Star Wars - MedStar 01 - Battle Surgeons

by Michael Reaves

  Barriss tried, but, of course, the balcony's floor held her fast.

  After a few moments, her Master said, "Is there a problem, Padawan?"

  "Yes, Master. I am trying, but—"

  "By saying 'try,' you limit yourself. Jedi do not limit themselves by choice."

  Barriss had nodded meekly. "Yes, Master."

  "I need to know how many pastries there are in that bakery window. This is of primary importance. Con­tinue. I will return later."

  And so saying, Master Unduli left.

  But, of course, the pressure was too great. Barriss had not been able to levitate even a hair's thickness from the floor. She was still trying, her rear and thighs numb from the cold ferrocrete, when Master Unduli finally re­turned, hours later.

  "I failed, Master."

  "Yes? How so?"

  "I could not manage to levitate."

  Her Master smiled. "But was that the lesson, Padawan?"

  Barriss stared at her, confused. "What?"

  "One can fail at a task but still learn the lesson, Bar­riss. The first time I sat on this balcony trying to do Ris­ing Meditation, all that happened was that I got sore. A Jedi does not put limits on herself, but there are limits, and you must find them, and understand how to deal with them. Have you ever heard the story of the old man's river crossing?"

  "I do not recall it."

  "At the bank of a wide river on this world, long be­fore it was as it is today, an old man sat by the water, meditating. A second, younger man came along and saw the older one. 'What are you doing?' the younger man inquired.

  " 'I am working on the ability to walk on water, so that I may cross the river,' the older man said.

  " 'Ah. And how is it going?'

  " 'Pretty well. I have been at it for forty years, and in another five or ten I believe I will have it.'

  "'Ah,' said the younger man. "Well, good luck to you.'

  "He bowed, then walked to a boat tied up nearby, climbed in, cast off, and rowed across the river." Mas-

  ter Unduli looked at her. "Do you understand the mean­ing of this story?"

  Barriss thought about it for a moment. "If the impor­tant thing was crossing the river, then the younger man was wiser than the older one."

  "Precisely. Why spend decades learning how to walk on water when there is a boat moored right next to you?" The Jedi paused, then asked, "What was most vi­tal in this exercise with which I tasked you?"

  "How many pastries were in the bakery window."

  "Exactly."

  Barriss felt incredibly stupid as she suddenly under­stood what her Master meant.

  Master Unduli smiled. "I see you comprehend at last."

  "I could have simply stood up and looked over the wall," Barriss said. "What was important was not how I got the information—only that I got it."

  Master Unduli nodded. "There is hope for you yet, my young Padawan ..."

  Barriss smiled at the memory. Then she took a deep breath, exhaled, and let her mind clear. A second later she floated upward from the floor, and hovered, weight­less and free, in the air ...

  13

  Jos had to admit that the formchair was comfortable. Ergonomically speaking, it did exactly what it was sup­posed to do: relax him somewhat, but not enough to make him drowsy. He had heard that the chair was equipped with biosensors that monitored heart rate, pulse, beta and theta wave activity, and so on, and re­layed the information to Merit, to better help him help those sitting there. Jos doubted it. Not that it couldn't be done, but he really didn't think Merit needed it. The Equani minder seemed always to know the right words to say, the right questions to ask, and the right times to be silent.

  Like now.

  Jos had been staring at the floor; now he looked up and met Merit's eyes again. They were large for the fur-covered face, slate gray in color; an Equani's eye pig­mentation always matched his fur, Jos had read in one of the many medicrons he'd had to study while a resi­dent. And right now they were fixed on him.

  "Explore, for a minute, your feelings for Tolk," he said gently.

  Jos leaned back, and the formchair obediently flowed, like warm mercury, into a new configuration to accom­modate him. Of course, Jos thought; it has to be able to

  adapt comfortably to any species. Even Hutts, proba­bly. He suppressed a shudder at the thought. I sure hope someone wipes it down afterward ...

  "Jos," Merit said. His voice was quiet and noninsis­tent, but somehow it penetrated the surgeon's thoughts like a particle beam. "You're not trying very hard," the minder continued.

  "You're right. Sorry."

  "It's your time," Merit said. "You're allotted one hour a week to get things off your chest—or to 'up­chuck gizzard trichobezoars,' as the Toydarians so col­orfully put it. How you spend that time is up to you. You can talk to me—in which case I might be able to help you work through some things—or you can sit there and enjoy the furniture."

  Jos grinned. "All right, Klo. I guess I'm going to talk about things whether I want to or not."

  The minder smiled. "It's always hardest to help your­self." He waited a moment, then prodded gently, "About Tolk...?"

  Jos sighed. "It's like I just noticed her yesterday. Be­fore that, she was just another pair of hands at the table—smart, don't get me wrong, she's an excellent nurse—but no more than that. Outside the room, she was someone to have a drink with, someone to com­plain about this pit of a planet with ..."

  "And now?"

  "Now she's .. . more. But she can't be."

  Merit said nothing, but his expression said, Go on. So Jos explained briefly about the beliefs of his family and his clan, about how he couldn't flout them by mar­rying an esker.

  "They're your family's beliefs," Merit said. "But are they your beliefs?"

  Jos opened his mouth, then closed it. He was making an honest effort to find the answer to that question, but his mind was having none of it. He found himself think­ing about the formchair again. Wonder how much one costs...

  After another fairly fruitless ten minutes, Merit glanced at the chrono and said, "We have to stop."

  Jos felt relieved, and then felt irritated at himself for feeling relieved. "I guess I'm just not a very introspec­tive sort," he told Merit at the door. "My family and clan are big on tradition, not communication. My dad's idea of a revealing moment is forgetting to lock the 'fresher."

  "All you need to know about yourself is in you," the minder replied. "You may have to dig a little deeper and a little harder, but it's there."

  "Maybe the Padawan could help me," Jos mused. "Can't Jedi read minds, that kind of thing?"

  "I wouldn't know. The Equani species is—was—by nature rather resistant to the powers of the Jedi. But I think you need to find your own answers instead of looking to others for them."

  The multiple-repulsor drone of incoming medlifters filtered into Barriss's sleep, and the siren that sounded almost immediately afterward meant that everybody within earshot needed to get to the OT. Now.

  She dressed hurriedly and headed for the triage area. It was only twenty meters from her cubicle, but the hu­midity was so high today, she felt that she was wading through a pool of heated fleek oil.

  When she got to the building, she stopped, momen­tarily unable to believe her eyes. Thirty-five or forty

  wounded troopers lay on stretchers, on gurneys, on the floor itself, being tended by doctors, nurses, droids, techs—anybody, in short, who could help. Most of the troops were bloody, and many were burned, with weep­ing red blisters and scorched black patches. Some were missing arms and legs.

  Some were all of those things, and more.

  Still more injured were incoming. She could barely hear the whine of the lifters' repulsor fields over the cries and groans of the wounded. Barriss swallowed, nauseated. Even doctors could be overwhelmed by too much gore. Nothing she had ever seen in her wartime experience so far had been anything close to this.

  Tolk was calling triage, and it was
short and to the point. Barriss watched her for a moment. To anybody outside the medical field and the battlefield, triage would seem remarkably cruel, but she knew it was the most efficient way to save the most patients.

  "This one won't make it," Tolk said, rising from the side of a sergeant whose legs had been blown off above the knees. His skin was chalk white, and from the red, ragged stumps the last of his life's blood was dripping slowly. Following behind Tolk was a droid, which at­tached a pulse-sticker to the dying clone's shoulder. A large, red x glowed rhythmically.

  Tolk moved quickly to the next patient, examined him briefly. "Shrapnel wounds to the belly and groin. Surgery, category three."

  The droid put a sticker on the man's shoulder. The number 3 throbbed on it.

  Barriss bent to examine the trooper closest to her— a lieutenant. He was awake and alert; his only injury seemed to be that his left arm was gone, blown off in

  a ragged stump just above the elbow. A constrictor around the stump had stopped the bleeding. His gaze met hers.

  "I'm good," he said through clenched teeth. "Take care of my men."

  "He can wait," Barriss said to Tolk. "Five."

  Tolk nodded at the droid, who affixed a number 5 pulse-sticker to the man's good shoulder.

  When there were fewer doctors than patients, one had to rank the injured as to survivability and the time neces­sary to keep them alive. Rimsoo category numbers ran from 1 through 6; category X was reserved for injuries that appeared mortal or very time-consuming to treat. The rating system was more complex than it appeared. The injury, survival chances, and need for immediate treatment all had to be taken into account. A severed artery might bleed out in a minute and all it would take to save the patient would be a simple staple or suture tie, so it would be best to treat him first, whereas a man with his leg blown off but heat-cauterized from a blaster bolt could be left until more life-threatening injuries had been dealt with. Making these decisions, the Padawan knew, was often as much intuition as science.

  A 6 meant a patient might survive if treated, but indi­cated treatment could consume a lot of time and effort, and there were no guarantees he would make it. But 6 could also mean that the injury was not likely to be fa­tal if not treated right away. Either way, a 6 waited. A 5 meant survival chances were higher and treatment less time-intensive, and so on down the count. The triage caller had to use experience to make the decisions, and thus had to be knowledgeable in treating the kinds of injuries coming in. A droid stepped up to Barriss. "I am to assist you,

  Padawan," it said. In one hand it held a pad of pulse-stickers.

  Barriss nodded, turned to the next stretcher, and gasped. Before her was a terrible sight: a trooper with all four limbs burned down to stumps, and nothing but red, suppurating tissue where his face had been. On Coruscant, or Corellia, or any of the other hundreds of civilized worlds, technology could attach cybernetic limbs and reconstruct his face—he would be a strange hybrid of machine and man, but at least he would be alive and relatively functional. But here on Drongar, they had no facilities even remotely capable of such things. She bit her lip and turned to the droid assigned to her. "Category X," she said.

  The droid applied the sticker, then looked at her. "A purgation of fire," it said. Barriss thought it was an odd comment for a droid to make, but she had no time to wonder about it. The wounded were being brought in so fast that she had to keep moving or be overrun.

  She had damped down on her connection to the Force as much as she could; extrasensory experience of this much agony at this close range carried a real possibility of synaptic overload. Even closed down as she was, she could still feel the pain, the fear, the horror of it all pounding and scrabbling at her mind. She swallowed dryly and kept moving. There were some here she knew she could heal with the Jedi arts she had learned, but it would take too long. Not even the Force could mitigate the cold and brutal equations of triage.

  Ahead of her, Tolk continued moving through the maze of dead and dying, followed by her droid, desig­nating who would live and who would almost certainly die. The fact that they were clones, all identical in ap­pearance, in no way lessened the horror; in fact, in a strange way it increased it—at least that was so for Bar­riss. Seeing the same body wounded and traumatized in a thousand different ways gave the whole scene a sur­real aspect, as if it had no beginning and no end, a per­petual loop of pain and death.

  She knew she had to focus, had to utilize the re­sources at hand wisely.

  Tolk moved to the next patient, slipped in a patch of blood, recovered her balance. She veered toward Bar­riss, who was looking at another wounded trooper. The Jedi shook her head.

  Another x, its red glow waxing and waning like the flow of lives all about them, was applied by the droid.

  They were dying like wingstingers hitting a zap field, and nothing Jos did seemed to matter. A repaired artery held without leaking, but the patient was too far into shock to come back, even with his blood volume pumped to the max. Another patient, without a mark on him, was smiling one second and dead the next. A scanner showed that a sliver of metal, thinner than a needle, had pierced the corner of his eye and gone deep into his brain.

  Despite the floor-level pressor fields, those working in the OT were at times up to their ankles in blood, urine, feces, lymph and spinal fluid. The air coolers and dehu­midifiers were still not working, and the stench, com­bined with oppressive wet heat, overwhelmed the scents of antiseptics and astringents. The surgeons cut and re­sected and transplanted with practiced efficiency, their nurses and what few droids they had at their sides, and yet the patients still didn't make it. Commands, both shouted and whispered, filled the reeking air: "—need twenty cc's coagulin, stat—"

  "—rotate the bacta tanks, no one gets more than ten minutes—"

  "—keep that field going, even if you have to hand-crank it—"

  After two hours' work Jos was five for five—none of them had lived. He was beginning to reel with exhaus­tion—it was taking nearly all he had just to keep his hands steady.

  "Get a pressor on that, stat!"

  He worked like a man possessed, exerting every bit of his skill, every trick he had learned in the day-to-day war against Death from the day he'd hit dirt here, and Death laughed at him at every turn, ripping the fading lives out of his and the other doctors' grasps with insult­ing, infuriating ease. The law of averages said things like this would happen, that there would be bad days and nothing to be done for it. But still Jos raged against life's dark foe, fighting it for all he was worth.

  The sixth one died on the table and couldn't be re­vived.

  Time blurred. He looked through a long and dark tunnel, with nothing visible in it except the patients be­fore him. He passed through exhaustion, through his second and third winds—and still the wounded and the dying kept coming, their eyes beseeching him under the stark, unforgiving lights.

  His life was painted in red and white. He had been born here doing this, had lived all his life here doing this, and would die here doing this .. .

  And then, as Jos sealed the latest patient, a double-lung and liver implant who would probably die, too, Tolk touched his arm.

  "That's it, Jos. That's the last one."

  He didn't understand what she was saying at first. It

  made no sense—how could there be an end to some­thing that was endless? He blinked, as if coming into the light from a great darkness. Slowly, her eyes above the mask came into focus. "Huh?"

  "We're done. We can rest now."

  Rest? What was that?

  He stumbled away from the table. Tolk moved to help him. "Careful," he mumbled. "Someone turned up the gravity." He peeled his gloves off, his hands fumbling, and tossed them at the waste hopper. They missed. He thought about going to pick them up, but the idea of bending over was too much to bear. He might never get up.

  He looked around. Others were finishing, or had just finished working on injuries, and they, too, had the look of
stunned exhaustion—the same look that had been on the common face of all those who had come under his knife.

  "How—how bad was it?"

  "Bad." He saw streaks of moisture along the top of her mask, where it had soaked up her tears.

  "Did we save any?"

  "A few."

  He tried to walk, staggered. She grabbed his arm, steadied him. "I don't want to know the percentages, do I?"

  "No. You don't."

  Jos felt himself slump even more. "I feel like I just went ten rounds in an arena on Geonosis." He wanted—needed—a drink, but that was far too much effort to contemplate, too. All he could think of now was finding a flat spot where he could collapse. It didn't even have to be flat. A pile of rocks would do ...

  He looked across the tables at Zan. His friend man-

  aged to lift his hand in a half salute or wave. Jos re­turned it, then staggered toward the door.

  And once outside, he heard the sound of more incom­ing lifters.

  Jos started to laugh. And, for a long, frightening mo­ment, he couldn't stop.

  14

  Want to see something interesting?" Dhur asked.

  Jos, Zan, Tolk, and Barriss were in the cantina, all drinking some form of alcohol, except the Jedi. It had been four days since that hellish influx of wounded. These days interesting was a loaded term, as far as Jos was concerned. But, as long as it didn't involve slicing into wounded troopers, he decided he was up to it.

  "Have a seat," Jos said. He waved at the tender, who nodded and started mixing. He knew who Dhur was and what the Sullustan drank by now.

  Dhur sat and pulled a small device from his pocket, a stressed-plastoid and metal sphere, about the size of a human child's fist. He held it up.

  Jos squinted at it. "Can't say I'm overly enthralled," he said. "Wait—" He took another drink, set the mug down, and squinted at the device again. "Nope," he said. "Still not enthralled."