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"And you have no use for heroes."

"I never said that," Den replied. "Properly indoctri-nated, they’re great at drawing fire away from those of us who are smart enough to know we’re cowards and cynics."

Barriss smiled as she turned to go. "Rest assured I’ll keep this knowledge to myself, Den, but just so you know as well-your aura is not the aura of a cynic’s, nor a coward’s. It has definite glimmerings of hero, in fact."

So saying, she left the cramped chamber. Den stared after her.

"Oh, no," he murmured. "Say it isn’t so."

37

Even aside from the almost daily thunderstorms and mortar shell explosions that seemed a little closer than usual, the OT was particularly noisy. Jos was in the middle of a nasty bowel resection-the trooper on the table had apparently eaten a large meal a few hours be-fore he had been hit by a chain-gun round that had per-forated the small intestine-when the public address system came on. An excited voice, going too fast, said, "Attention, all personnel. Republic Medical Surgical Unit Seven will be relocating, commencing at eighteen hundred hours! This is not a drill! Repeat, this is not a drill!"

Jos said, "Put a stat on that, please."

Tolk hurriedly glued the incision closed, almost drop-ping the patch in her haste.

"Relax, Tolk. You have an appointment you’re late for?"

"You heard that announcement?"

"Yeah-so?"

"Look at the chrono-it is now seventeen forty-five. In fifteen minutes, you’re going to be standing in the middle of an empty swamp in the rain with war ma-chines trying to zap your inattentive butt if you don’t close this up stat."

"You think?"

Before she could answer, there came a boom! that shook the OT. The operating table vibrated enough so the patient jittered toward one edge.

"Blast!" Jos said. "What was that?"

Vaetes stuck his head into the room and said, "We just took a direct hit on the shield from a particle weapon. Main generator’s out; we’re on backup power. We don’t know where they came from, but there’s a bat-tle droid force more than eight hundred strong less than ten thousand meters from here, coming across the Jack-hack Slough at a goodly speed. The ground’s too wet for the troopers to set up a defensive line. That’ll also slow the droids down some, but it’s still best you close up any and all open patients and get them ready to move, people. This mobile unit is about to live up to its name."

As if to punctuate his words, another explosion rocked the building, rattling it hard enough to knock bedpans off the wall racks. The pans hit with harsh metallic clangs.

"Aren’t those supposed to be in the cooler?" Jos asked. "The better to make our patients uncomfort-able?"

Behind him, Jos heard Zan swear, something in low Pugali that he missed most of, but which sounded ap-propriately vile. "If my quetarra gets damaged I’m going to personally hunt Dooku down, excise his reproductive organs, and feed them to the swamp snails."

"Glue this one shut and start a stabilization packet," Jos said to Tolk. "Soon as you’re done, get your stuff packed. Where’s our staging station?"

"Southeast quadrant, by the backup shield generator."

"Got it." He raised his voice. "All right, people, you heard the colonel. Time to close up shop and move it!"

Jos backed out of the sterile field, stripped off his gloves, and went to check on his staff and their patients. There was a procedure for moving the unit-there was a procedure for doing everything in the military-but they had been here for what seemed like forever, and Jos had gotten so used to it that he had forgotten most of the course of action.

Another vibration thrummed from the energy shield. If those hits were any indication, it was seeming more and more like a good idea to pack up the splints and hightail it to safer ground-assuming any such thing existed on the planet...

He hurried down the corridor. They had practiced the drill several times, during those rare instances when there hadn’t been any incoming patients, and