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"We’ll know if he starts clanking when he walks." An orderly began wheeling the gurney over to the two FX-7 medical droids that were doing the patching up. "Next!" Jos said wearily. He yawned behind his face mask, and before he’d finished there was another trooper supine in front of him.

"Sucking chest wound," Tolk said. "Might need a new lung."

"He’s lucky; we’re having a special on them." Jos made the initial incision with the laser scalpel. Operat-ing on clone troopers-or, as the staff of Rimsoo Seven tended to call it, working the "assembly line"-was easier in a lot of ways than doing slice and stitch on in-dividuals. And, since they were all the same genome, their organs were literally interchangeable, with no worry about rejection syndrome.

He glanced over at one of the four other organic doc-tors working in the cramped operating chamber. Zan Yant, a Zabrak surgeon, was two tables away, hum-ming a classical tune as he sliced. Jos knew Zan would much rather be back in the cubicle the two of them shared, playing his quetarra, tuning it just right so that it would produce the plangent notes of some Zabrak native skirl. The music Zan was into lately sounded like two krayt dragons mating, as far as Jos was concerned, but to a Zabrak-and to many other sentient species in the galaxy-it was uplifting and enriching. Zan had the soul and the hands of a musician, but he was also a de-cent surgeon, because the Republic needed medics more than entertainers these days. Certainly on this world.

The remaining six surgeons in the theater were droids, and there should have been ten of them. Two of the other four were out for repairs, and two had been requisitioned but never received. Every so often Jos went through the useless ritual of filing another 22K97(MD) requisition form, which would then promptly disappear forever into a vortex of computer-ized filing systems and bureaucracy.

He quickly determined that the sergeant-the rem-nants of his armor had the green markings that denoted his rank-indeed needed a new lung. Tolk brought a freshly cloned organ from the nutrient tanks while Jos began the pneumonectomy. In less than an hour he had finished resecting, and the lung, grown from cultured stem cells along with dozens of other identical organs and kept in cryogenic stasis for emergencies such as this, was nestled in the sergeant’s pleural cavity. The pa-tient was wheeled over for suturing as Jos stretched, feeling vertebrae unkink and joints pop.

"That’s the last of them," he said, "for now."

"Don’t get too comfortable," said Leemoth, a Duros surgeon who specialized in amphibious and semiaquatic species. He looked up from his current patient-an Otolla Gungan observer from Naboo, who had had his buccal cavity severely varicosed by a sonic pistol blast the day before. "Word from the front is, another couple of medlifters will be here in the next three hours, if not sooner."

"Time enough to have a drink and file another pa-thetic plea for a transfer," Jos said as he moved toward the disinfect chamber, pulling off the skin-gloves as he went. He had learned long ago to cope with whatever was wrong now and not worry about future problems until he had to. It was the mental equivalent of triage, he had told Klo Merit, the Equani physician who was also Rimsoo Seven’s resident empath. Merit had blinked his large, brown eyes, their depths so strangely calming, and said that Jos’s attitude was healthy-up to a degree.

"There is a point at which defense becomes denial," Merit had said. "For each of us, that point is positioned differently. A large part of mental hygiene lies simply in knowing when you are no longer being truthful with yourself."

Jos came out of his momentary reverie when he real-ized that Zan had spoken to him. "What?"

"I said this one has a lacerated liver; I’ll be done in a few more minutes."

"Need any help?"

Zan grinned. "What am I, a first-year intern at Cor-uscant Med? No problem. Sewn one, sewn

’em all."

He started humming again as he worked on the