heart, I opened two ampules of Clondex, one of endogenous steroid, a cordine patch, and a
liter of serum-replacement solution, and laid them down ready to
hand.
Liak crouched beside me, ready to help if needed; Has-lam stayed alert
at the door.
"Hey," Melenna remarked, "never underestimate the power of a woman,"
"You're in better shape than I thought you'd be," I commented as I
worked.
"I had three vials of . . . Clondex when I got here . . . been
underdosing myself. I only . . . ran out two days ago."
"How'd you get them past the body search?" Melenna demanded.
"Swallowed them." Weak as he was, Vibrion winked at her. Melenna
followed this statement to its logical conclusion and grimaced; funny,
I wouldn't have thought her the squeamish type. I ran the scanner over
his body, noting the small heart--another sign of dehydration--and the
shrunken kidneys and adrenals, which went along with the Zithrom's.
Blood pressure was a little low, heart rate a little fast, but
otherwise everything looked pretty normal. I allowed myself a sigh of
relief. This isn't going to be as bad as I thought, thank the skies.
And remember, the next time Briessen wants to send you out on one of
these things, say no.
The IAU clicked, and a backflow of darkish venous blood appeared in its
access chamber, indicating the catheter was in the vein. I injected
the first unit of Clondex and the steroid rapidly, then started feeding
in the serum solution as fast as I could. I had to be careful here;
giving a large volume of fluid too fast could tip him over the other
way into lung and kidney failure.
"How're we doing?" Haslam asked. "We've gotta move out soon."
"I need a few more minutes. Have they caught on to US?"
"No sign yet," he said, "but let's not push our luck.
Liak, go open the access tunnel entrance and stand by."
Liak lumbered up from my side and out the door, ruffling my hair with
his big paw as he passed.
The fluid bag was nearly empty; I squeezed it to get the last few drops
into my patient, then disconnected it. Already Vibrion was looking
better, his eyes less sunken and color coming back into his face. I
gave him the second round of Clondex, then slapped the cordine patch
onto his neck. He flushed red, a hand going shakily to his forehead as
the stimulant took hold.
"The headache will pass in a minute," I said. "This'll help you keep
up. We need to get out of here. Can you sit up?"
Vibrion nodded, wincing as I helped him to a sitting position and
rechecked his blood pressure; it was holding steady. So far, so
good.
"Liak's got the tunnel open," Haslam said, calmly but with a note of
underlying urgency in his voice. I hauled Vibrion to a standing
position, Melenna stepping in to get a shoulder under his arm for
support, and rechecked the scanner's readings; his pulse had gone up 10
beats per minute to compensate for the change in body position, but
blood pressure remained stable.
"Okay?" I asked him.
"Okay." He smiled wanly. "Let's go."
The access tunnel ran parallel along the hallway, a brightly lit, dusty
passage just tall enough to stand up in (Liak and Enkhet had to slouch)
and just wide enough for one. Melenna, Vibrion and I, linked in the
tail position, shuffled sideways. Liak led, followed by Enkhet and
Gowan; Haslam was in the middle, where he could monitor everyone at
once. It was slow going, with a couple of back-up-and-start-over
maneuvers at first. I hadn't the slightest idea where we were going,
and wasn't sure if I cared. I'd done what I came to do, and the
post-code ebb of unused adrenaline had left me drained, flat, and
hun
gry. Melenna, on the other hand, was looking keyed-up and nervous.
"This is taking too long," she hissed at Haslam, just ahead of her.
"How long do you think it'll be before the Imps figure out something's
up? They're not all idiots, you know."
"I'm aware of that, Melenna," Haslam said with careful calm.
"It's only been eleven minutes. We have time."
Eleven minutes? How could it only have been eleven minutes?
It felt like hours since I'd walked into that cell.
Liak grunted something from the head of the line, and we kept shuffling
along. I glanced repeatedly up at Vibrion, reassessing his condition;
after a few minutes he was dripping sweat--it was hot in the tunnel and
noticeably paler as the cordine flush wore off, but he gently squeezed
my shoulders and kept moving. It occurred to me that fragile as the
old man appeared, anyone who--at his age, and burdened by chronic
illness--could found and run an entire cell of the Rebellion had to be
tougher than tempered titanium. He was certainly proving it now.
After a long few minutes more of this business, we all stopped at a
signal from Liak: we were nearing the docking bay. The plan was to
throw a concussion grenade into the bay while we remained under cover
in the tunnel; with the guards incapacitated and the tractor beam
hopefully deactivated, we would scurry to our stolen shuttle, take off,
and evade pursuit long enough to complete the run-to-jump for
hyperspace.
At least, that was the theory.
We all crouched down on the dusty floor of the tunnel, except Vibrion,
who sat down rather suddenly, as if his legs would no longer hold
him.
Melenna propped him up against the wall while I scrabbled in the medpac
for another cordine patch. I wasn't sure of the wisdom of giving him
another round it might send him into heart failure but I wanted it
handy if he did need it. A flash of white caught the corner of my eye
at the far curve of the corridor, and I glanced up.
A stormtrooper, flattened against the curving wall, was just edging
around the corner, blaster up and pointed directly at me.
Ambush, I thought, very coldly and clearly, as time slowed to a halt
around me. I couldn't seem to get in a breath--the nauseated stunned
emptiness was almost exactly what I'd felt at age six, after falling
off a balcony flat onto my stomach. But my mind, trained to function
logically in a crisis, kept clicking right along: There isn't time to
warn Haslam. You're blocking the others--they can't shoot around
you.
If you fall, Vibrion's next in line.
You've got a blaster.
My right hand pulled the little hold-out blaster from its holster under
my left sleeve, leveled it at the trooper, and fired. The shot angled
upward just enough to pass between the breastplate and the bottom of
the helmet; it took him square in the throat, and he let out a choked
gurgle and dropped to his knees. His helmet flew off as he went down,
allowing me a brief glimpse of a very young man, light brown hair damp
with sweat and clinging to his skull, clear gray eyes wide in
amazement, before he toppled flat onto his face.
I had just time to be amazed that I'd actually hit him before I was
surrounded by blaster shots: Haslam and the others had caught on to the
&nb
sp; fact that something was going on behind us, and were shooting over my
head in a perfectly choreographed blast-and-duck pattern that said
they'd been in situations like this before. The rest of the troopers,
their cover blown, had moved around the corner into the open and were
blasting away at us. I started to turn back, with some confused idea
of shielding Vibrion with my body, but Melenna hissed at me, "Stay
down!"
Her statement was punctuated by a dull, but extremely loud, explosion
from the direction of the docking bay that shook the walls around us.
I swallowed to equalize the pressure in my ears and got off a couple of
random shots toward the troopers, at the same time groping be
hind me with my left hand for Vibrion's wrist. His pulse was rapid and
slightly irregular, but strong; he squeezed my hand in weak
reassurance.
During all this, I'd forgotten to try to breathe again. I gasped, and
air rushed into my lungs, making me suddenly dizzy. I dropped my
forehead onto my wrist; curled awkwardly in a semi-fetal position on
the floor, there wasn't much else I was capable of. I stayed there,
clutching Vibrion's hand, until someone sharply wrenched at my
shoulder.
"Come on!" a voice shouted roughly. "We're going!"
I looked up to see Gowan bending over me, helmet off and a charred
crease of blaster burn slanting across his forehead where a bolt had
winged him. He grasped my wrist, hauled me to my feet, and slung me
forward toward the docking bay. Behind Us lay only a heap of white
armor, the gray-eyed boy hidden beneath his comrades.
The floor of the bay was similarly littered with the limp bodies of
troopers and officers, all knocked unconscious simultaneously by the
blast of Liak's concussion grenade.
Haslam, at the entrance waiting for us, grabbed my arm and dragged me
up the shuttle ramp just behind Melenna and Vibrion; he was leaning
heavily on her shoulder, knees buckling and plainly on the verge of
collapse.
Gowan, following us in, hit the door latch and headed for the cockpit
at a dead run; the engines were already roaring in startup sequence.
Haslam dumped Vibrion and me onto the passenger seat, rapidly strapped
us in, then turned to follow Melenna aft.
"Where are you going?" I gasped.
"To man the guns," he flung back over his shoulder, not missing a
step.
"Guns? I thought shuttles didn't have guns!"
No answer but the jolting rise of the craft; then we were flung
backwards by the steep drag of acceleration as the shuttle shot
forward. The next few minutes were a rough approximation of a whirling
repulsorlift ride I'd gone on once during a Coruscant Fete Week: moving
straight
up, down, sideways, in a corkscrew, and several less-conceivable directions, all at breakneck speed, in pitch darkness
(the cabin lights had gone out during the second high-speed maneuver),
and this time with the added thrill of people shooting at us. I could
dimly hear Haslam and Melenna's casual crosstalk as they shot back;
evidently this shuttle did have guns. Vibrion was too far away for me
to reach, but sat crumpled in his restraints, his eyes sunken again
into his head but sparkling. People say emergency medics are
excitement junkies, but this was getting ridiculous. Haslam was right
about Enkhet's piloting, though; even I could tell he was doing a
superb job of keeping us in one piece. Finally the ride turned into a
high-gravity Aurin sandwich, pressing the breath out of my lungs as the
shuttle made the star-stretching jump to hyperspace.
The next few minutes were a blur, as I got Vibrion settled more
comfortably and gave him some more fluid and another half-dose of
Clondex. Haslam had taken a blaster shot to the left shoulder, which
had managed to miss the great vessels and nerve plexus; I cleaned and
dressed his and Gowan's wounds. Melenna, who'd been in plain view of
the troopers and without armor or any other form of protection, didn't
have a scratch on her.
"That's why we keep her around," Enkhet quipped cheerfully, strolling
into the common room from the cockpit. "She's our luck."
Melenna thumped him lightly on the top of the head with a derisive
chuckle, and Enkhet tugged teasingly on a curling golden strand.
I finished Haslam's dressing and was halfway through repacking the
medpac, thinking a hot drink sounded like a good idea, when the shakes
hit. I always get a little trembly after a code; usually it passes off
after a few seconds, but this time it got steadily worse. I knelt on
the deck-plates in the 'corner of the common room, face turned to the
wall, while the ugly, jeering thoughts crawled around in my brain.
You shot that trooper. You killed him. I thought you were supposed
to be a doctor, remember?
I had to! It was him or us.
Yeah, right. All that pious moralizing about your oaths, and do no
harm, and the sanctity of sentient life--and none of it really meant
anything, did it?
It wasn't just me, not just my own life. I had a patient to protect.
I had the whole group to protect.
Oh, come off it! You had to protect them? Who appointed you Hero of
the Universe? Face it--you can mouth off all you want to about
morality, but when it comes right down to it, you took a 'life. You're
not a healer, you're a killer.
"Aurin?"
A hand touched my shoulder, and I turned. Gowan knelt next to me,
looking tired and battered and absurdly young, open concern in his dark
eyes. I just looked at him, unable to get any words around the
hessa-ball that had suddenly taken up residence in my throat.
"You know," he said slowly, "you did a good job in there."
"I killed him." A deep breath let me speak, but couldn't keep the
tremor out of my voice.
"I knoW. And I'm sorry you had to . . . but I can't say I'm sorry you
did." His voice was even, quiet. "Listen to me. Aurin . .
. this is a war. The point of war is that if you can kill enough of
the people on the other side, they'll quit. That's a hard thing to
live with. What's even harder is, sometimes people get caught up in
the killing who don't really belong there. And I think you're one of
those people."
"You can say that again." A shaky half-laugh, half-sob escaped me.
"I'm supposed to keep people alive, not... this."
"Exactly. And that's what makes what you did today so valuable.
The Rebellion doesn't have anything like as many troops as the Empire
does. If we can't stay alive long enough to win this war, we've thrown
our lives away. Look at it this way: you helped keep all of us alive a
little longer
to fight this thing. And you kept Vibrion alive, and
that's even more important, just because of who he is. Because he can
bring in others who believe what we're doing is right."
I hadn't expected such gentleness, such eloquence out of this dark man
who had barely spoken during the entire mission. The hard knot in my
throat promptly dissolved into tears. Cowan put an awkward arm
around
my shoulders as I cried, hot tears of shame, of self-recrimination, of
grief, and of sheer reaction to the events of the day.
The tensions and pain gradually drained out of my body along with the
tears. After a few minutes I simply stopped crying and slumped
exhausted against the wall, dashed my sleeve across my eyes and smiled
shakily up at Cowan.
"I'm okay now. Really," I added at his doubtful look.
"Sorry I cried all over you. I'd just . . . like to be alone for a
while."
He nodded and stood up. "Do you want anything? A drink?"
"Not now, thank you."
He nodded and moved forward toward the cockpit.
"Cowan?"
He turned.
"Thanks."
He nodded again and walked away. I just sat there for a while, eyes
closed, mind drifting. For the most part, I'd done what I came to
do.
I'd gotten Vibrion out of the prison alive; I'd made it out myself, and
so had the rest of the team. And if all that was partly due to my
having violated my oath to do no harm . . . well, maybe allowances
could be made for having done a wrong thing for a right reason. Maybe
the pretty rules of medicine don't hold up as well in war. Either way,
Tales From The Empire Page 30
