Tales From The Empire

by Peter Schweighofer

  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,