Star Wars_ MedStar 02_ Jedi Healer - Michael Reaves [4]
Vaetes looked at him mildly, as if they’d been discussing the weather. “Feel better now? Good. The exit’s behind you. Just turn around, take a couple steps to trip the sensor. And you might want to hurry along, because—”
“I hear them,” Jos said in disgust. At least two medlifters were approaching. “But we’re not done with this, D’Arc.”
“Hey, drop by anytime. My door’s always open. Well, except when it’s closed. Which you can see to on the way out.”
Jos stalked out of the colonel’s office into the wet and smothering Drongaran afternoon.
This is just what I need, he thought. A youngling more naive than a freshly decanted clone. The kid might think he was ready for fieldwork, but those were long odds, in Jos’s opinion. True, things could get intense in any big medcenter, but he’d seen hardened veterans with years of experience in all the myriad ways that sentients could die have to bolt from a Rimsoo OT to keep from upchucking in their masks.
“Mimn’yet surgery,” they called it, after a meat dish of questionable origin popular with the bloodthirsty reptiloids of Barab I. It was a vivid metaphor, illustrating the fast and furious patchwork pace that they had to follow. Stop the bleeding, slap a synthflesh patch or spray a splint, and move on. No time for niceties like regen-stim; if someone wound up with a livid streak of shiny scar tissue across the face, it didn’t really matter—as long as he or she could still shoot.
There were times when Jos was on his feet twenty hours straight, his arms coated with red, with barely any time between patients. It was primitive, it was barbaric, it was brutal.
It was war.
And this was the sterile hell into which Vaetes had just plunged a kid who didn’t look old enough to legally pilot a landspeeder.
Jos shook his head. Lieutenant Kornell “Uli” Divini was in for a rude awakening, and Jos did not envy him it.
On the other hand, there was one possible positive aspect to the situation: Tolk would probably love the kid.
Thinking of her did bring a genuine smile to his lips. His relationship with the Lorrdian nurse was the one good thing that had come out of this war. The only good thing, as far as Jos was concerned.
Den Dhur was on a mission.
It was a mission that had little to do with the war between the Confederacy and the Republic, except in rather abstract terms. And, even though he was a freelance field correspondent, it was not something he was likely to file a story on. No, this quest was to aid a friend—someone whom he’d become acquainted with during his stay at Rimsoo Seven, and whom he’d come to consider a kindred spirit.
Those who knew the hard-bitten Sullustan of old would no doubt find it hard to believe that Den would profess friendship for any living thing. Which meant that their opinions of him could remain intact, since the being Den was undertaking this favor for wasn’t a living one— not in the traditional sense, anyway.
Which made it all the more challenging.
Den was sitting with his comrade in the base cantina. He was nursing a particularly potent concoction of spice-brew, Sullustan gin, and Old Janx Spirit called a Sonic Servodriver; no one appeared to know why the drink was named that, and, after the first one or two had been imbibed, very few cared. His companion, as usual, was drinking nothing. This wasn’t surprising, since he had no mouth or throat, and he’d managed to convince Den earlier that pouring alcohol into his vocabulator was probably not a good idea.
Den focused his large eyes blearily upon I-5YQ. The droid had an annoying tendency—exacerbated by the polarized droptac lenses the Sullustan wore—to separate into multiple images. Other than that, all seemed normal enough. “We gotta get you drunk,” he told I-Five.
“And this is such an imperative because …?”
“’S’not fair,” Den told him. “Ev’rybody else can get blasted outta their craniums—”
“Which they do with alarming