Star Wars - MedStar 01 - Battle Surgeons

by Michael Reaves

  Bota was also one of the main reasons Barriss was here. It was true that her primary mandate was to aug­ment the doctors and surgeons who cared for Republic troops, using her skills as a healer, but she was also sup­posed to keep an eye on the harvesters, to make sure that the bota was being packed and shipped to offworld Republic ports as it was supposed to be. The harvesting

  operations had been folded in with the Rimsoo proce­dures to save money and expedite shipment. Neither she nor her superiors had any problems with that. Any advantage the Republic could gain over the Confeder­acy was valuable and desirable—the Jedi certainly had no love for the rogue Count Dooku, who had caused the deaths of so many of them two standard years ear­lier on Geonosis.

  She strongly suspected that she was here for another reason as well: that this assignment was part, or all, of her trials. Her Jedi Master, Luminara Unduli, had not told her that such was the case, but not all Padawans were warned in advance that they were about to be tested. The nature of the trial, and whether or not the Padawan would know about it beforehand, were mat­ters left entirely to the discretion of the Jedi Master.

  Once, about six months ago, she had asked Master Unduli when she could expect to begin her Jedi trials. Her mentor had smiled at the question, and said, "Any­time. All the time. No time."

  Well. If her sojourn on this world was to be her trial by fire, the test that would determine whether or not she had what it took to be a Jedi Knight, she would proba­bly know before too—

  The transport slewed in a sudden yawing turn, inertia shoving Barriss hard into the seat. The ship's internal gravity field had obviously been turned off.

  "Sorry 'bout dat," the pilot said. "Dere's a Sep'ratist battery in dis sector, an' every now and den dey try t'track one'a us an' knock us down. Standard procedure to t'row in a few 'vasive maneuvers on de way down. Kanushka!"

  The exclamation of surprise in the Kubaz's native tongue drew Barriss's attention. "What?"

  "Big battle goin' on, off t'starboard. Coupla mech units an' troops goin' at it—dere, y'see? I'll do a fly­over—we're high 'nough, dey can't hit us wit' hand weapons. Hang on."

  The pilot made a broad turn to the right. Barriss looked down at the scene. They were, she estimated, about a thousand meters high, and the air was reason­ably clear; they were below the main spore strata, with no clouds or mist to block her view.

  As a Jedi Padawan, she was knowledgeable in the ways of war. And she had been trained in personal com­bat with her lightsaber from an early age, so her obser­vation was more critical than most.

  The trooper units moved across a field of short, stubby plants, with the sun at their backs—a sound tac­tical move when facing biological opponents, but of lit­tle use against battle droids, whose photoreceptors could easily be adjusted to tune out glare. There were perhaps two hundred troopers; they had a slight numer­ical advantage over the droids, which, Barriss esti­mated, had maybe seventy or eighty units on the field. From this height, the crescent attack formation of the Republic force was apparent as it sought to envelop the droids and gain superiority in field of fire.

  The battle droids were mostly of the Baktoid Bl se­ries, as nearly as she could tell from high overhead. There were also several B2 super battle droids, which were basically the standard model with an armored cas­ing overlay and more weaponry. They had broken into quads, each unit of four fanning out to deal with the tactic of envelopment, concentrating its fire on the same section of troopers.

  Classic formations on an open battlefield, she knew,

  just as she knew that the outcome would be decided by which side could instigate the most accurate firepower the fastest. She could almost hear the voice of her Mas­ter echoing in her memory:

  It does not matter how fast you are if you miss the target. It is the one who hits the most who will have the victory.. .

  Blaster beams lanced through the engaging forces, which were now separated by no more than a short sprint's distance. Vapor boiled up from misses that hit vegetation, and small fires quickly flared here and there. Troopers fell, seared black and smoking, and battle droids ground to a halt, scorch marks and flashes of electricity on their white metal chassis marking where blasterfire had struck.

  It was all eerily silent, no sound reaching this height as the pilot slowed to give her a longer look.

  It appeared that the Republic forces would win this engagement—both sides seemed to be losing combat­ants at the same rate, and in such a case, the side with the larger force would win—though the victory would be costly. A unit that lost eight out of ten troops won only in the technical sense.

  "We can't hang 'round," the pilot said. "D'filters'll be in d'red in 'nother fifteen minutes an' we're five away from Rimsoo Seven. I like t'have a margin 'f error."

  The shuttle craft gained speed, and they left the battle behind.

  Barriss mused on what she had seen as the transport shot over lowland vegetation and steaming, miasmic swamps. Whatever else this assignment might be, it cer­tainly was not going to be dull.

  Jos was snatching a few precious moments of sleep in the cubicle he shared with Zan when he heard the trans­port's approach.

  At first, only half awake, he thought it was another medlifter bringing in more wounded, but then he real­ized the repulsor sound was pitched differently.

  It has to be the new doc, he thought. No one else in their right mind would make planetfall on Drongar without being ordered to.

  He pushed through the osmotic field that covered the cubicle's entrance; it had been set to let air circulate freely, but it kept out the eight-legged, bi-winged in­sects they'd come to call "wingstingers" that constantly buzzed about the unit. He'd heard that the newer-model fields came with an entropic overlay feature that bled energy from the air molecules as they passed through the selective barrier, thus lowering the inside tempera­ture by a good ten degrees. He'd put in a requisition for a batch of them; with any luck, they might arrive a day or so before the war ended.

  Blinking in the harsh light of Drongar Prime, he watched the transport spiral down to the pad. He no­ticed Zan, Tolk, and a few others emerging from the OT as well. It was a time of relative quiet at Rimsoo Seven, which meant that triaged patients weren't queued up, waiting for surgery and treatment, and that the surgeons weren't in a life-and-death race with time to save them. They were enjoying the respite while it lasted.

  A couple of Bothan techs ran up to the shuttle and sprayed the exterior with spore disinfectant. This par­ticular batch of chemicals, Jos knew, would probably be good for another standard month; it took about that long for the spores that attacked the craft's seals to de­velop immunities to the spray. Then various chemical

  precursors would have to be altered, and molecular configurations shifted just enough to produce a new type of treatment that would once again be effective— for a time. It was a constant dance that went on be­tween the guided mechanisms of science and the blind opportunism of nature. Jos wondered, not for the first time, what the odds were of the spores mutating into a more virulent pathogen that could strip-mine a pair of lungs in seconds instead of hours.

  Then the shuttle's hatch opened, and so did Jos's mouth—in surprise.

  The new doctor was a woman—and a Jedi.

  There was no mistaking the simple dark garb and ac­coutrements of the Order, and certainly no mistaking the shape beneath them as anything other than femi­nine. He'd heard that the latest addition to the team was a Mirialan—which meant human, basically—a member of the same species as himself, whose ancestors had spread in several ancient diasporas across the galaxy, colonizing such worlds as Corellia, Alderaan, Kalarba, and hundreds more. Humans were ubiquitous from one spiral arm to the other, so to see another one—male or female—arrive here was no great surprise.

  But to see a Jedi, here on Drongar—that was surpris­ing.

  Jos, like most other beings intelligent enough to ac­cess the HoloNet, had seen the recorded images of the Jedi's
final stand in the arena on Geonosis. Even before that, the Order had been spread mighty thin across the galaxy. And yet one of them had been assigned here, to Rimsoo Seven, a ragtag military medical unit on a world so far off the known space lanes that most galactic car­tographers couldn't come within a parsec of locating it on a bet.

  He wondered why she was here.

  Colonel D'Arc Vaetes, the human commander of the unit, received the Jedi warmly as the latter disembarked from the transport. "Welcome to Rimsoo Seven, Jedi Barriss Offee," he said. "Speaking for everyone here, I hope you will be—"

  But before he could finish his sentence, Vaetes stopped, for a sound was rising in the thick, humid air—a sound every one of them at Rimsoo Seven knew very well.

  "Incoming lifters!" shouted Tanisuldees, a Dressel­lian enlistee. He was the aide-de-camp to Filba, the Hutt supply officer. He pointed to the north.

  Jos looked. Yes, they were coming, sure enough—five of them, black dots against the sky, which at this time of day was a faint verdigris in color, like the algae that coated the surface of the Kondrus Sea. Each medlifter could carry up to six wounded men—clones and possi­bly other combatants. That meant at least thirty in­jured, possibly one or two more.

  After the first moment of realization, everyone began moving purposefully, each doing his, her, or its duty to prepare. Zan and Tolk headed for the OT at a run. Jos was about to follow, but instead he turned and moved quickly to where the Jedi, looking slightly confused, was standing.

  Vaetes took her hand and gestured toward Jos. "Jedi Offee, this is Captain Jos Vondar, my chief surgeon. He'll get you briefed and prepped for what's coming." The colonel sighed. "It's something we're all quite used to, sadly. What's even more sad is that you'll get used to it as well, very quickly."

  Jos wasn't quite sure what the proper protocol for greeting a Jedi was, but he didn't see much point in

  worrying about it at the moment. "Let's hope the Force is with you, Jedi Offee," he said, having to raise his voice to be heard over the rising whine of the repulsors. "Because it's going to be a long, hot day." He started toward the open landing area in the camp's center, where the initial triage calls were pronounced on the wounded as they came off the lifters.

  Barriss Offee moved quickly to keep up with him. He trusted she was willing to tackle whatever was in store. She's a Jedi, Jos told himself—she's probably got what it takes.

  For her sake—and the troops'—he hoped so.

  3

  The full-spectrum light in his office was dimmed—as a Sakiyan, Admiral Tarnese Bleyd could see farther into the infrared than most beings, and he preferred to spare himself the harsh glare that many of the galaxy's species needed for illumination. Most sentients considered themselves enlightened to some degree, but to those who could see things as they really were, the rest of the galactic population was stumbling about half blind. Un­fortunately, the sighted few were all too often handi­capped by the blindness of the masses.

  Bleyd frowned. He knew himself to be one of the Re­public's most capable admirals: smart, clever, and deft. Given the proper venue, he could have risen easily to the top of the military's chain of command in short order. Become a fleet commander, at the least; perhaps even a Priority Sector High Commander. But instead, his supe­riors had seen fit to shunt him to this Maker-forsaken, backrocket planet in the hind end of nowhere, to pre­side over the administration of a lowly MedStar, a med­ical frigate fielding Rimsoo units charged with patching up clones and collecting an indigenous plant.

  He feared for the stability of a commonwealth that could make such ill-advised decisions.

  Bleyd stood and moved to the large transparisteel view-

  port. Drongar filled a quarter of the sky "below" him. Even from orbit the planet looked vile and pestilential. From the surface, he knew the sky would have a sickly copper tint caused by the clouds of spores constantly adrift in the upper atmosphere, and the rampant, al­most virulent growth that covered everything.

  He shivered, rubbing his upper arms. His skin was the color and texture of dark, burnished bronze, but that didn't mean Tarnese Bleyd didn't feel the cold occasion­ally. Even when the temperature was set to a comfort­able thirty-eight degrees.

  The only parts of the planet, with its vast, continent-spanning jungles and marshlands, that remotely re­minded him of the veldts of his homeworld were the few isolated patches where the bota grew. He couldn't even see those from orbit. By far the largest fields were on Tanlassa, the bigger of two landmasses in the south­ern hemisphere. The Jasserak engagement—the only ac­tive conflict zone on the planet, at the moment—was taking place on the Tanlassan western shore.

  Bleyd turned away from the port and made a gesture. A hologrammic display appeared before him, showing a translucent image of the rotating planet. Alphanumerics cascaded on either side of the globe. The admiral brooded on the stats. He knew most of them by heart, and yet he often felt compelled to review them. Some­how, it was comforting to know everything about the planet that was going to make him rich.

  According to the Nikto survey team that had first discovered the system, nearly two centuries ago, Dron­gar was a relatively young world, with a radius of 6,259 kilometers and a surface gravity of 1.2 Standard. It had two small moons—nothing more than captured asteroids, really. There were three other planets in the

  system, all gas giants orbiting in the outer reaches, which meant Drongar was well shielded from meteor and cometary impacts. Drongar Prime was approxi­mately the same size as Coruscant Prime, but it burned hotter. That explained Drongar's current near-tropical climatic zonation. But the lack of a large moon to stabi­lize its obliquity meant that, in a few hundred million years, Drongar would probably become a "snowball" world as cold as, or colder than, Hoth.

  Bleyd gestured again, and the holo faded. He thought about Saki, his homeworld. True, it was mostly tropical as well, with large stretches of jungle and marshes—but not like Drongar. Neimoidia and Saki together couldn't match Drongar for sheer fetid, noisome area.

  Saki also had forests, and savannas, and lakes ... and, unlike Drongar, a stable axis, anchored by the gravity of a single, large moon. Thus, seasonal varia­tions on Saki were mild, the air was sweet, and the hunting was good. Saki Prime was an older star, its spectrum shifting more toward the red. From the planet's surface it looked like a swollen crimson jewel hanging in the azure sky.

  Bleyd had heard it said on occasion that Sakiyan were too insular, that they tended to stay on their own world rather than venture out into the galaxy and play with the big kids. He never responded to these charges. He knew that, if most of the other sentients voicing the complaint could spend even one day on Saki, they would under­stand why few of its children ever wanted to leave.

  True, he had left—but only because circumstances had forced him to seek his fortune offworld. His pride-father, Tarnese Lyanne, had invested heavily in various black-market and smuggling operations—far too heav­ily. Shiltu the Hutt, a Black Sun vigo, had double-crossed

  Lyanne. Clan Tarnese had been ruined—and Bleyd had left to find employment in the Republic military.

  But one day he would return. That was never in doubt. And he would return in style.

  The Sakiyans were a proud and predatory race— Bleyd's ancestors had been legendary hunters. It was his monthrael to be no less of a legend than they.

  Bleyd stopped reminiscing. He could not afford to lose his focus now. A decison had to be made, a decision that could determine the rest of his life's course.

  But there really was only one choice. If the Republic was unable or unwilling to recognize his abilities, then it was the Republic's loss, not his. He had known all along, after all, that it was up to him to make certain that he came out of this war wiser—and richer.

  Much richer.

  With sufficient credits Bleyd could reclaim his clan's holdings. It was too late to wreak any sort of delayed re­venge on Shiltu—the old reprobate had died a decade before from sud
den massive cellular hemorrhage, a sort of full-body stroke that had ended the Hutt's life far too quickly and painlessly, in Bleyd's opinion.

  But it was just as well that he not be tempted. Re­venge, he knew, was an expensive and dangerous lux­ury. Retiring from the war a rich man would be his best vengeance upon a military too foolish to know what they had in him,

  If Filba continued to come through . ..

  Bleyd was certainly not blind to the irony that re­quired him to trust another Hutt in dealing with Black Sun again. It was risky—very risky. Allying with Black Sun was like gambling with a Wookiee: even when you know he's cheating, sometimes it's best to let him win. But the stakes were too high to walk away from. With

  the credits they stood to make, he could become a landed person, perhaps even enter politics. He closed his eyes, picturing it: the wealthy Senator from Saki, with his own palatial spire on Coruscant, affecting the lives of trillions with his every command ... he could certainly get used to such a lifestyle.

  Yes, it was risky. Going after the big game always was. But he'd hunted razor-tailed tigers in the Dust Pits of Yurb; he'd fought lyniks that had tasted his blood and therefore knew every move he would make; he had even trapped a nexu, one of the most ferocious beasts in the galaxy.

  He was more than capable of outwitting even a many-headed beast such as Black Sun.

  His secretary droid appeared in the doorway. "Admi­ral, you asked to be reminded of the time."

  Bleyd glared at the droid, annoyed at being pulled back from his visions of glory. "Yes, yes. All right, you have reminded me. Go on about your business."

  The droid, a standard protocol unit, quickly shuffled away. It knew better than to hesitate when Bleyd told it to move.

  The admiral glanced down at his desk and the moun­tain of flimsies and datapads there. Bleyd set to work. It would be best to have a clear mind, unencumbered by trivial business, so that he could concentrate on his plans. He had to keep things running smoothly; there was far too much at stake for any mistakes to be made at this point. Bleyd thought of the billions of credits he would realize from the Hutt's scheme. Those billions would buy him the top floor of a monad in Corus­cant's prestigious equatorial belt, and servants to cater to his every whim. The means to accomplish all this was