Star Wars_ MedStar 02_ Jedi Healer - Michael Reaves [42]
If that harmonic malfunction wasn’t fixed soon…
On his way to his quarters Jos noticed several members of Revoc’s retinue heading for the cantina. He waved, and they waved back. Most of them were taking the unexpected exile fairly well. Trebor and the other headliners had been bivouacked in a quickly constructed barracks, and there they had mostly stayed. No one had been allowed to evacuate yet, either to another Rimsoo or to MedStar, because the more the malfunctioning dome was attenuated to allow transports through, the more discombobulated the harmonics seemed to become. The majority of the incoming lifters were being rerouted to Rimsoos Five and Fourteen, the closest nearby units, but they could only handle so many extra cases, so some still had to be allowed through here.
Zan’s supply of processed bota was now under Jos’s cot. He’d kept it, not quite sure what to do with it. Now he knew that, on some level, he’d been waiting for an opportunity like this.
What the Republic didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them, and it could save a trooper’s life—a life that Jos now knew was worth as much as anyone’s. At some point, you had to start taking a stand. Jos wasn’t certain of much in his life, but he knew one thing for sure: letting a man die when you could save him was wrong. And vac take anybody who said otherwise.
“Jos?”
He looked up and saw Vaetes approaching.
His blood went icy faster than a cryovascular transfusion. He tried to steel himself for the news that Tolk had been in the wrong place at the wrong time on MedStar, that they had confirmed the ID, that he would never see her smile again—
“Tolk’s okay. I just got word.”
Jos’ relief was so great that he almost sobbed. He felt like the legendary world-carrying giant Salta must have felt when he had transferred his burden to a pedestal of platinum cast for him by his brother Yorell.
“Thank you” was all he could manage.
Alive! Tolk was alive!
“She won’t be coming back down anytime soon, I’m afraid. The explosion took out four decks in the ventral hull area, including, as I’m sure you know, the docking bays. She’s helping tend to the injured.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Jos said. “As long as she’s safe.”
“Merit’s okay, too.”
“I knew he was off base,” Jos said. “Didn’t know he’d gone upstairs.” He noticed then that the colonel still wore a grim expression. “What?”
“I recently spoke with Jedi Offee, and, based on some tests we ran pursuant to her suggestions, we’ve confirmed that this was not an accident. It was sabotage. Probably the same person or persons who blew up the transport.”
Jos stared at him, unable to process, for a moment, what Vaetes had just said. Sabotage? Again? They’d never found out who had destroyed the bota transport, and now the same thing had happened, this time on a much larger scale.
The news was shocking. There were supposed to be some rules, some accords, even in war. Hospital ships had been considered inviolate ever since the Great Hyperspace War. Even though the orbiting ships were easy targets, the concept of damaging or destroying one was anathema to civilized beings.
Or had been, until now…
16
Den seemed to be spending pretty much all his time in the cantina lately. He wasn’t 100 percent okay with that, although it had its advantages. For one thing, it was the warmest place in the Rimsoo, by far. For another, it was the easiest place to meet people, and people were usually the starting points for the kind of stories that he did best.
And third, of course, there were the drinks.
It took a lot to get a Sullustan drunk—truly, seriously, falling-down-and-missing-the-floor drunk. Jos had tried to explain the physiology of it to him once, using a lot of jawbreaking words like glycolysis, mitochondria, and polymorphic chemisorption—the gist of it all being that his body’s cells were very selective about which molecules they used and how. Which meant that an amount of liquor that would have most carbon-based species sitting with arms or tentacles around each other’s shoulders, singing old Corellian drinking songs, merely