“Mimn’yet surgery,” they called it, after a meat dish of questionable origin popular with the bloodthirsty reptiloids of Barab I. It was a vivid metaphor, illustrating the fast and furious patchwork pace that they had to follow. Stop the bleeding, slap a synthflesh patch or spray a splint, and move on. No time for niceties like regen-stim; if someone wound up with a livid streak of shiny scar tissue across the face, it didn’t really matter—as long as he or she could still shoot.
There were times when Jos was on his feet twenty hours straight, his arms coated with red, with barely any time between patients. It was primitive, it was barbaric, it was brutal.
It was war.
And this was the sterile hell into which Vaetes had just plunged a kid who didn’t look old enough to legally pilot a landspeeder.
Jos shook his head. Lieutenant Kornell “Uli” Divini was in for a rude awakening, and Jos did not envy him it.
On the other hand, there was one possible positive aspect to the situation: Tolk would probably love the kid.
Thinking of her did bring a genuine smile to his lips. His relationship with the Lorrdian nurse was the one good thing that had come out of this war. The only good thing, as far as Jos was concerned.
Den Dhur was on a mission.
It was a mission that had little to do with the war between the Confederacy and the Republic, except in rather abstract terms. And, even though he was a freelance field correspondent, it was not something he was likely to file a story on. No, this quest was to aid a friend—someone whom he’d become acquainted with during his stay at Rimsoo Seven, and whom he’d come to consider a kindred spirit.
Those who knew the hard-bitten Sullustan of old would no doubt find it hard to believe that Den would profess friendship for any living thing. Which meant that their opinions of him could remain intact, since the being Den was undertaking this favor for wasn’t a living one— not in the traditional sense, anyway.
Which made it all the more challenging.
Den was sitting with his comrade in the base cantina. He was nursing a particularly potent concoction of spice-brew, Sullustan gin, and Old Janx Spirit called a Sonic Servodriver; no one appeared to know why the drink was named that, and, after the first one or two had been imbibed, very few cared. His companion, as usual, was drinking nothing. This wasn’t surprising, since he had no mouth or throat, and he’d managed to convince Den earlier that pouring alcohol into his vocabulator was probably not a good idea.
Den focused his large eyes blearily upon I-5YQ. The droid had an annoying tendency—exacerbated by the polarized droptac lenses the Sullustan wore—to separate into multiple images. Other than that, all seemed normal enough. “We gotta get you drunk,” he told I-Five.
“And this is such an imperative because …?”
“’S’not fair,” Den told him. “Ev’rybody else can get blasted outta their craniums—”
“Which they do with alarming frequency, I’ve noticed.”
“Ev’ryone ’cept you. ’S’no good. Gotta fix that.”
“Assuming for a moment that intoxication is a state to which I aspire,” the droid said, “I see a number of problems that must be solved. Not the least of which is, I have no metabolism to process ethanol.”
“Right, right.” Den nodded. “Gotta work aroun’ that. Don’ worry, I’ll think of somethin’…”
“At this point you’d be hard-pressed to think of your own name. No offense, but I wouldn’t trust you to rewire a mouse droid’s circuits right now. Maybe later, when you’ve—”
The Sullustan suddenly fluttered his dewflaps in excitement. “Got it! ’S’ perfect!”
“What?” The droid’s tone was wary.
Den knocked back the rest of his drink, then had to hang on to the edge of the table for a moment until the entire cantina, which had suddenly and unaccountably launched itself into hyperspace, steadied. “W’do a partial power-down on your core. Scramble th’ sensory inputs a li’l bit, loosen up those logic circuits.”
“Sorry. Multiple redundancy backups. They’re hardwired—I could no more voluntarily interfere with them than you could stop breathing.”
Den frowned at his empty mug. “Blast.” He brightened. “Okay, how ’bout we realign the circuitry directly? Jus’ temporarily, o’course…”
“That might work—if you had the picodroid engineers needed to do the realignment. Which are only available at Cybot Galactica repair centers or their authorized representatives. I believe the nearest one is approximately twelve parsecs from here.”
Den belched and shrugged. “Well, we’ll figure som’thin’ out. Don’ worry—Den Dhur’s no quitter. I’m on it, buddy.” His head dropped to the table with an audible thud, and a moment later he began to snore.
I-Five stared at the unconscious reporter, then sighed. “Something about this,” the droid murmured, “feels so familiar.”
3
Jos wouldn’t have started the kid off this way, had there been any choice, but the operating theater was full of wounded clone troopers, the drone of the medlifters bringing in new injuries seemed as constant as a heat exchanger as they arrived, and anybody who could lift a vibroscalpel was needed. Now.
He didn’t have time to watch the kid—he was up to his elbows in the chest cavity of a clone full of shrapnel. Count Dooku’s weapons research group had come up with a new fragmentation bomb, called a weed-cutter—a smart bomb that, when launched, arced up and over any and all defensive grids, came down in the middle of a trooper force, and exploded at thoracic level above the ground, sleeting tiny, smart, razor-sharp durasteel flechettes in a circular pattern. The weed-cutter was deadly for two hundred meters against soft targets, and the clone trooper armor didn’t stop much, if any, of it.
Whoever had designed and produced the clone armor had much to answer for, in Jos’s opinion. The Kaminoans might be geniuses when it came to designing and sculpting soft tissue, but the armor was, as far as he could see, practically useless. The nonclone field troops referred to the full-body suits as “body buckets.” It was an aptly descriptive term.
He started to ask for the pressor field to be stepped up a notch, but Tolk beat him to it: “Plus six on the field,” she said to the 2-1B droid managing the unit.
Tolk le Trene was a Lorrdian; her kind had an uncanny ability to read most species’ microexpressions and to somehow sense emotions, to the extent that it almost seemed like telepathy. She was also the best surgical nurse in the Rimsoo. And more, she was beautiful, compassionate, and Jos’s sweetheart, despite her being ekster—non-permes, an outsider, not of his homeworld clan—which meant there wasn’t supposed to be any future for their relationship. The Vandars were enster, and that meant marriage had to be with someone from one’s own system, preferably one’s homeworld. There were no exceptions.
Temporary alliances with eksters were allowed, with a wink and a nod about sowing-one’s-wild-grains and all, but you didn’t bring a non-permes girlfriend home to meet your kinfolk, not unless you were willing to give up your clan and be permanently ostracized. Not to mention the infamy such an act would offer your family: He married an ekster! Can you imagine? His parents keeled over dead from shame!
Jos glanced at Uli, and then at Tolk, who said, “Uli seems to be doing okay. The orderly droids just wheeled his first patient out and they weren’t heading toward the morgue. He’s a cute kid.”
Jos shook his head. “Yeah. Cute.”
He risked a quick look around. They were still two doctors and three FX-7 surgical droids short of a full unit, and that was going to cost them today—
Even as he thought his, he saw a masked-and-gowned figure step up to one of the empty tables. The sterile field kicked on, and the figure gave a bring-’em gesture to the orderly droids.
“I don’t know who that is,” Tolk said as Jos was about to ask.
After months of work in this tropical pesthole, the OT doctors could recognize each other even when faces and heads were covered with surgica
l masks and caps. Which meant this was a new player. And that raised the question: why hadn’t anybody told him, Captain Vondar, the chief surgeon, that they had a new guy?
A fresh bleeder opened up, sprayed blood in a fan, and Jos suddenly had other things to worry about.
Nine patients later, Jos caught an easy one, a simple lacerated lung he was able to glue-stat shut in a few minutes. Tolk began to close, and Jos looked around. They didn’t have a new patient prepped. Things had slowed down, finally. He looked at the triage droid—it was I-Five today—and the droid held up that many digits, indicating the number of minutes before they would have another one ready.
Jos stripped off his sterile thinskin gloves and slipped on a fresh pair, thankful for the moment’s breather.
“I could use a hand over here,” the new surgeon said, “if you don’t have anything pressing.”
The voice was deep, and it sounded older than he’d usually heard in this operating theater, where most of the surgeons and doctors were the age equivalent of humans twenty to twenty-five standard years. Jos moved over three tables, squeezing past Leemoth, who was working on a Quaran Aqualish who had deserted from the Separatists. He looked at the procedure the new surgeon had in progress on a clone trooper.
“Heart–lung transplant?” he asked.
“Yep. Took a sonic pulse, blew out myocardium and alveoli all over the place.”
Jos looked at the new organs, fresh from the clone banks. The dissolving staples holding the arteries and veins together were X-style—he hadn’t seen those since medical school. This guy was older—they must be scraping the bottom of the recycler for doctors now. First a kid, now somebody’s grandfather, he thought. Who’s next—med students?
“You want to do those nerve anastomoses distally there?”
“Sure.” Jos regloved, took the adapto-pressor suturing tool offered by the nurse, and began the microsutures.
“Thanks. Ohleyz Sumteh Kersos Vingdah, Doctor.”
If the man had slapped him across the face, Jos wouldn’t have been more surprised. That was a clan-greeting! This man was from Corellia, his homeworld, and more, he was claiming kinship on his mother’s side. Amazing!
“Lose your manners, son?”
“Uh, sorry. Sumteh Vondar Ohleyz,” Jos said. “I’m, uh, Jos Vondar.”
“I know who you are, son. I’m Erel Kersos. Admiral Kersos—and your new commander.”
And here was another whack across the face. Erel Kersos was his mother’s uncle. They had never met, but Jos knew about him, of course. He had left the homeworld as a young man, and never returned …because he had…
Jos tried not to let his shock show. This was astonishing, flat-out unbelievable. Of all the Rimsoos on all the worlds in all the galaxy, what were the chances of running into Great-Uncle Erel in this one?
“Maybe we might have a chance to talk later—if you feel that’s proper,” Kersos said.
“Uh, yeah. Right. I’d like that. Sir.”
Amazingly, his hands did not shake as he finished the suturing. His great-uncle, clan-shunned for sixty years, here on Drongar. And running the show.
What were the odds?
Kaird of the Nediji watched the Jedi healer working on the wounded trooper. The cloned soldier had just come from the OT into postop, and the marks of the laser suturing stood out against his bronze skin. The healer was performing a laying on of hands; no doubt something to do with the Force. Kaird knew little about such things, and cared less. He had no doubt that the Force was real, but since Jedi did not normally concern him, neither did their mysterious power source. As an agent of Black Sun, his primary focus was on more practical matters.
Still, it was interesting to observe her work. And he was in a position to observe it quite well, since he was standing near enough to touch her in the postop chamber. Hidden, as it were, in plain sight.
Normally, Kaird would stick out in just about any crowd of sapients, for those of his species were not well known in the galaxy; Nedij was one of the more outlying worlds, and quite insular. Only those who had forsworn the fellowship of the Nest tended to wander the space-ways. His sharp face, stubby beak, violet eyes, and skin covered with pale azure down would definitely draw stares, were he dressed in his usual garb. But now he was effectively invisible, having chosen for this assignment a perfect disguise for a medical facility.
The siblinghood known as The Silent were ubiquitous throughout the galaxy. They never spoke, they usually kept their features and bodies hidden inside flowing, cowled robes, and for the most part they did nothing except stand and be. They believed that their meditative presence in the vicinity of illness or injury somehow aided in the recovery of afflicted patients. And the amazing thing about it—the thing that reputable scientists and doctors were at a loss to explain—was that The Silent were right. Statistical studies showed without question that sick and wounded people recovered faster and more often when the shrouded figures were around than when they were not. Apparently it had nothing to do with the Force, either; the order’s adherents came from all species and social strata, and exhibited none of the biological markers that sometimes indicated an affinity with the mystical energy field. Nor could the phenomenon be totally attributed to the placebo effect, because patients who had never heard of the order benefited just as much. It was a truly inexplicable marvel.
Kaird didn’t know how such a thing could be, and didn’t particularly care, although he did sometimes wonder if his presence was having the same palliative effect, since the thoughts usually passing through his mind were about as far from the serenity of a Silent as Drongar was from the Galactic Core. No matter. He was pretending to be one of the siblinghood because it let him become part of the background in a way no other role in this Republic Mobile Surgical Unit—“Rimsoo”—could. He had earlier ingested an herbal concoction brought from his homeworld, which effectively masked his distinctive scent from most species’ senses. Together with the shrouded robes, his anonymity was thus assured—quite necessary for an agent of Black Sun, whose business here had nothing to do with either the war or the treatment of those injured in it.
Kaird was here because of the bota, pure and simple. The rare plant would be a heavyweight addition to any physician’s armamentarium; it could be an antibiotic, a narcotic, a soporific—all manner of things, in fact, depending on the species using it. It was a more effective curative than cambylictus leaves or bacta fluid for the Abyssin, a more potent psychotropic than Santherian tenho-root if you were a Falleen, and an anabolic steroid that could help Whiphids attain their personal bests. Black Sun could make a fortune moving as much bota as they could get their hands on—it was a product with true universal appeal.
Ironically, use of the wonder plant here in the Rimsoos on Drongar had been interdicted. The official word claimed it was in order to discourage black marketeering, but it was generally felt that the real reason was economics—the farther one traveled from Drongar, the more valuable bota became. Why waste it at the source on clone troopers? After all, it wasn’t like they were going to run out of them anytime soon…
A number of the physicians here were petitioning to get the interdiction reversed. And a few, Kaird had heard, simply ignored the law and found ways to treat their patients with it anyway. As an individual and a warrior, Kaird applauded their courage and dedication. As a member of Black Sun, however, he might have to do something about it if and when the ordinance was changed.
Up until recently, the crime cartel had been able to obtain fair amounts of carbonite-encased bota, which could be smuggled without detection or damage, from a pair of black marketeers in the local Republic forces. Alas, both of these suppliers were no longer among the living—one appeared to have deleted the other, and Kaird himself had killed the survivor. Thus, Black Sun needed another local contact, and until he developed one, the vigos had decreed that he would remain here.
Black Sun did have a contact onplanet—in this very Rimsoo, in fact—but unfortunate
ly, it couldn’t utilize this op, who was a double agent, working also for Count Dooku’s breakaway factions. The spy would not risk discovery by becoming active as a procurer, and Kaird could understand that. Furthermore, Lens’s current task of leaking information about both sides to the criminal organization was far too valuable to them.
He shifted uncomfortably, feeling the robes sticking to his skin. The air coolers on the base operated only sporadically, and the osmotic fields kept some, but not all, of the heat and humidity at bay. Drongar’s pestilential environment was completely unlike the clean, thin air in which the avian Nediji had evolved. Their wings were long gone, their soft, feathery hair but a pale shadow of the plumage sported by their distant ancestors, but the Nediji still preferred the cool heights, the crags of mountains drifted deep with snow, to the lowlands.
Ah, if he could but be there now…
Kaird smiled to himself, his expression hidden inside the cowl. Might as well wish for a crèche of females and a hillside full of rath-scurriers, the Nediji’s traditional prey, while he was at it. And maybe a little vintage thwill-wine to complement the hedonistic fantasy.
The smile became a frown as he watched Padawan Offee moving the palms of her hands slowly over the clone’s bare chest. He wondered if this Jedi might be potential trouble. Her presence on this world struck him as very odd. To be sure, she was a healer, but the Jedi were spread very thin these days. It seemed a waste to send one here, even if that one was a Padawan still not fully fledged. As a Black Sun operative, Kaird suspected everybody and everything he could not immediately explain. There were old ops and there were careless ops in his position, but no old and careless ops. One stayed alive by constant vigilance, by always being one swoop ahead of a potential enemy.
Star Wars®: MedStar II: Jedi Healer Page 2
