Star Wars_ MedStar 02_ Jedi Healer - Michael Reaves [16]
He was right, of course. Barriss nodded. “And how do you propose to do this?”
He grinned. “No problem—I’m packing.” He patted a small pouch on his belt. “Got my trusty kit right here.” He gestured at a relatively dry spot of ground. “Be seated, m’lady.”
Barriss sat, restraining a smile, and Uli squatted next to her in that relaxed, rear-on-heels position available only to those with flexible ankles. He opened the medpac, laid the sterile sheet out and triggered it, then slipped into a pair of thinskin gloves while she positioned her foot. The field tickled as she extended her leg through it.
He used a flash-sterilizer on the wound, the bright strobe of actinic blue and the accompanying zap! indicating that the injury had been cleansed of bacteria and germs, then reached for a sprayer of nullicaine.
“I won’t need that,” she said.
“Right. I forgot.”
He put the anesthetic back in the kit. He lubed a resector with synostat, and used a hemostat to spread the cut wide. Bending close, Barriss could see that the tendons leading from her toes had small cuts in the sheaths, revealing a pair of paler, pearly white ellipses.
She concentrated on keeping the pain at bay.
Uli dabbed synostat onto the cuts and waited. In five seconds the cuts changed color to match the uncut tendon sheaths.
“You forgot what?” she asked.
“I did my internship at Big Zoo, on Alderaan,” he said, reaching for the biostapler. “I treated an injured Jedi once. Great body control—the ability to stop minor bleeding, shut off pain—very useful.”
He inserted the tip of the stapler into the wound and triggered it. The staple—which, Barriss knew, was made of a biodegradable memory-plastic—formed a tiny loop. It would hold for a week or so, then be absorbed by her body. By then the wound would be healed.
“How did that happen?” she asked, referring to his story. “The Jedi have their own healers on most of the Core worlds, including Alderaan. They don’t usually see outside doctors.”
He dialed another staple into the applicator’s tip. “One fine evening, a bunch of drunken hootyboos decided to take apart a cantina in downtown Aldara. Started a riot that boiled out into the street. The Republic Senator was passing by, and her flitter got caught in the melee. She had a Jedi protecting her. There were thirty, thirty-five rioters who took it upon themselves to turn her flitter onto its back. The Jedi—a Cerean, as I recall—ah… objected to this action. The mob decided to teach the Jedi a lesson.”
“What happened?”
He laughed as he triggered the third staple shut. Barriss looked at his face, thought, Someday, when he’s old enough to have laugh lines, he’ll be stunningly handsome.
“What happened was, four surgical interns—including me—and two residents spent the rest of the night reattaching hands, feet, arms, and legs to the rioters. Lightsabers leave neat, surgical cuts. Every bacta tank in the place was fired up. The Senator wasn’t hurt, but they brought her in to check, of course, and her bodyguard came along. He had a vibroknife wound on one arm, good-sized laceration, all the way to the ulna. Wasn’t bleeding, though, and it didn’t seem to be bothering him. I cleaned and stapled it for him.”
Barriss smiled. She wondered who the Jedi had been. Ki-Adi-Mundi was the only Cerean Jedi she knew, and the talents of a Jedi Master would not be squandered on a bodyguarding assignment these days, even for a Senator. Probably one of the many who died at Geonosis, she thought. We are so few now, so few …
Uli put four staples inside, then looked at the external wound edges. “Even with a dermaseal, I’m thinking a couple of extra staples to close the skin,” he said.
She nodded. That would keep the strain off the edges of