Star Wars_ MedStar 01_ Battle Surgeons - Michael Reaves [83]
What could she say to a man who had questions for which there were no simple answers? And even if he could feel the Force, what did it say about the life of a droid or a clone, or, for that matter, anyone else? The Force was not an instrument of any but the most basic of ethics and morality. There was the light side and the dark side, and those were the choices the Force offered. Education as to the true nature of sentient life? That must come from elsewhere.
Still... she was a healer. She could, at times, ease the fury of mental storms. At the very least, a calm mind was a better tool for dealing with such issues. She couldn’t answer Jos’s questions, but perhaps she could help him find a quiet place in which he could find his own answers. That much she was willing-and happy - to do.
30
The spy was known by two aliases-Lens to Black Sun and Column to the Separatists. It was the latter identity that sat and frowned at the odd-looking squiggle on the computer’s holoproj. To the uninitiated, the little mark might seem nothing more than a flaw in the projector’s image resolver. To those in the know, the glitch meant something else entirely.
The spymaster on Drongar had sent yet another of a series of all-too-frequent communications. It was irri-tating. Of the dozens of coded messages that had been sent, none had yet offered anything of substance. The messages were trivial intelligence, along the lines of "Keep an eye on the bota"... useless in general, and a particular waste of time to a field agent in Column’s circumstance. It took hours to decode the blasted things, which were Feraleechi onetime loops. In a dull, repetitive, manual process a cipher was partially de-coded, using a keyword in the early-morning holonews. This gave a series of numbers that were then keyed to a particular textbook available on the library
’cast, al-ways something so boring that reading it aloud could stop a full-scale cantina riot dead-Aridian Procedures for Development of Agricultural Fertilizer on Lythos Nine or some such mindless twaddle. Then it had to be translated from Basic into Symbian, a language dead, but unfortunately not buried, for thirty thousand years, and every sixth word transposed. The end of all this la-bor was usually a message along the lines of,
"How’s it going?"
The spymaster must not have much to do, and must be paranoid in the extreme to boot.
Which, Column thought, teetered on the edge of silly. Even if somebody managed to intercept one of the mes-sages-unlikely-and even if they were the best slicer in the galaxy and somehow broke the cipher-unlikelier still-learning the number of cases of Phibian beer de-livered to the military canteen at Prime Base last month would hardly be worth the effort.
Column sighed. It was how the Separatists chose to do things, and no there was no help for it. It would have to be done, but not right now. Later.
Much later...
Jos moved through the medical section, on his way to see a postop patient who had recently developed a noso-comial infection. The patient was a human male officer, not a clone, and one upon whom both he and Zan had worked for several hours to replace a shrapnel-riddled heart. They had been lucky; five minutes more and they would have lost the man. After such a brilliant surgical triumph, losing him to some waste-hopper secondary bug was simply unacceptable. Even though the Rimsoo was state-of-the-art in sterile procedure and environ-ment, nosocomial infections-contagions picked up while one was hospitalized-still happened now and then. This particular one had been very stubborn, not re-sponding to the usual broad-spectrum antibiotics, and so far they had been unable to culture out and identify it.
The prognosis was dire. Unless they could ID the cause, the officer wasn’t going to survive.