Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [50]
“Bad caf,” he said, looking at the cup. “Tastes like dishwater.” He shook his head.
“And how would you know that? Drink a lot of dishwater?”
He shrugged and flicked his gaze at Alamant. “What does he want?”
“He’s offering me a job running a military cantina … won’t say where. I need to sign on for two years, no leave. Pay is good, plus a piece of the profit, some benefits—housing, medical, like that.”
Rodo nodded. “You gonna do it?”
Memah made a show of looking around the diner. “Amid all these other offers to put a roof over my head and food on the table? I don’t know; it’s so hard to winnow them down.” She sat down beside him. “I know someone like you can always get a job—but if I take this, I want you as my security man.”
Rodo nodded once. “Okay, I’m in.”
“Just like that?”
He grinned. “A chance to thump active military guys who get rowdy? Why not? The guys in the field usually have better skills than the benchwarmers. More interesting that way. Besides, I’d miss you.”
She had to smile at that. “You’re a Branded Aesthete, Rodo. You don’t engage in intimate relations with women.”
He nodded again. “Keep ’em on a pedestal where they belong, that’s our motto. But everybody’s got to be somewhere. Beauty is where you find it.”
Memah felt a wave of relief. “Ship leaves in three days.”
“No problem. I can pack in five minutes.”
She nodded. Yeah. It would take her about that long, too.
“So I’ll tell the man we’ll take the job.”
“Might as well. Caf can’t be any worse.” He lifted his mug in a salute to the recruiter at the other table.
21
MEDCENTER SURGICAL COMPLEX, SECTION N-ONE, DEATH STAR
When the only tool you have is a knife, the old joke went, every problem looks like a steak. Thus Uli, being a surgeon, was primarily concerned with procedures surgical—after all, if your speeder breaks down, you don’t call a plumber. But there was more to it than just the operation under the sterilizing lamps. Until the patient was back on his or her or its feet, he or she or it was the surgeon’s responsibility, and there was another old saw that spoke to this: You cut it, you take care of it.
That was precisely why a surgeon had to know a certain amount of general medicine before he was allowed to pick up a laser scalpel. Because if your wonderful cardiothoracic procedure to repair a ballooned aorta before it could burst in a deadly aneurism was perfect, but the patient died two days later in recovery, that brought up the third hoary old saying: The operation was a success, but the patient died.
There were surgeons who could separate the two and still sleep at night, but Uli was not one of them. And so he found himself standing near the bed of a grizzled old Wookiee construction chief who had been involved in a nasty decompression accident that had required a heart-lung transplant three days past. Despite the best sterile procedures, sometimes patients developed secondary infections, and something like that had apparently happened here.
The usual antivirals, antiprions, and antibiotics had been ineffective thus far, and no pathogenic agents had been collected. Nevertheless, the old Wook had a fever, he was coughing, and his blood work showed a strange shift that wasn’t bacterial, prional, or viral. The patient had an elevated eosinophil count, hyper to the level of Second-Stage HES. Naturally, Uli had called in more expert help, but the medical specialist had ruled out the usual trans-species suspects—it wasn’t kozema, leukemia, asthma, autoimmune disease, or drugs. The only remaining possibilities were some kind of parasitic or protozoal infestation. But the QRI scans were clean, there were no telltale nanocam images, and nothing cultured out. Save for the elevated white cells, there weren’t any other real indicators. If this wasn’t some previously unknown form of nosocomial infection, the only other possibility seemed to be black magic.
The Wookiee, named Hahrynyar, wasn’t critical, but he didn’t seem to be getting any better. He was sick enough that he