Star Wars_ MedStar 01_ Battle Surgeons - Michael Reaves [85]
Jos opened his mouth, but said nothing. What was there to say? Bota was valuable-so much so that the Republic deemed theft of it a crime to be severely pun-ished. The plant was, ultimately, why both they and the Separatists were on Drongar. And, ironically, the local Rimsoos were forbidden to use it because of its poten-tial offworld value.
Before Jos could speak again, Zan said, "Nobody will miss a few plants. There are little pockets of bota all over the lowlands that nobody even knows about. Pluck a couple of scales, stick them in your pocket, hand-process them later... who’s to know?"
"Zan..."
"Come on, Jos, you know a lot of the xenos around here sneak out and harvest the stuff for recreational use. Filba used to bliss out with a hookah full of it most every night.
Everybody knows what it can do for them, and everybody looks the other way, as long as no one gets greedy. At least I’m using it to save lives-which is what the Republic says it’s doing, too. Is the life of some-one a hundred parsecs from here more valuable than one in the next room? Can I stand by and let people die without doing everything in my power to save them?"
"You didn’t start this war, Zan. You’re not responsi-ble for everybody who gets hurt in it."
"Oh, that’s good. This from the guy who once kicked a hole in a wall when he lost a patient to Draknahr Syn-drome-something that all of Coruscant Med and a room full of Jedi and Silents couldn’t treat."
At a total loss for words, Jos looked at his friend, and saw nothing in front of him but a doctor who took his job as seriously as he himself did. He sighed. "Okay. But you’ve got to be more careful-there are a lot sharper eyes than mine around here who could notice a blank skinpopper."
"Point made. I’ll make sure they’re marked from now on," Zan said. "I can even use dye to color the serum so it looks like polybiotic or spectacillin. Nobody will no-tice, Jos."
"I hope not," Jos said. " ’Cause if someone does, your career could be smashed flatter than a mynock in a black hole."
Zan grinned and clapped a hand on his friend’s shoul-der, and the two turned and reentered the building.
31
Den Dhur was not a being to sit idle for long. Despite his facade of being supremely bored and cynical, of do-ing his job solely because it paid his drink tab, the thing in which he took the most pleasure in his life was his work. Even with the admiral hunting him, he could not simply camp in his quarters-in fact, he couldn’t do that precisely because the admiral was hunting him. The first question to answer during an investigation, an old police officer had once told him, is: what looks dif-ferent now than it did before? Any change in the behav-ior of a criminal suspect was cause for suspicion. If a bank is robbed and the guard on duty at the time sud-denly decides to take an unscheduled vacation or begins driving a new and expensive speeder to work... well, unless his rich uncle just passed away suddenly and left him a bundle of credits, or a winning ticket in the daux-cat races, he’s going to have company, to be sure. Com-pany in uniform, carrying sonic pistols and stun batons.
Den Dhur the reporter did not usually spend his days alone in his quarters, and he surely wasn’t going to start doing so now. So it was that he found himself out in the blistering hot day, shadowing the Rimsoo’s combat in-structor. Discreetly. Very discreetly. It wasn’t a real good idea to come to the attention of a being who could, if he wished, exterminate you without even raising his heart rate. A being who had demonstrated his ability and his willingness to snuff out lives and who had been recorded doing it. A