MedStar_ Battle Surgeons Part 11

The water was not cold enough, however, to chill his thoughts-and the problem of Tolk.

Tolk, who had cer-tainly discerned his interest in her. And who had appar-ently decided to have some fun with it.

The water thrummed against his head, sending icy trickles and rivulets into his eyes and ears, but it was not cold enough to drive the memory of what had happened just that morning from his too-warm thoughts...

He had stepped into the dressing room to change his surgical suit, the one he'd been wearing having become soaked from a bleeder that popped in the middle of a vein graft. The room was unis.e.x, but there was an in use indicator on the door to keep people from being surprised. Jos had palmed the door switch and stepped briskly into the room, having seen that the in use diode was dark.

And there was Tolk, halfway through changing her own surgical suit. Which was to say, not entirely clothed. Or, to put it another way, mostly naked. Bare. Gloriously so...

As a surgeon, Jos had seen plenty of flesh in his ca-reer, male, female, and other. It was simply part of the job-you didn't have friendly thoughts about some-body whose liver you were resecting. But to step into a room and see your recently noticed and decidedly beautiful a.s.sistant nearly nude was an entirely different matter.

Even that wouldn't have been so bad-well, okay, it wasn't bad, it was just blasted embarra.s.sing-since he'd gaped in slack-jawed shock for only a second, maybe two or three, before turning around, crimson-faced, and saying, "Oops, sorry!"

But what kept him staring for that extra second was Tolk's expression. That, along with the rest of her.

She smiled. Slow, languid, no-mistake-about-it. "Hi, Jos. Did I forget to thumb the diode on? How careless of me."

Jos managed to exit and shut the door, the vision of Tolk's mostly bare form seared into his memory-for-ever, he was pretty sure. But that smile... oh, that smile had been the stopper in the bottle. And as he thought about it later-at least two dozen times during the day as they worked together-he kept wondering: Had she forgotten to light the diode?

Even at its coldest, the water couldn't wash that ques-tion away.

"You've been in there half the night, Jos! How clean do you need to get?"

A very good question, that.

Seated at a table in the chow hall, Den Dhur was a happy diner. It didn't really have anything to do with what he was about to eat. He was savoring the taste of imminent cold revenge, for soon-very soon, now-he would slam the hatch on Filba, that no-creche outling Hutt. He had just collected another rock for the Hutt's cairn from an unhappy corporal, and soon he was going to bury Filba like a battle dog does an old bone.

The thought made him smile. You do not mess with the press, no way, no how, especially if you are as crooked as a rancor's back teeth. Most everybody had something to hide, something they wouldn't want to see splashed on the evening holonets, but if you were a thief, it would be something worse. A lot worse.

And he'd found it.

Filba was going to be flensed and hung out in the hot suns.h.i.+ne to dry, and good riddance.

Den chuckled to himself, and reapplied his cutlery to the food before him with gusto.

Vengeance was the perfect spice for dinner.

Of course, what dinner was and how it was prepared was something he had to get used to when he s.p.a.ced to odd planets. One of the first things Den had discovered as a young reporter was that if he didn't learn to eat and drink the local flora and fauna when he world-hopped covering the military, he got hungry and thirsty in a big hurry. s.p.a.ce on board an interstellar troop transport was at a premium, and it wasn't usually wasted on ex-otic foods. He'd heard the clone troopers had been con-ditioned to be happy with simple fare, but even so, given the number of different species in the Republic armies and navies, they couldn't begin to stock fa-vorites for everyone. Especially since the officers, as usual, got preferential treatment.

The soldiers in the field got RRs-Ready Rations - which were reconst.i.tuted pap with essential nutrients for each species. They usually ranged in color from pus-tulent to putrid, and in texture and taste from old boot plastoid to something that would gag a Neimoidian. Given this, the first thing military cooks generally did when they got to a new planet was a.s.sign foragers to find and bring back anything that might be edible. Den had been on some worlds where there wasn't much lo-cal produce or game to be found, and a steady diet of RR meals made for a lot of thin troopers. He'd lost a lit-tle ma.s.s himself on those a.s.signments.

Fortunately, one of the few positive things that could be said about Drongar was that there were plenty of things to be trapped, picked, tapped, or dug up, and, while it was not the best he had eaten, the Rimsoo chow hall wasn't bad as such things went. Den had ordered a plate of the local land shrimp, a hand-sized creature that, boiled with herbs and spices, tasted surprisingly like hawk-bat, although more pungent. It came with some bright orange mashed plant root that had a smooth consistency and a nice cinnamon flavor.

Wash it all down with some of the locally produced ale and, well, he'd eaten a lot worse.

Until someone finally fig-ured out how to invent a gadget that could instanta-neously a.s.semble a meal from basic elements, like the adventurers in those future-fic holodramas were always using, military food would always be a chancy affair.

And besides, even eating an RR wouldn't have been so bad, feeling as he did today. All cynicism aside, a good story went a long way toward making a reporter feel like he was worth his paycheck-as little as that was...

He looked up and saw Zan Yant leave the serving line, carrying a tray. Den caught the Zabrak's attention and waved him over. "Hey, is that fleek eel? " he said, when he saw the other's plate. "I didn't see it on the menu."

"No. It's wriggler, a local species of giant worm, seared in redfruit juice and sprinkled with fried fire gnats."

"Ah. Sounds... tasty."

"Well, it's not the Manarai on Coruscant," the sur-geon said, "but it sure beats RRs."

Dhur regarded Zan Yant quizzically. "You've eaten at the Manarai?"

"I wasn't born on this mudball, friend Dhur. One of my instructors was a professor at CU's School of Mu-sic. I went to visit him from time to time."

"Still, a spendy place for a student."

"My family is... comfortably well-off," Yant said, slicing off a big chunk of worm and popping it into his mouth. "Ah. That Charbodian cook really knows its stuff. Want a bite?"

"Thanks, no, I'm happy with mine." Den regarded the surgeon with curiosity. A rich medic and an expert musician-not the sort of person one expected to run into in the galactic hinterlands. Why hadn't he or his family been able to have Yant exempted from the mili-tary? Wealth and power had its privileges, everybody knew that. Could it be that Yant had volunteered? If so, Den's respect for him would have to be ratcheted up a notch.

Before he could pursue the subject, Yant asked, "And how goes the crusade to keep the public informed?"

"Good." Den smiled. "And about to get better."

"Ah. A hot story?"

"Yes, indeed. I can't talk about it yet-don't want to let the kreel out of the cage, you understand-but I'm pleased with it. I expect it will shake things up quite a bit in certain quarters."

"That's good, I suppose." Yant took another big mouthful of worm, chewed, swallowed, and smiled. "Not bad at all." He paused a bit, then said, "A ques-tion, if you don't mind."

"I'm all ears."

"I and the other medics here are conscripts. Left up to us, we'd be a dozen pa.r.s.ecs in any direction away from Drongar. But you're a noncom. You don't have to be out here-you could be reporting off a civilized planet, up to your dewflaps in relative comfort and safety.

So why are you here? What calls you to this work?"

He hadn't expected that one. n.o.body had asked that particular question in years. There were stock answers, of course-every reporter had a few. The adventure, the chance to be where the action was, the desire to serve the public. Maybe they even believed it-he had once, a long time ago.

And now?

Abruptly, without meaning to, Den found himself telling the truth. "Wars make for big stories, Doc. It's all about the important issues. Life, death, honor, love... it's the raw feed, the mother lode, the crucible. You watch people deep in this kind of fire, trying to get out, trying to get each other out, and you see what they're really made of.

"Listen-you interview a local politician after a pub-lic meeting, and he spins word webs like an educated spin-worm: all glossy and s.h.i.+ny, but without any real substance. Sure, he's working to keep his job-he might even be working for the public good and all, stranger things have happened-but he's not under any real pressure, so he's got time to sort out his lies and make them nice and neat.

"But you catch a commander whose unit has just been shot to b.l.o.o.d.y pieces, with no hope of rescue and en-emy fire still incoming? He is going to tell it like he sees it, and forget the consequences. War is ugly, my friend, ugly and painful and cruel-but it strips away the cover, it flenses out truth-and that is what it's all about."

Zan nodded, thoughtfully chewing another bite of his dinner. "But you see so much death.

Not to mention you could get killed yourself."

Den shrugged. "You see an epidemic of Rojo Fever, you see plenty of bodies. And you could get run over by some wet-head kid bringing his landspeeder to the city for the first time.

When your name is called, you go - doesn't matter where you're standing, does it?"

Zan chuckled. "No. No matter where you are, you're always at the head of the line."

Den chuckled as well, and for a few minutes the two were silent, enjoying the rest of their food. At length the Sull.u.s.tan drained the last of his ale, burped, and leaned back.

"Let me tell you a story," he said. "A long time ago, I was a.s.signed to cover a little insurrectionist brush war on some backrocket world in the middle of the Gordian Reach. I was hanging around the exit base-a prefab muster station where the troops s.h.i.+pping out for home were staged for lift into orbit. It was way behind the lines, a day's ride by crippled bantha from any shooting, as safe as your mother's lap-or creche, or pouch, or whatever.

"So I'm talking to this human pup. Tall; I'm not even chest-high to him, even though he's real young. Seems he lied about his age to get into the army, so he's no more than sixteen standard years old, and by the maker's grace he's survived his tour without a scratch in the middle of some very heavy action. Seventy percent of his unit got fried blacker than carbonite, but he's still breathing, and on his way out. Just a child. A child who now knows about war.

"So I'm running my thumb cam, recording the kid, getting some basic how-does-it-feel-to-be-going-home? stuff for the viewers. All of a sudden, braap-zap!

some-body cuts loose with a pulse carbine, just waving it back and forth like a pressure hose and cutting troops down, left, right, and center. One of the insurrection-ists, undercover on a suicide run.

"The security guys come running, but they're not get-ting there fast enough. The shooter is walking right at us, he sees me, and I can see that he sees me, and I know I'm about to have my datachip pulled. Everyone's yelling, 'Run!' at me. Are they kidding? I'm so milking terrified I can't even breathe, much less run.

"But then this kid, who isn't even armed, steps in front of me, quite deliberately. He catches a bolt in the gut-it was meant for my head-and goes down. The shooter's carbine runs dry right then, the secs open up on him, and that's the end of that.

"I squat down next to this poor human kid and I see he's not going to make it. So I ask him, 'Why'd you do it?'

"And the kid says, 'You're so little.'"

Yant stopped chewing and looked at Den, puzzled.

"I think he knew I was an adult, intellectually," Den continued. "But at that moment, when danger threat-ened, he equated small stature with youth. He jumped in front of me because that's what humans do-they protect their young. I thanked him before he died." Den paused.

"Know what he said?"

Yant shook his head.

"He said, 'It's okay. Would you tell my mother I love her?'"

They were both quiet for a moment. Yant ran one hand lightly over his stubby horns and sighed. "That's so sad."

"There's more." Den looked at his hands, saw they were knotted together. He unlaced his fingers, feeling them crackle.

"The shooter? He was also a human. He was four-teen. I didn't get to him before he died, but one of the secs did. The shooter's last words were, 'Tell my mother I love her.'

Brothers in death, children saying good-bye to their mothers."

Yant shook his head again.

"These are the stories you get on the front, my friend. These are the stories that people need to know." Den shrugged. "Not that it slows war down a microsecond, but at least they know it isn't all grand fun-not when you have children killing each other, and mothers'

hearts breaking over it."

Somehow, the potential skewering of Filba didn't seem as bright and s.h.i.+ny now as it did when Den had sat down to eat.

"I'm sorry," Yant said.

"Yeah," Den said. "Aren't we all?"

19.

Jos sometimes-not often, these days-felt as if he could call a dying patient back to life; that by dint of pure will, he could keep someone critically injured alive, refusing to let Death claim him.

It helped, of course, if his surgical procedure went well. Sometimes, however, even when the operation was technically correct, something went sour, and no matter how hard he tried, no matter how much he wished it otherwise, the patient expired.

So it was with the clone trooper on the table now. The surgery had been relatively easy as these things went: a bit of shrapnel had nicked the pericardium, and there had been bleeding into the pericardial sac with a.s.soci-ated cardiac tamponade. But the blood had been drained, the wounds repaired, and that should have been that. Instead, the trooper had ceased breathing, the repaired heart had stopped, and all efforts to jump-start things had failed. Had Jos been a religious man, he would have said the man's essence had departed.

This was the last patient, though, and he had man-aged to keep five others alive, including one who had sustained ma.s.sive injuries to three organ systems that needed replacement: a multipunctured and deflated lung, a ruptured spleen, and a severely lacerated kidney.

Why had that one survived and this one died? It was totally unexpected, totally inexplicable, and totally frustrating.

Medicine was not an exact science, he knew-the pa-tients often confounded things. You'd think that gene-tically identical clones would have pretty much the same reactions to physical stress, but that certainly didn't seem to be the case with these two.

Back when Jos had been a fairly fresh student in med-ical school, he had frequented a Bamasian restaurant that had become all the rage among his peers. The food was cheap but good, and the servings large; the place was within walking distance of the student housing complex, and it was open all day and all night-perfect for students. Bamasian cuisine was varied, spicy, and something of an acquired taste, but Jos liked it. At the end of each meal, the traditional complimentary dessert was a small, sweet, baked bread ring, about the size of a bracelet. Cooked into the treat was a protein-circuit onetime holocaster.

When you broke the ring, the 'caster projected a bit of Bamasian wisdom that glim-mered and hung in the air for a few seconds before the organic circuitry decayed. The aphorisms were amusing to the medical students, who tended to eat as a pack for the family-style discounts. Often they would all break the bread rings at the same instant, then try to read the homilies before they faded away. Some of them were real howlers: "Avoid dark alleyways in bad neighbor-hoods." Or "Being rich and miserable is better than just being miserable." Or "Beware smiling politicians..."

One evening, when Jos was exhausted from a long se-ries of exams and tricky procedures he had mostly fum-bled, and feeling overwhelmed by things he had never thought to see, never even considered might be a part of his training, he had cracked his sweetened bread ring open and gotten a message that had seemed personally crafted for him alone: "Minimize expectations to avoid being disap-pointed."

At the time, it had struck him as oddly useful, if somewhat obvious, wisdom. If he didn't expect any-thing, he wouldn't be distressed if it didn't happen. He tried to plug it into his life, and found it helped. Some-times he forgot, of course. Sometimes he expected to be able to save them all. He was a good surgeon; maybe, given the circ.u.mstances, even a great surgeon, and he never expected to lose a patient who had even the small-est chance of survival. When it happened, it was always a shock. And always disappointing.

It was hard to admit, even to himself, but there were times when he even caught himself feeling resentful to-ward the never-ending parade of wounded and dying troops. There were times, when they wheeled in a Twi'lek with a nearly severed lekku, or a Devaronian with one of his livers perforated, that a small part of him relished the opportunity to do something different. Because at this point it really did feel like he could build a stratosphere-piercing tower just from the sheer tonnage of shrapnel he'd pulled out of the clone troopers. Not to mention paint it red with their blood.

Jos sighed as he headed for the dressing room. It was too bad he didn't have a Bamasian bread ring now to offer him solace...

Barriss was on her way to the medical ward when she pa.s.sed a trooper standing in the hall outside the main operating theater. He didn't seem to be doing anything other than simply standing there, staring at a blank wall.

To the unaided eye, they all looked alike, but to one who was connected to the Force, this was not the case. She knew this one. He had been her patient.

She stopped. "CT-Nine-one-four," she said.

He looked at her. "Yes?"

She could feel his question roiling in his mind, and she smiled. "You might all look alike, but you aren't all the same. Your experiences shape you as much as your her-itage.

The Force can recognize this."

He nodded. She regarded him. "You have no prob-lems with your blood pressure," she said, and it was not a question-she knew it was true.

"No. I feel fine-physically."