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She had damped down on her connection to the Force as much as she could; extrasensory experience of this much agony at this close range carried a real possibility of synaptic overload. Even closed down as she was, she could still feel the pain, the fear, the horror of it all pounding and scrabbling at her mind. She swallowed dryly and kept moving. There were some here she knew she could heal with the Jedi arts she had learned, but it would take too long. Not even the Force could mitigate the cold and brutal equations of triage.

Ahead of her, Tolk continued moving through the maze of dead and dying, followed by her droid, desig-nating who would live and who would almost certainly die. The fact that they were clones, all identical in ap-pearance, in no way lessened the horror; in fact, in a strange way it increased it-at least that was so for Bar-riss. Seeing the same body wounded and traumatized in a thousand different ways gave the whole scene a sur-real aspect, as if it had no beginning and no end, a per-petual loop of pain and death.

She knew she had to focus, had to utilize the re-sources at hand wisely.

Tolk moved to the next patient, slipped in a patch of blood, recovered her balance. She veered toward Bar-riss, who was looking at another wounded trooper. The Jedi shook her head.

Another x, its red glow waxing and waning like the flow of lives all about them, was applied by the droid.

They were dying like wingstingers hitting a zap field, and nothing Jos did seemed to matter. A repaired artery held without leaking, but the patient was too far into shock to come back, even with his blood volume pumped to the max. Another patient, without a mark on him, was smiling one second and dead the next. A scanner showed that a sliver of metal, thinner than a needle, had pierced the corner of his eye and gone deep into his brain.

Despite the floor-level pressor fields, those working in the OT were at times up to their ankles in blood, urine, feces, lymph and spinal fluid. The air coolers and dehu-midifiers were still not working, and the stench, com-bined with oppressive wet heat, overwhelmed the scents of antiseptics and astringents. The surgeons cut and re-sected and transplanted with practiced efficiency, their nurses and what few droids they had at their sides, and yet the patients still didn’t make it. Commands, both shouted and whispered, filled the reeking air: "-need twenty cc’s coagulin, stat-"

"-rotate the bacta tanks, no one gets more than ten minutes-"

"-keep that field going, even if you have to hand-crank it-"

After two hours’ work Jos was five for five-none of them had lived. He was beginning to reel with exhaus-tion-it was taking nearly all he had just to keep his hands steady.

"Get a pressor on that, stat!"

He worked like a man possessed, exerting every bit of his skill, every trick he had learned in the day-to-day war against Death from the day he’d hit dirt here, and Death laughed at him at every turn, ripping the fading lives out of his and the other doctors’

grasps with insult-ing, infuriating ease. The law of averages said things like this would happen, that there would be bad days and nothing to be done for it. But still Jos raged against life’s dark foe, fighting it for all he was worth.

The sixth one died on the table and couldn’t be re-vived.

Time blurred. He looked through a long and dark tunnel, with nothing visible in it except the patients be-fore him. He passed through exhaustion, through his second and third winds-and still the wounded and the dying kept coming, their eyes beseeching him under the stark, unforgiving lights.

His life was painted in red and white. He had been born here doing this, had lived all his life here doing this, and would die here doing this...

And then, as Jos sealed the latest patient, a double-lung and liver implant who would probably die, too, Tolk touched his arm.

"That’s it, Jos. That’s the last one."

He didn’t understand what she was saying at first. It made no sense-how could there be an end to