Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [70]
“Not me, Memah Roothes,” he replied. “Just one who appreciates good ale and beautiful females.”
“Welcome to the Hard Heart, Celot Ratua Dil. You’re a contractor?”
“Actually, I recently escaped from the prison planet. I’m just conning my way along.”
She raised an appreciative eyebrow. “A sense of humor is worth a lot around here.”
He looked around, noting the bright colors and decorations that softened but didn’t completely disguise the hard angles and general severity of the architecture. Impressive as the Empire’s new weapon was, it wasn’t going to win any design awards. “I can see that. I guess there’s more than one reason for calling it the Death Star. And,” he added, “call me Ratua, please.” He smiled and raised his mug again. “May I buy you a drink?”
“Too early to start this shift,” Memah Roothes said. “But if you’re still here in an hour or so, maybe I’ll take you up on that.”
Ratua grinned. “A herd of wild banthas couldn’t drag me away.”
She turned aside to serve a new customer, and he watched her, admiring the lithe way she moved. Oh, yes, he was definitely going to be spending some quality time in here.
33
OPERATING THEATER, MEDCENTER, DEATH STAR
The surgery was not going as well as it should have. Uli was getting frustrated.
“Get a pressor on that bleeder, stat,” he said.
The surgical assistant, an MD-S3 droid, was a stationary unit built into the suite. It used a thin and flexible arm to clamp a field reader onto the cut vein; the flow of blood stopped. The droid adroitly sponged up the blood in the cavity, said, “Sponge four,” aloud, removed the sponge from the endoscopic incision, and dropped the soaked pledge into the waste bin.
“Wipe,” Uli said.
The droid used another of its multiple arms to run a sterile cloth over Uli’s forehead, blotting away the perspiration that threatened to run into his eyes. There were anti-sweat films that could be sprayed on to temporarily keep perspiration at bay, but Uli didn’t like them; most of them made him itch.
Carving humans and humanoids was generally no problem for him—he could do clone surgery in his sleep, might actually have done so a couple of times back when he was in the field, working long shifts and patching up scores of wounded every day. But natural genetics sometimes threw a sport at you, a body that wasn’t built exactly the same way most of that particular species were normally constructed. The navy major here on the surgical table was one of those sports, and if Uli didn’t figure out what he needed to know, and fast, the major could become an interesting statistic.
Three hours earlier, a forty-year-old human male from the planet Bakura had presented to the screening medic complaining of nausea, loss of appetite, low-grade fever, and pain in his abdomen. Symptoms were classically consistent with an inflamed appendix. The medical examiner made the diagnosis and sent the patient along for surgery.
Normally a surgical droid would have handled an operation like this, quickly and efficiently. But the battle station was still understaffed and underequipped. So Uli had shrugged and scrubbed. It should have been a routine appendectomy, the kind of ho-hum surgery any first-year resident could do one-handed. Except when Uli shoved an endoscope into the major to find the inflamed appendix, he encountered a slight problem:
It wasn’t there.
At least, it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. This was impossible, but Uli didn’t waste time questioning the image on the screen. “Do a tomographic axial scan and find that appendix,” he told the MD droid.
“Yes, Doctor,” the droid replied. Its imaging scanners hummed. A thin green line appeared and moved from the patient’s groin to his chest, mapping the length and width of the scan. “TA scan complete.”
“Show me.”
A hologrammic projection, life-sized, appeared over the patient, floating in the pale bluish glow of the OT’s UV sterility lamps.
Uli looked. “I still don’t—oh, there it is. What the frip is it doing there?”
It was a rhetorical question, but the droid answered it anyhow. “Cross-checking