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Jos Vondar arrived just then, and the three of them watched the gurney head for the OT.

"Bad luck," Jos said. He didn’t look happy.

"Filba was a friend of yours?" Barriss asked.

He looked at her, obviously surprised at the question. "Filba was an obnoxious, officious, tightfisted father-less squat who would make his own pouch mother sign a requisition for water if she was dying of thirst."

"You’ve got to learn to be more open with your feel-ings," Zan said.

"Why the grief, then?" Barriss asked.

"Because I’m on ME duty," Jos said dolefully. "Lucky me, I get to do the autopsy. This war’ll be over by the time I’ve cut him up. I’ll dull just about all the vi-broscalpels we have in stock. I’m saving the last one for my throat," he said to Zan in a mock-aside whisper.

"Word is, he was poisoned," Zan said.

"Won’t help, and you know it. I still have to dice him and weigh each organ, even if he just had a simple car-diac arrest. I’ll need a wrecker droid to help."

"Oh, well, look on the bright side," Zan said. "Maybe we can recycle him into lube-it’d be enough to keep all our surgical droids working smoothly for, oh, the next couple hundred years."

"It’s good to see you two can maintain a sense of hu-mor at the death of a fellow being,"

Barriss said, sound-ing slightly stiffer than she had intended. After all these weeks at Rimsoo Seven she was certainly not unfamiliar with the black humor; even so, it occasionally took her somewhat by surprise.

Jos looked at her and shrugged. "Laugh, cry, get tanked, or go mad-those are the options around here. I’ll leave you to your own choice-me, I have a moun-tain to carve." He headed toward the OT, following the gurney.

After he was gone, Zan said, "It gets to you, after a while. You have to develop defenses.

I have my music - Jos uses sarcasm. Whatever gets you through the hot nights."

Barriss didn’t say anything. She knew he was right, but still...

Zan sighed. "You know what I regret?"

"What?"

"I just heard a brand-new Hutt joke, and now I can’t use it to steam Filba."

She looked at him in surprise, and he grinned at her. After a moment, she smiled back and shook her head.

It was, other than Filba’s demise, a quiet day. There was a lull in the fighting, and no medlifters arrived bear-ing wounded, a welcome rarity.

The activity around Filba’s death was exciting enough. The plithvine carried rumors everywhere. As Barriss made her medical rounds in the ward, even the patients knew about it. She overheard the Ugnaughts gossiping: Yar, the Hutt drank poison. Suicide, f’sure. He beed a spy-it war Filba who blowed up the bota transport, no lie, blood. They were closin’

in on ’im, ’e sar it comin’...

Hadn’t Admiral Bleyd himself gone to see the Hutt just before Filba had croaked? No doubt it had been to question him about his activities. He was also stealing bota, didn’t you know? That little reporter, Dhur? - he was on the Hutt like sleaks on swamp scum, nosing around, building a case, and Filba was on the verge of being arrested, and he had taken the poison to avoid be-ing court-martialed and executed... and so on.

Barriss didn’t add to the gossip; she just listened as she went about her duties. If the suicide rumor was true, then it might mean she would be leaving Drongar soon. Her mission to find out who had been stealing bota would be over, if it truly had been the Hutt. And from the talk, it seemed it had. How many thieves, after all, were likely to be operating at the same time in a small outfit like this? Filba had been a supply noncom-he would have had the access. And, while Barriss didn’t like to make sweeping speciesist generalizations, it was true that Hutts in general were not known for their honesty and virtue. Filba was a good fit for the crime.

Perhaps too good a fit. She could not be sure, because the Force was not quiescent.

Something was still roiling in its invisible folds, and she did not have the skill to de-termine exactly what the subtle vibrations portended. She only knew that the matter was not yet settled.