Star Wars_ MedStar 01_ Battle Surgeons - Michael Reaves [18]
Instead, she made it come back to her.
She had not known she was capable of that. She sim-ply reached for it, and the ball stopped, hesitated, and then rolled obediently back to her.
As she bent to pick it up, she sensed someone behind her. She turned and beheld Master Yoda, standing in the far entrance to the antechamber. He smiled and nod-ded, quite evidently impressed with what he had just seen.
That was all. She remembered nothing after that, whether Master Yoda had gone on his way and she had continued playing, or if he had spoken to her, or if something else entirely had happened. One would think such an encounter with one of the most leg-endary Jedi of all would be impressed in one’s brain far more thoroughly than the part about playing with a ball. But that was how it was. She even remembered the ball’s color: blue.
That memory came to her now, as it did, sometimes fleetingly, sometimes in great detail, nearly every time she prepared to call on the Force.
Barriss felt the palms of her hands growing warm against the trooper’s belly. She didn’t have to visualize the process-she knew that healing energy was pouring from her into him.
No-not from her; through her. She was only the vessel, the conduit through which the Force did its work.
An unknown time later-it could have been a minute or an hour, as far as she knew-she opened her eyes and lifted her hands.
"Wow," Zan murmured behind her. He was looking at the readout panel. She saw that the trooper was stabi-lizing. Also, the discoloration had vanished; his skin was a healthy color.
"You must’ve been top in your class. How’d you do that?" Zan asked, without taking his gaze from the panel.
"I did nothing," Barriss replied. "The Force can heal wounds on many occasions."
"Well, it sure worked on him." Zan gestured at the panel. "His brain wave pattern’s within normal limits, and most of the secondary trauma seems gone. Pretty impressive, Padawan."
The FX-7 guided the gurney out. By the time Zan had finished changing gloves there was another body before him. "Stick around," he said to Barriss. "There’s plenty more where he came from."
Seated on a bar stool, his left foot propped on a rung higher than the right foot, Zan adjusted the tuning mechanisms on his quetarra, bringing the strings into tune. The instrument had eight of these, bucky-fibers of varying diameters and texture, and eight was three more than Zan had fingers on either hand. The first time he had seen his friend play the thing, Jos had been impressed. The Zabrak’s fingers had danced nimbly up and down the instrument’s fret board, and he had now and then leaned way over and pressed his chin against the instrument, using it to fret the strings. The quetarra was a hollow, ornate, and beautifully grained pleek-wood box, polished to a dull sheen, with several holes in it, shaped something like a figure eight. A flat board protruded from the box, and eight geared turnkeys on a carved headpiece attached to the ends of the strings.
The cavalcade of war-torn bodies had finally stopped coming nearly five hours after the last lifters had ar-rived. During the final hour another lightning storm had passed through-a bad one, with bolts stabbing down quite close to the camp. The entire area was electrostat-ically shielded, of course, but it was hard to remember that when the thunder was loud enough to shake the building, the sudden flares of white light through the win-dows left purple afterimages in his eyes, and the pungent scent of ozone filled