Star Wars®: MedStar II: Jedi Healer

by Michael Reaves

  I-Five looked at him. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “All of what I have said before is technically true,” the droid said. “But I’ve come to realize it’s possible for things to be more than the sum of their parts. And that a difference that makes no difference is, for all practical purposes, moot. I think I was, for lack of a better term, afraid. I believe that I was trying to convince myself, more than you, that I am not what you, Barriss, and a few others here see me as. I was, however, lacking necessary information to reach the right conclusion.”

  “And that would be…?”

  “That I am indeed sentient,” I-Five said.

  Jos grinned, and slapped the droid on his durasteel back. “Took you long enough to figure it out.”

  They found an Ishi Tib tech, half asleep under a tool bench. At first he was surly, but the bottle of Corellian wine that Den had grabbed as they’d left proved an effective bribe.

  As the tech was reattaching I-Five’s arm, spot-welding snapped junctions and splicing sensory cables and hydraulic circulatory piping, Jos said, “By the way, it’s none of my business, but I’m curious—just what is the obligation you remembered?”

  I-Five didn’t answer right away, and the silence stretched long enough for Jos to begin to wish he hadn’t asked. Then the droid said, “It was a request of Lorn’s. He asked me to watch over his son.”

  29

  Barriss could not sleep. Her experience with the Force continued to echo in her, stronger by far than after the first time, bringing up powerful flashes of the wondrous cosmic consciousness she had been a part of—along with the feeling of important things going undone. She wanted to return to that place—to stay there, if at all possible.

  Maybe it was cumulative. Maybe it would come to pass that, eventually, she could swim in that magical sea on her own, at will, and without the bota to deliver and keep her there.

  There hadn’t been any new revelations. The danger to the camp was approaching, but it was not yet at hand. On some level, she knew she had enough time to decide upon a course of action. On another level, what that course of action would be seemed utterly beyond her capabilities.

  Beyond her unamplified capabilities. But nothing seemed too big for her to handle while connected in the Force by the miracle of the bota. She knew, right to the depths of her bones, that what she could do with the Force in that state would be astounding, once she got used to it. Once she learned to not control it, but to flow with it, to be it.

  She now understood how it was that the greatest Jedi Masters could sense things even parsecs away, information gained far faster than by subspace packet; she had now the knowledge—the certainty—that the universe was of an entire piece, each part connected to all the others, webbed together by vibrating strands of the Force that stretched through dimensions utterly beyond the ken of her senses—and she knew her place in it, and that all things, great and small, were precisely in position. As they had always been, and as they always would be, worlds without end.

  There was a temptation to rush out and harvest bota by the bale, render it into fluid, and install a constant-feed pump on her arm to trickle it into her system continuously. She wondered if that was the desire of a seeker, or an addict.

  She wondered if there was any difference.

  In any event, she could take this new knowledge back to the Jedi Council, and with it the Jedi could become more powerful than anyone could possibly imagine. They could stop this war, as well as prevent others from starting. They could abolish slavery, transform barren worlds into lush paradises, chase evil to the ends of the galaxy and strike it down! Nothing would be beyond their capabilities—the power was that immense!

  It all swam in Barriss, overwhelming in its intensity. Even now, she could barely contain the memory of it.

  But first, before she went too far into the void, she had to deal with the camp situation. That would be easily accomplished. Then, she could address the larger issues…

  Den hurried through the camp to the launch platform, hoping that he wasn’t too late. Milking fool, he thought, of all the days to oversleep—!

  He hardly ever bothered with alarm chronos—like most of his kind, Den had an inner timekeeper that went along with his keen sense of direction. Usually it adjusted to the day-and-night cycles of whatever world he was on fairly quickly, taking no more than a standard week at most, and he’d been on this planet a lot longer than that.

  But on the one day he needed it the most, wouldn’t you just know it would kick out on him, and he’d sleep just long enough to maybe miss the transport departure of the HNE folk, including Eyar?

  After the proposal she had made and he had accepted, he couldn’t let her leave without saying good-bye. It was hard to know just when he would see her again. And when he did, it would be as part of the extended family that would include, by all accounts, a truly staggering number of younglings.

  He was to be a patriarch, a hoary old dispenser of wisdom. To sit somewhere deep in the warren and dole out nuggets of sage advice to the young and foolish.

  The whole thing didn’t seem quite as appealing now as it had when Eyar had described it to him.

  The entertainers were being ferried up to MedStar, where their own transport was docked. Eyar had been scheduled for the first lift up.

  Den came around the corner of the launch facility’s main building in time to see the few members of the troupe moving up the ramp. Eyar was one of them.

  He ran forward, pushing his way through the taller beings that surrounded him, mostly techs and other workers. “Hey!” he shouted. “Eyar! Wait!” Blast it, he couldn’t see anything but legs—legs covered with clothing, fur, or scales; digitigrade legs, plantigrade legs; a veritable forest of supporting limbs. At last he reached the gate.

  “Eyar!”

  She was walking sadly up the ramp, the last to leave. At his cry she whirled, and when she saw him, her eyes, her face, her whole body lit up.

  “Den-la!”

  He was so relieved she hadn’t left yet that he didn’t care that she’d attached the familiar-suffix to his name in public. They embraced.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t come! What happened?”

  To tell her he’d overslept would be a bad idea—this he knew almost instinctively. She’d be offended that he’d nearly missed her leave-taking for so trivial a reason. “Had a comm from HNE,” he said. “Some talk about one of my articles from last year being made into a holo. Finally had to cut ’em off and run all the way to get here.”

  Amazing how easily the lie came out of him—amazing, and not a little bit dismaying. But it worked. She looked at him with starry-eyed love. “Come back to Sullust soon,” she whispered. She nuzzled his dewflaps one more time, and then turned and ran up the ramp.

  Den moved back behind the field radius. The transport, silent save for the thrum of the repulsorlifts, rose quickly and disappeared into the glare of Drongar Prime.

  Den walked slowly back to his kiosk. It had been so easy to lie to her. One could argue that it was a small incident, trivial and unimportant. One could argue that he’d lied out of beneficence, to save her from hurt feelings. One could argue all kinds of things, but none of them had any more validity or authenticity than a Neimoidian’s handshake.

  He was a scoundrel.

  Eyar was sweet and sincere and trusting. He admired those qualities in her. But how long would it be before those same attributes filled him with impatience, or annoyance…

  Or contempt?

  He was hardly worthy of Eyar’s admiration.

  Den stopped in the middle of the compound. This was bad. He was having cold feet all the way up to his armpits, and he had no idea what to do about it.

  He looked about. From where he was standing, he had two options, each of which lay in practically opposite directions. To his left was the cantina, with its amazing and highly therapeutic varieties of distillates. To his right was Klo Merit’
s office, where he could talk to the minder, or at the very least make an appointment to do so later. He needed to work this out.

  How?

  It took Den nearly two minutes of standing in the broiling sun before he turned and trotted off, a direction finally chosen.

  30

  The throbbing of the medlifters, the shouts and cross talk of personnel running to the triage area, the screams and groans of the troopers—it was a litany of sounds and cries that Jos had responded to so many times that it seemed he could do it in his sleep by now.

  Sleep. There was a laugh. The truncated periods of naps and dozing that the medics of Rimsoo Seven managed to snag on good days wasn’t anything even close to good sleep hygiene. Of course, they had delta wave inducers, but cramming six to eight hours of uninterrupted cycling through the four stages and REM periods into a ten-minute nap just didn’t replenish the brain the same way that real-time sleep did. The only solution was a proper night’s rest, and that was a luxury seldom afforded.

  Most of the time, the patients were clone troopers. For Jos, the hardest cases were not the completely alien species. They were the nonclone individual humans, because their anatomies were familiar to him, and yet subtly different from one another. When operating on such a human patient, he had to be very careful not to let his hands and brain fall back into familiar patterns that might work on a clone, but be just off enough to kill another human being. It had already happened once.

  Truly alien individuals didn’t come through the OT very often. The few who did were usually on Drongar in some kind of observation or clerical capacity. And they often provided most of the moments of both humor and horror.

  The last time they’d had an unexpected incident like that had been when Jos had been drenched in the Nikto’s life fluids. This time, it had been Uli who experienced the shock of the new.

  The young surgeon had been working on a female Oni. The Oni were a fairly bellicose species, by all accounts, that hailed from the Outer Rim world of Uru. What this one was doing on Drongar no one seemed to know for sure—probably a mercenary. In any event, she had caught a projectile from a slugthrower, and Uli was probing for it when there was a blue-white flash, a sound like someone whacking a nest of angry wingstingers, and the young surgeon bounced backward and hit the wall.

  He wasn’t hurt that much, as was evidenced by a stream of curses. The usual buzz of instrument requests and readout quotes came to a stop. Threndy, the nurse who had been assisting, helped Uli to his feet.

  “You okay, Uli? Need any help?” Jos called.

  “I’m good, thanks. But what in the seven skies of Sumarin was that? I never—”

  He was interrupted by a tripedal medical droid that came in, moved to Uli’s side, and spoke briefly to him. Jos couldn’t hear the conversation, but after a moment Uli and Threndy both broke into laughter.

  “What’s up?” Jos asked.

  “Apparently, Oni females are electrophoretic. I must’ve brushed against a lobe of her capacitor organ during my probe.” Uli shrugged. “Kinda wish I’d known about it sooner…”

  Jos chuckled. “Maybe we should keep her around in case our droids need a jump start.”

  His shift and Uli’s were over at the same time, and, on impulse, Jos asked the younger man if he wanted to join them at sabacc. They’d been short several players the last couple of times. Tolk didn’t show up anymore, and Barriss seemed lately to be too absorbed in “Jedi-ing,” as Den put it, to sit in on every game. Even Klo had been too busy to put in more than an occasional appearance.

  Uli grinned, a smile that spread over his entire face. “Sure!” he said enthusiastically. “I’ve been hoping one of you’d ask.”

  Jos grinned back. “Glad to have you.” It would be nice to have something approaching a full set of players again. On one level, though, he did feel bad about it. Uli was so open and guileless, he was sure to be eaten alive by the others. Sabacc could be a tough game.

  Jos, Den, Barriss, and I-Five walked out of the cantina.

  “Wow,” Jos said. “Who knew?”

  “Not you, I’m assuming,” Den replied. “Unless you’re in cahoots with the little—”

  “Hey, I had no idea he could play like that. I mean, look at him. He looks like a holorep for some nice wholesome farmworld somewhere.” Jos shrugged. “Besides, we’ve been losing players. And I felt sorry for him.”

  “Yeah? Well, feel sorry for me. I lost three hundred creds in there.” Den shook his head.

  “Just a suggestion,” I-Five said to Jos, “but the next time you’re tempted to be altruistic in matters like these—don’t.”

  “Aw, clamp your vocabulator,” Den told him sourly. “You’re the only one who didn’t lose his shirt. Not that you have one to lose.”

  “This is true. However, for the first time in some weeks I have not won anything, either.”

  Jos swatted futilely at a buzzing cloud of fire gnats. “Again I ask: what do you need money for? You’re a droid.”

  “A fact that seldom escapes my notice, thank you. My need for money is quite simple—it costs large amounts of credits to travel. Especially as far as Coruscant.”

  “You’re really going, then?” Barriss asked.

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re military property,” Jos said. “Even if you could find a way to get transferred to Coruscant, you’ll have limited freedom to search for Pavan’s son.”

  “Also true. Which means,” I-Five said calmly, “I might have to desert.”

  For a long moment the silence was unbroken save by the gnats. Then Jos said, “If you do, and you’re caught, they’ll wipe your memory down to the last quantum shell.”

  “If I’m caught. My time on Coruscant wasn’t completely misspent—I know a variety of ways to slip through the cracks, especially in a megalopolis that large.”

  Den sucked on a hydropak for a moment, then said, “No doubt—but first you have to get off Drongar. And won’t you arouse suspicion, traveling by yourself?”

  “Droids, particularly protocol droids, make interstellar journeys all the time. We’re not children. No one will look twice at me—especially if I carry the papers of an envoy en route to the Coruscant Temple on Jedi business.”

  He looked at Barriss. She looked back quite seriously.

  “You are willing to risk everything—your very self—to do this?” she asked.

  “It’s something I promised Lorn many years ago, when his son Jax was first taken from him. He asked me to make sure that, should anything ever happen to him, I would do my best to keep watch over Jax, even though he was under the protection of the Jedi. Lorn did not trust Jedi.”

  “I must remind you, I-Five, that the Jedi are sworn to uphold the laws of the Republic.” Barriss paused, then added, “There are times, however, when such laws come into conflict with the moral codes that we espouse. These conflicts often require difficult decisions to be made.”

  “And how do the Jedi make these decisions?”

  “Well,” she said with a slight smile, “some have been known to get drunk.”

  Jos laughed. He couldn’t help it. And it felt good.

  “It so happens,” Barriss continued, “that I have something I wish to see delivered to the Temple on Coruscant as soon as possible. There are very few to whom I would entrust such a mission. If you would be willing …?”

  I-Five said, “I would be honored.”

  31

  Column stared at the message on the desktop. It had taken several hours to decipher the cumbersome triple code, but this time it had been worth the effort. The Separatists had gotten the missive sent from this location earlier. They had checked it out, and found that the bota was indeed losing its potency. Much quicker than the spy had expected, they had come to a decision: there would be an all-out attack on the Republic forces on Drongar in the next few days. Every mech and mercenary the other side could field would participate in the battle, with but one purpose: to capture and collect the remaini
ng bota for the Separatists. Many would die or be destroyed on both sides; much of the bota in the fields might be ruined—but the message, short as it was, was quite unambiguous and explicit. They were coming. This Rimsoo, along with all the others, would shortly be overrun. They would not be taking prisoners—at least, none they intended to keep alive.

  Column stared at the note with labile emotions and mixed feelings. Yes, it had been expected, if not so soon. Yes, it would be a blow to the Republic, which was the reason that Column had come to be here in the first place. This didn’t change the fact that the responsibility for the loss of life and matériel would be on Column’s head.

  The decrypted message, printed on a plastisheet templast, started to curl at the edges. In another minute the process, a combustible oxidation that began the moment the plastisheet was exposed to air, would evaporate the note into nothingness.

  Just as the spy’s third identity would soon come to an end.

  No matter, either way. The note had served its purpose— Column had committed the contents to memory. The war here would also be effectively over, quite soon. The bota would be collected or destroyed or mutated into uselessness—they all came to the same result, insofar as the combatants were concerned.

  Column would be gone by the time the attack came in force. There would be a reason to visit MedStar, and the transport supposed to take the spy there would be…diverted, so that it delivered its cargo to the Separatists’ territory. Column would, of course, have the vouchsafe codes that would allow the ship to pass unscathed. Then, the jump to hyperspace, and those left behind here would be no more than sad memories.

  There would be another assignment, on another world, soon enough. The war elsewhere would continue, and Column, under another false identity, would go forth to continue to aid in the destruction of the Republic. However long the task took, it would happen, the spy knew. It would happen.

  Column sighed. There was still much to be done here, and little time in which to accomplish it. Records, files, information, some of which might prove of value to Column’s masters, all must be gathered and condensed into data packets one could slip into one’s pocket or travel case. The end—at least here and now—was quite near.