Star Wars_ MedStar 02_ Jedi Healer - Michael Reaves [38]
Tront frowned. “Do you know the fable of the Crystalline Kåhlyt, Hunandin?”
Kaird shook his head.
“A popular parable on M’haeli. A farmer comes across a kåhlyt—an inoffensive oviparous creature—that has the miraculous ability to lay rubat crystals in the form of eggs, once every moon cycle. The farmer sells the crystals and begins to accumulate wealth. But his wife is impatient. She doesn’t want to wait for riches, so she kills the kåhlyt and cuts it open to remove all the crystals at once.”
Kaird made an impatient gesture. “And…?”
“And she finds only the innards of an ordinary kåhlyt—no crystals at all.” Tront delicately sipped his drink. “Perhaps your superiors have not heard this tale, friend Hunandin. It is not a wise thing to kill the kåhlyt that lays the rubat crystals.”
“Perhaps not,” Kaird replied. “But it is also not particularly wise to yank on a nexu’s tail, which is tantamount to telling the new underlord ‘No.’ ”
Thula shifted uncomfortably. “I have heard stories of the underlord’s temperament.” She glanced at Tront, then shrugged. “Squa and I will make it happen.”
“Excellent.” Kaird rose, dropped a couple of credits on the table, and left the cantina.
He strode across the snow-blanketed compound, thinking. For their sake, Thula and Tront had better meet the smuggling quota. Now that Kaird had determined to quit Black Sun and return to Nedij, he was impatient with anything that smacked of hesitation or obstruction. The sooner he raised ship and left Drongar behind forever, the better.
And may the Cosmic Egg crack for anyone who got in his way.
I-Five had managed to rig enough of the battery-powered heaters in the operating theater so that at least the patients’ blood wasn’t freezing anymore. A small AG droid had been reprogrammed and dispatched to the roof, to plane the snow down to a level where it wouldn’t cave in the thin structure and bury everybody. The droid had been instructed to leave a few centimeters of the white stuff in place, to act, oddly enough, as insulation.
Jos cut and stapled and glued wounded troopers, but it was as mechanical as the droid above shoveling snow from the roof. Tolk had not commed him, and his gut was twisted in fear.
Vaetes had come in himself, to relay as much as he knew about the explosion on MedStar—which wasn’t much. Nothing was certain, but the colonel passed along what news there was in a terse recital as Jos operated:
“A seal blew on one of the external ports—possibly a micrometeor impact, though how it got through the shields is unknown. The blowout caused a short-circuit in the ship’s electrical system. The system monitor shut down the power grid, but somehow a container of volatile chemical spilled, and the vapor from that ignited, setting off other flammable material in the supply hold. There was a secondary explosion, which blew the integrity. Automatics sealed off the section, but there are at least a dozen dead.”
Jos’s throat was dry. “Tolk?”
Vaetes had shaken his head. “I don’t know, Jos. The ship’s comm is on emergency status, they aren’t letting any calls in or out until they lock things down. I got the mortality figure from the pilot of a transport—that’s how many bodies he counted in space outside the hull rupture. No report of the onboard casualties yet. As soon as I hear anything more…”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
The sterile field had a heater, almost never used on this world, but the surgical droid assisting Jos had cranked the field up to maximum, so at least his hands were warm.
The chill he felt over the rest of his body, however, was nothing compared to the cold in his soul.
Tolk …
She couldn’t be dead. No cosmos could be so cruel as to allow such a travesty. After he had worked so hard for so long, healing so many wounds, saving so many lives, it was inconceivable