“Life isn’t simple, Jos. Once you start clumping cells into tissues and tissues into systems, the level of complexity goes up in powers of ten. I can’t give you any easy answers—you have to figure things out for yourself.”
“Whatever the Republic’s paying you, it’s too much.”
Merit shrugged, a fluid and smooth gesture. “That’s how the galaxy works. It’s not my design; when I get to be in charge of everything, I’ll fix it. Until then, we’re stuck with this.”
Jos sighed. When you wanted answers, more questions didn’t exactly help.
Merit looked at his chrono and stood. “Our session is up—and I believe it’s now time for the weekly sabacc game, is it not?”
“Raise,” Den said. He tossed a ten-credit chip onto the table. The suspension field kept it from clinking too much or rolling away.
“I’ll see that,” Jos said, “and raise you two.” Two more chips hit the growing pile.
Den glanced owlishly at his cards, then at the rest of the players surrounding the cantina table as each anted up in turn. Besides himself and Captain Vondar, there were five others: Captain Yant, Barriss Offee, the minder Klo Merit, Tolk le Trene, and I-Five. Den could glean no clues from any of them as to the hands they were holding; the four organics all had carefully noncommittal faces, and even though the droid was capable of subtle expressions, he apparently had no problem controlling them.
It had been said that sabacc was as much a game of skill as it was of chance, and Den had no trouble believing that, especially with this crowd. Talk about a stacked deck: out of seven players, three of them were extremely adept at reading others. He was pretty certain that the Padawan would not use the Force to give herself an edge, but he wasn’t so sure about Tolk and Merit. The minder might be able to sense feelings in the others that would betray their emotional state, and so gain an edge, but Tolk would have a harder time of it. Even though this group wasn’t exactly at the same level of expertise as a bunch of card shooks working the Coruscant Crown Casino, they’d all, Den included, mastered fairly well the art of the “sabacc mask”—the completely expressionless face that did not betray by so much as an eyelash flicker any clues whatsoever. Not even a Lorrdian could read body language if the body in question was being utterly uncommunicative.
“Nobody calls? Great,” Yant said. “Draw two.” Barriss, the new dealer, handed him his cards.
From the camp’s hypersound speakers, the voice of one of Filba’s subordinates made an announcement, the focused sound beams making it seem as if he were speaking to each individual alone. “Attention,” the voice said hesitantly, obviously reading unfamiliar copy. “At, uh, zero-six-hundred hours the scheduled inspection by Admiral Bleyd will take place. Let’s make sure we give him a big welcome.”
“Ah, yes,” Jos said. “The visitation from on high. Think I’ll start saluting now and avoid the rush.”
A new round of betting began, starting this time with I-Five. Den had been watching the droid play with some interest. I-Five’s cognitive module was no doubt capable of calculating all or nearly all of the myriad combinations possible in the seventy-six-chip-card deck, but not even the most advanced synaptic grid processor could anticipate the random order in which they might occur in any given hand. Still, the droid was an excellent player, calm and cool. “Raise three,” he said.
Jos raised an eyebrow. “Maybe it’s just the heat,” he said, “but I could swear that durasteel skin of yours is starting to sweat.”
“Must be a leaky lube node,” I-Five replied imperturbably. “I might note, however, that my olfactory sensor is picking up a distinct whiff of fear pheromone with your genetic tag, Captain Vondar.”
“How’d you get to be so good at cards, I-Five?” Den asked the droid.
“My partner taught me,” the droid replied. “He could usually walk out of a game with more credits than he went in with. He’s held more idiot’s arrays than an asylum nurse.”
“Do you consider yourself to be a sentient organic, like a human?” Jos asked abruptly.
“Only when I’m particularly depressed,” the droid replied.
Jos made a wry face. Before he could reply I-Five continued, “Knowing what I do of organics, however, and of humans in particular, I must assume that your question is sincere, Captain Vondar. I can only answer that, due to a cognitive module superior to most droids of my category, as well as the lack of a creativity damper, I am more sentient than most of my colleagues. Does this mean that I qualify as a ‘living’ being? I suppose that depends on one’s point of view. But most philosophers take the position that to be able to ask the question is to have already answered it.”
Den saw a quick glance pass between the captain and the minder, saw the latter smile slightly. Something sub-surface was definitely going on there.
“In the twelve years that I have ricocheted around this galaxy like the legendary Roon Comet,” I-Five continued, “I have encountered a great many interesting personalities. Some of them have been droids. I still have gaps in my memory that seem to be connected to some kind of trauma occurring not long after my leaving Coruscant. My self-repair systems are processing these gaps, assembling the missing data from interior hologrammics, but my internal logic circuits won’t allow synaptic linkage to proceed with less than seventy-five percent certainty.”
Den glanced at Jos. It was his hand, but the surgeon seemed deep in thought, unaware of his turn.
“Jos,” Barriss said gently after a moment.
Jos looked up. “I call,” he said.
Everyone showed their hands. Den chuckled as he put down a full twenty-three. “Pure sabacc,” he said, grinning and reaching for the two pots. “Scan ’em and sob, ladies and—”
Jos laid down his cards. Den and the other players stared in disbelief. It was an idiot’s array: the face card plus a two of sabers and a three of flasks.
“Nice play,” Tolk said.
“Thanks,” Jos said as he gathered in the credits. But Den, watching the surgeon’s expression, had the distinct feeling that right now, Captain Vondar could not have cared less about winning.
21
The night was, of course, warm. Wingstingers, fire gnats, and other hapless insects flew past and hurled themselves against zappers, adding little blue flickers to the camp lights and what little wan star gleam managed to penetrate the mostly cloudy skies. Drongar’s two moons weren’t even big enough to show disks, so, were it not for the Rimsoo lights, the swamp would be exceedingly dark now. As would the entire night half of the planet. On a rainy evening, the only light was from swamp rot, lightning flashes, and the intermittent glow of the fire gnats.
An unpleasant place in every aspect. Well, no, be honest—the enemy personnel were actually fairly decent beings.
There was a tendency, the spy knew, to identify with the people you found yourself among when you were working. There could come a time when you’d forget your original purpose, and start to think of those whom you were detailed to watch, or to damage, as real friends. It was called “going native.” Many agents and spies had done it, in war and in peace. It was all too easy. Enemies were not faceless automata, or amoral monsters who got up every morning with a burning desire to rage forth and do evil. No, most of them were just like anybody else—they had hopes, fears, families, and they believed they were doing the right things for the right reasons.
It was hard to demonize such people.
To be sure, you could present it as such to a bunch of young troopers. You could indoctrinate them, visualizing the enemy soldiers as maniacal fiends who wanted nothing more than to slaughter innocent younglings, burn down your prime mother’s house, and violate your drove father’s grave. Modern soldiers rarely saw the enemy face to face at any event. Firing a missile at somebody ten thousand meters away was bloodless and uninvolving. But even a brief encounter at close range on the field was sometimes enough to ruin months of training: the first time one of your recruits saw a young being who looked
a lot like him or her or it, sitting on a battlefield holding in his guts with his hands and crying for a drink of water—well, it was a shock. Your newly battle-trained conscript might suddenly realize that the dying young soldier had hopes and fears not all that different from his own—and maybe that all he, too, wanted to do was just serve his tour and go home. That realization was like an upended flask of liquid nitrogen, chilling to the core.
Thinking along those lines was not a good idea for a soldier. It might make him hesitate next time; might even get him killed. Best to try and ignore it.
But when you were a sub-rosa agent, you couldn’t do that. You couldn’t harbor illusions that your enemies were evil; not when you ate with them, drank with them, worked with them. You sometimes grew very attached to them. In a place like this, people lived in each other’s pockets. You learned to know the one sitting across from you at the chow hall table, almost as well as you did your own reflection.
The staff at this Rimsoo were good people, almost all of them. The spy knew this—judging beings was a big part of an agent’s business. If this war hadn’t begun, any of them could have been potential friends. There wasn’t a demon among them.
That made the tasks harder. When you weren’t hurting some monster by setting events in motion, but instead were harming people who considered you their friend—it hurt. You got up every morning and your life among them was almost totally a lie. Everything you said or did had to remain hidden behind a thick shroud, kept secret for your own survival. Spies, after all, were not well treated in times of war. You were seldom traded when caught; generally, a quick military court would be convened and you would be extinguished like a switched-off glow stick, quietly and quickly, as soon as they extracted whatever intelligence they could from your soon-to-be-dead brain. Dead on some faraway planet, unmourned in a shallow grave, detested by those who thought they’d known you.
And even if you were successful—even if you completed your mission and returned safely—there was no glory, no medals, no parades at home. If you were very lucky, you got to live a quiet, low-key life without having extensive parts of your memory sponged away by “your” side.
Spying was not a job for one with pale courage. You had to be made of something stronger than the strongest steelcrete to withstand the stress of being an undercover agent, no matter which side you worked for, no matter how strong and valid your reasons for doing the job.
Valid? Oh, yes, the spy’s reasons were certainly that. The reasons were old and far away, but undiminished nonetheless. Even so, it was impossible to smile at these people and not mean it, because they were good people. None of them had participated in the atrocity that had made all this necessary—all of them, in fact, would have been horrified at the event. Decent beings on any side of any war would be. But it wasn’t the decent beings who caused such things. And it was the indecent ones who had to pay for their crimes. You had to resolve early on that the innocent might have to suffer, and you had to strive to make them suffer as little as possible, but suffering was unavoidable. People died in war, just as the spy’s people had died, and there was little to be done about it, save to make it happen as cleanly and quickly as possible.
Some of them were attractive, bright, skilled…all the things the spy sought in friends and lovers. And yet they would die. That resolve had to remain steadfast. War was a cold business. The tears would have to come much later…
It was time for bed. Tomorrow would bring whatever it would bring, and rest, if allowed by happenstance, was always necessary.
At least once a month, Admiral Bleyd did a tour of the Rimsoos. It was a cursory inspection, to wave the flag and pretend he cared about the troops and medics toiling on this tropical mudball he had come to so thoroughly detest. When the next Black Sun agent appeared, it was not Bleyd’s intent that there be anything unusual in his own routine. The inspection tour was scheduled and, without compelling reason to call it off, would proceed as normal. Business as usual.
It was largely a waste of everybody’s time. They knew when he was coming, had had plenty of time to polish and prepare. He would not see anything amiss unless it happened by accident, and right in front of him.
He couldn’t even take time off to go hunting—but then, there was nothing worthy of his skill on this sodden world.
Bleyd always used his personal lighter for the flight to the surface, a small craft traditionally called that because its namesake’s original purpose had been to “lighten” vessels on planetary seas by moving cargo ashore. His craft, a modified Surronian Conqueror assault ship, was not the standard vessel for an admiral of the fleet. The vessel was small, less than thirty meters in length, and its cargo-carrying capacity was limited—it wouldn’t lighten any ship of size to any noticeable degree, which was normal enough. It ran, however, a cluster of eight Surronian ion engines, four A2s and four A2.50s, and was the fastest thing in the atmosphere on this planet by far. Enemy guns set to track ordinary transport and starfighters would be shooting at empty air far behind the ship when Bleyd cranked it up. Exposure to the spores was also more limited than in other craft. On a good flight, with no local storms to slow him down, he could leave the flight deck and land at ground stations in half the time any other transport available could manage. The hyperdrive was a Class One Corellian Engineering Corporation H1.5, sufficient to carry a passenger back to the realm of civilized worlds. Bleyd had heard about the vessel after it had been captured from some pirate or other during a military engagement just before he was posted here, and with a bit of clever bargaining had managed to obtain it as his personal transport.
Aside from its other virtues, the ship had a pleasing aerodynamic shape, a kind of elongated figure eight. There was, after all, no reason an admiral’s transport couldn’t look as good as it flew.
This jaunt was a piece of dream cake. As he lanced through the atmosphere toward the surface, he was pondering his other problem: credits, and how best to amass as many as possible as quickly as possible without risk of detection.
“Please identify yourself,” came the request from the main Republic ground battery control.
Bleyd smiled. They had to ask, but they certainly knew who he was. The sensor profile of his lighter was unique—there was nothing in twenty parsecs that looked even remotely like it.
“Admiral Bleyd here,” he responded, his voice crisp. “On inspection tour from MedStar Nineteen.” He rattled off the current identification code, which was changed daily on his order.
There was brief pause while the officer in charge pretended to check to make sure his commander wasn’t some Separatist spy coming to bomb a poor Rimsoo unit squatting in a swamp. Then: “All fine, sir. Proceed to designated landing quadrant, and welcome, Admiral.”
Bleyd shut off the comm without responding.
It was not the money per se, though that certainly had its appeal on some level. No, it was the recovery of honor, the prestige, the righting of wrongs—that was what a bank full of credits represented. He had already managed to build himself a nice sum, enough so that, if managed correctly, it would keep him fed and clothed and reasonably comfortable for the rest of his life. But the goal was not merely to retire in comfort; no, the goal was much more important than that. The goal was honor.
Mixed in with this was, of course, a degree of vengeance. There were beings who needed to be dealt with, old grudges settled, and a dynasty to begin. He had to find a mate, marry, produce heirs, and make certain that his sons and daughters would be sufficiently wealthy so as to guarantee their rightful places in the galaxy. This war would be over eventually. The Republic would prevail—he didn’t doubt that, inconceivable that it would not—and life would go on much as it had before. A peaceful galaxy, with ample opportunity for the landed and wealthy to prosper even more—these were things to be taken for granted. No sane being wanted war, save that it served his own ends. There were fortunes to be made in times of conflict, power to be gathered, and when this one was done Bleyd and
his descendants would be among the rich and powerful. Of that, there was no doubt.
The doing of it was not so easy, but he was both clever and resourceful. Small amounts of the bota could continue to be diverted and stored. His dealings with Black Sun would have to cease—a major theft was out of the question—but he could hide a lot of the valuable adaptogen on a ship the size of a MedStar, stack it in blocks of carbonite disguised as something else, and take it back to civilization himself, bold as you please. The material would never show up on a manifest, nobody would know it existed, and it would only become more valuable as time went by. A thousand kilos of pharmaceutical-grade bota stashed in some warehouse would eventually be worth millions all by itself.
But there were other things a smart admiral could do to enhance his fortune. A medical system necessary for a Rimsoo could be ordered in duplicate, and one of them could find its way elsewhere, perhaps to some world in desperate need of such a facility, and bartered for something of equal value but more portable. Precious metal or rare gems, say. And a couple of first-class medical droids misdirected to some frontier planet where doctors were in short supply would also be worth their weight in credits. Even a copy of a proprietary computer program, such as the one that ran the MedStar’s operational systems, was a valuable commodity—if presented to the right customer. How many one-starship worlds would love to have one of those for its hospitals, with no questions asked, for the right price?
The ship’s hull began to warm as it arrowed its way into the atmosphere. The sensors noted this and adjusted the environmental control systems. He was only a few minutes away from the ground medical HQ, traditionally called Rimsoo One. There didn’t seem to be any fighting in this quadrant today, so he didn’t expect any real trouble. Now and then, some pilot from the Confederacy would try a suicide run, braving the spores in order to get a chance to attack a Republic vessel outside his operational range. He had never been attacked himself, and the lighter was equipped with a pair of fire-linked ion cannons, as well as laser cannons he could use from the cockpit. He sometimes wished one of the Separatist fighters would try him so that he could demonstrate he was no rear-guard admiral, but such an opportunity had never presented itself. Too bad.
Star War®: MedStar I: Battle Surgeons Page 14
