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Do you really believe that?

I have to, Jos told himself. I have to.

Uli stepped up next to him. “I’m caught up,” he said. “Need a hand?”

Jos let the nurse wipe his brow, then shook his head. “I’m good.” He couldn’t recall telling a bigger lie in his entire life, but there was nothing the boy could do to help him—not on any level. He just had to keep working. He excised and debrided burns, amputated and reattached limbs, stanched bleeding, drained wounds, ligated bleeders…

The sufferers passed beneath his healing hands, and Jos kept working, hoping that their injuries would be his anodyne.

In the cantina, Den Dhur worked the room. He pulled in every favor he had built up since he’d stepped off the transport months ago. All the drinks he’d bought for techs and grunts, all the unauthorized uses of his private comm to let people call their families, crèches, litters, and so on back home, the creds he had lent until payday… he begged, cajoled, wheedled, shamelessly. This was a big story, and he needed access to it.

Bits and pieces began to drift in, and eventually to coalesce. Den tallied them.

From an Ugnaught shuttle mechanic, he heard that one of the supply sections that had spewed its contents into vac had been the electronics small-parts storage. Which, according to the mech, meant that those replacement harmonizers and crystal stabilizers the dome-dinks were waiting on to stop the mopakky snow? They were gonna be part of the meteor shower lighting up the sky soon as they hit atmosphere, blood, y’know?

Talk about your vaporware…

From a comm droid that had been on duty when the accident happened, before the emergency status shutdown had hit, Den heard that there had been 186 people stationed on the affected decks. Some of them had made it past the blowout doors before they’d automatically sealed. Some had not. There were probably pockets of air in the affected section, rooms that could be shut and seals rigged, but with life support off, it was going to get milking cold in there real fast, and until the blowout was patched, no heat or air would be forthcoming.

There were emergency suits in disaster lockers, of course, mostly thinvac suits with limited air supplies, but no way to tell how many people could get to those.

From a Kubaz transport shuttle pilot, Den got an updated body count. At least twenty-six frozen corpses were pinwheeling through space in the vicinity of MedStar. “It been one major ’plosion t’ ’ject dat many, you bet,” the pilot said, his trunk curling up and down in horror.

And that was pretty much all he could get that was of substance. There were a few people from this Rimsoo up there, card-playing friends like Tolk and Merit, and for all Den knew they could be two of the many trapped—or worse, twisted and ruptured ice sculptures orbiting the damaged ship. Den was a reporter; he’d seen friends and acquaintances killed in brush wars all over the galaxy, but that never made it any easier. He had to shift into his objective mode, turn off his personal feelings, if he was to do his job. But of late, that had been getting harder and harder to do. When Zan Yant died, it had hurt, more than he’d thought possible. It was one thing to play the cynic for the people around him, to shrug it all off with a what-can-you-do? attitude, but when it was just him, alone, with nobody watching, it wasn’t as easy as it had been back when he’d been young and full of himself and going to live forever.

Den sat and tossed down Bantha Blasters like there was no tomorrow, wondering how many people he knew for whom that was literally true. Despite the latest influx of wounded, the cantina was full of people who had nowhere else to be, waiting to hear news, be it good or bad.

Teedle rolled up. “Need a refill, sweets?”

“No. I’m good.”

As the little droid rolled away, Den stared at his mug. Good—that was a word he was finding less and less useful and fitting when talking about himself.

Maybe it was time to get out of the field. Just find a nice quiet planet