streak of shiny scar tissue across the face, it didn't really
matter-as long as he or she could still shoot.
There were times when Jos was on his feet twenty hours straight, his
arms coated with red, with barely any time between patients. It was
primitive, it was barbaric, it was brutal. It was war.
And this was the sterile hell into which Vaetes had just plunged a kid
who didn't look old enough to legally pilot a landspeeder.
Jos shook his head. Lieutenant Kornell "UK" Divini was in for a rude
awakening, and Jos did not envy him it. On the other hand, there was one
possible positive aspect to the situation: Tolk would probably love the kid.
Thinking of her did bring a genuine smile to his lips. His relationship with
the Lorrdian nurse was the one good thing that had come out of this war. The
only good thing, as far as Jos was concerned.
Den Dhur was on a mission.
It was a mission that had little to do with the war between the
Confederacy and the Republic, except in rather abstract terms. And, even
though he was a freelance field correspondent, it was not something he was
likely to file a story on. No, this quest was to aid a friend-someone whom
he'd become acquainted with during his stay at Rimsoo Seven, and whom he'd
come to consider a kindred spirit.
Those who knew the hard-bitten Sullustan of old would no doubt find it
hard to believe that Den would profess friendship for any living thing.
Which meant that their opinions of him could remain intact, since the being
Den was undertaking this favor for wasn't a living one- not in the
traditional sense, anyway. Which made it all the more challenging. Den was
sitting with his comrade in the base cantina. He was nursing a particularly
potent concoction of spice-brew, Sullustan gin, and Old Janx Spirit called a
Sonic Servodriver; no one appeared to know why the drink was named that,
and, after the first one or two had been imbibed, very few cared. His
companion, as usual, was drinking nothing. This wasn't surprising, since he
had no mouth or throat, and he'd managed to convince Den earlier that
pouring alcohol into his vocabulator was probably not a good idea.
Den focused his large eyes blearily upon I-5YQ. The droid had an
annoying tendency-exacerbated by the polarized droptac lenses the Sullustan
wore-to separate into multiple images. Other than that, all seemed normal
enough. "We gotta get you drunk," he told I-Five. "And this is such an
imperative because . . . ?" "'S'not fair," Den told him. "Ev'rybody else can
get blasted outta their craniums-
"Which they do with alarming frequency, I've noticed." "Ev'ryone 'cept
you. 'S'no good. Gotta fix that." "Assuming for a moment that intoxication
is a state to which I aspire," the droid said, "I see a number of problems
that must be solved. Not the least of which is, I have no metabolism to
process ethanol."
"Right, right." Den nodded. "Gotta work aroun' that. Don' worry, I'll
think of somethin' . . ." "At this point you'd be hard-pressed to think of
your own name. No offense, but I wouldn't trust you to rewire a mouse
droid's circuits right now. Maybe later, when you've-"
The Sullustan suddenly fluttered his dewflaps in excitement. "Got it!
'S' perfect!" "What?" The droid's tone was wary. Den knocked back the rest
of his drink, then had to hang on to the edge of the table for a moment
until the entire cantina, which had suddenly and unaccountably launched
itself into hyperspace, steadied. "W'do a partial power-down on your core.
Scramble th' sensory inputs a li'l bit, loosen up those logic circuits."
"Sorry. Multiple redundancy backups. They're hardwired-I could no more
voluntarily interfere with them than you could stop breathing."
Den frowned at his empty mug. "Blast." He brightened. "Okay, how 'bout
we realign the circuitry directly? Jus' temporarily, o'course ..."
"That might work-if you had the picodroid engineers needed to do the
realignment. Which are only available at Cybot Galactica repair centers or
their authorized representatives. I believe the nearest one is approximately
twelve parsecs from here."
Den belched and shrugged. "Well, we'll figure som'thin' out. Don'
worry-Den Dhur's no quitter. I'm on it, buddy." His head dropped to the
table with an audible thud, and a moment later he began to snore.
I-Five stared at the unconscious reporter, then sighed. "Something
about this," the droid murmured, "feels so familiar."
3
Jos wouldn't have started the kid off this way, had there been any
choice, but the operating theater was full of wounded clone troopers, the
drone of the medlifters bringing in new injuries seemed as constant as a
heat exchanger as they arrived, and anybody who could lift a vi-broscalpel
was needed. Now.
He didn't have time to watch the kid-he was up to his elbows in the
chest cavity of a clone full of shrapnel. Count Dooku's weapons research
group had come up with a new fragmentation bomb, called a weed-cutter-a
smart bomb that, when launched, arced up and over any and all defensive
grids, came down in the middle of a trooper force, and exploded at thoracic
level above the ground, sleeting tiny, smart, razor-sharp durasteel
flechettes in a circular pattern. The weed-cutter was deadly for two hundred
meters against soft targets, and the clone trooper armor didn't stop much,
if any, of it.
Whoever had designed and produced the clone armor had much to answer
for, in Jos's opinion. The Kaminoans might be geniuses when it came to
designing and sculpting soft tissue, but the armor was, as far as he could
see, practically useless. The nonclone field troops referred to the
full-body suits as
"body buckets." It was an aptly descriptive term.
He started to ask for the pressor field to be stepped up I a notch, but
Tolk beat him to it: "Plus six on the field," she said to the 2-1B droid
managing the unit.
Tolk le Trene was a Lorrdian; her kind had an uncanny I ability to read
most species' microexpressions and to somehow sense emotions, to the extent
that it almost I seemed like telepathy. She was also the best surgical nurse
in the Rimsoo. And more, she was beautiful, compassionate, and Jos's
sweetheart, despite her being ek-ster-non-permes, an outsider, not of his
homework! I clan-which meant there wasn't supposed to be any future for
their relationship. The Vandars were enster, and I that meant marriage had
to be with someone from one's I own system, preferably one's homeworld.
There were no I exceptions.
Temporary alliances with eksters were allowed, with a I wink and a nod
about sowing-one's-wild-grains and all, I but you didn't bring a non-permes
girlfriend home to I meet your kinfolk, not unless you were willing to give
up I your clan and be permanently ostracized. Not to mention the infamy such
an act would offer your family: He married an ekster.' Can you imagine? His
parents keeled over dead from shame!
Jos glanced at Uli, and then at Tolk, who said, "Uli seems to be doing
okay. The orderly droids just wheeled his first patient out and they weren't
heading toward the morgue. He's a cute kid." Tos shook his head. "Yeah.
Cute."
He risked a quick look around. They were still two doctors and three
FX-7 surgical droids short of a full unit, and that was going to cost them
today-
Even as he thought his, he saw a masked-and-gowned figure step up to
one of the empty tables. The sterile field kicked on, and the figure gave a
bring-'em gesture to the orderly droids. "I don't know who that is," Tolk
said as Jos was about to ask.
After months of work in this tropical pesthole, the OT doctors could
recognize each other even when faces and heads were covered with surgical
masks and caps. Which meant this was a new player. And that raised the
question: why hadn't anybody told him, Captain Vondar, the chief surgeon,
that they had a new guy?
A fresh bleeder opened up, sprayed blood in a fan, and Jos suddenly had
other things to worry about.
Nine patients later, Jos caught an easy one, a simple lacerated lung he
was able to glue-stat shut in a few minutes. Tolk began to close, and Jos
looked around. They didn't have a new patient prepped. Things had slowed
down, finally. He looked at the triage droid-it was I-Five today-and the
droid held up that many digits, indicating the number of minutes before they
would have another one ready.
Jos stripped off his sterile thinskin gloves and slipped on a fresh
pair, thankful for the moment's breather.
"I could use a hand over here," the new surgeon said, "if you don't
have anything pressing."
The voice was deep, and it sounded older than he'd usually heard in
this operating theater, where most of the surgeons and doctors were the age
equivalent of humans twenty to twenty-five standard years. Jos moved over
three tables, squeezing past Leemoth, who was working on a Quaran Aqualish
who had deserted from the Separatists. He looked at the procedure the new
surgeon had in progress qn a clone trooper.
"Heart-lung transplant?" he asked.
"Yep, Took a sonic pulse, blew out myocardium and alveoli all over the
place."
Jos looked at the new organs, fresh from the clone banks. The
dissolving staples holding the arteries and veins together were X-style-he
hadn't seen those since medical school. This guy was older-they must be
scraping the bottom of the recycler for doctors now. First a kid, now
somebody's grandfather, he thought. Who's next-med students!
"You want to do those nerve anastomoses distally there?"
"Sure." Jos regloved, took the adapto-pressor suturing tool offered by
the nurse, and began the microsutures. "Thanks. Ohleyz Sumteh Kersos
Vingdah, Doctor." If the man had slapped him across the face, Jos wouldn't
have been more surprised. That was a clan-greeting! This man was from
Corellia, his homeworld, and more, he was claiming kinship on his mother's
side. Amazing!
"Lose your manners, son?"
"Uh, sorry. Sumteh Vondar Ohleyz," Jos said. "I'm, uh, Jos Vondar."
"I know who you are, son. I'm Erel Kersos. Admiral Kersos-and your new
commander."
And here was another whack across the face. Erel Kersos was his
mother's uncle. They had never met, but Jos knew about him, of course. He
had left the homeworld as a young man, and never returned . . . because he
had . ..
Jos tried not to let his shock show. This was astonishing, flat-out
unbelievable. Of all the Rimsoos on all the worlds in all the galaxy, what
were the chances of running into Great-Uncle Erel in this one?
"Maybe we might have a chance to talk later-if you feel that's proper,"
Kersos said.
"Uh, yeah. Right. I'd like that. Sir."
Amazingly, his hands did not shake as he finished the suturing. His
show.
What were the odds?
Kaird of the Nediji watched the Jedi healer working on the wounded
trooper. The cloned soldier had just come from the OT into postop, and the
marks of the laser suturing stood out against his bronze skin. The healer
was performing a laying on of hands; no doubt something to do with the
Force. Kaird knew little about such things, and cared less. He had no doubt
that the Force was real, but since Jedi did not normally concern him,
neither did their mysterious power source. As an agent of Black Sun, his
primary focus was on more practical matters.
Still, it was interesting to observe her work. And he was in a position
to observe it quite well, since he was standing near enough to touch her in
the postop chamber. Hidden, as it were, in plain sight.
Normally, Kaird would stick out in just about any crowd of sapients,
for those of his species were not well known in the galaxy; Nedij was one of
the more outlying worlds, and quite insular. Only those who had forsworn the
fellowship of the Nest tended to wander the space-ways. His sharp face,
stubby beak, violet eyes, and skin covered with pale azure down would
definitely draw stares, were he dressed in his usual garb. But now he was
effectively invisible, having chosen for this assignment a perfect disguise
for a medical facility.
The siblinghood known as The Silent were ubiquitous throughout the
galaxy. They never spoke, they usually kept their features and bodies hidden
inside flowing, cowled robes, and for the most part they did nothing ex-
cept stand and be. They believed that their meditative presence in the
vicinity of illness or injury somehow aided in the recovery of afflicted
patients. And the amaz-ing thing about it-the thing that reputable
scientists and doctors were at a loss to explain-was that The Silent were
right. Statistical studies showed without question that sick and wounded
people recovered faster and more often when the shrouded figures were around
than when they were not. Apparently it had nothing to do with the Force,
either; the order's adherents came from all species and social strata, and
exhibited none of the biological markers that sometimes indicated an
affinity with the mystical energy field. Nor could the phenomenon be totally
attributed to the placebo effect, because patients who had never heard of
the order benefited just as much. It was a truly inexplicable marvel.
Kaird didn't know how such a thing could be, and didn't particularly
care, although he did sometimes wonder if his presence was having the same
palliative effect, since the thoughts usually passing through his mind were
about as far from the serenity of a Silent as Drongar was from the Galactic
Core. No matter. He was pretending to be one of the siblinghood because it
let him become part of the background in a way no other role in this
Republic Mobile Surgical Unit-"Rimsoo"-could. He had earlier ingested an
herbal concoction brought from his homeworld, which effectively masked his
distinctive scent from most species' senses. Together with the shrouded
robes, his anonymity was thus assured-quite necessary for an agent of Black
Sun, whose business here had nothing to do with either the war or the
treatment of those injured in it.
Kaird was here because of the bota, pure and simple. The rare plant
would be a heavyweight addition to any physician's armamentarium; it could
be an antibiotic, a narcotic, a soporific-all manner of things, in fact,
depending on the species using it. It was a more effective curative than
cambylictus leaves or bacta fluid for the Abyssin, a more potent
psychotropic than Santherian tenho-root if you were a Falleen, and an
anabolic steroid that could help Whiphids attain their personal bests. Black
Sun could make a fortune moving as much bota as they could get their hands
on-it was a product with true universal appeal.
Ironically, use of the wonder plant here in the Rimsoos on Drongar had
been interdicted. The official word claimed it was in order to discourage
black marketeering, but it was generally felt that the real reason was
economics-the farther one traveled from Drongar, the more valuable bota