Star Wars_ MedStar 02_ Jedi Healer - Michael Reaves [48]
It seemed to take forever for the vessel to land and the port to open, and five people got off before Tolk did, of course. She was wearing surgical scrubs, and her luggage was following in a baggage droid’s hamper. Jos saw chilblains start to frost her bare arms.
He felt a rush of joy that was nearly vertiginous as he saw her, and he hurried to embrace her. She relaxed into his arms for a moment, then seemed to stiffen.
“Hey. You okay?”
“I am, yes.” She looked around, and shivered. “You weren’t joking about the weather, were you?”
“Isn’t so bad right here—over near the rep-dep there’s some kind of cold spot where the snow’s piled higher than a wampa on stilts.” Jos took her arm and steered her back toward the camp. “Let’s get you inside. You’ll warm right up.” He held her close with one arm, and hurried toward his kiosk.
“Let’s go to my place first,” she said. “I have a jacket there.”
Jos shrugged. “Sure.”
Inside her kiosk, the heater Jos had installed and turned on earlier had taken most of the cold from the air. Tolk sat down on her cot. “Snow,” she said. “On Drongar. Amazing.”
“You get over that pretty quick,” he said. “Then it just gets to be a big pain in the posterior. Especially given our triage situation. If they don’t get the uplift back on schedule pretty soon, we’re gonna be stacking patients in warehouses—we’re running out of room in the wards.”
She nodded. She looked tired, Jos realized. Tired and drawn.
“Pretty bad up there?”
She sighed. “Not for me. I was on the Command Level. All we got was a big vibration before we were sealed in. I didn’t know any of the people who were killed, and the injured and survivors were triaged by the emergency response teams belowdecks.”
Jos shook his head. “Unbelievable. Blowing up a medical ship.”
“It’s a terrible thing,” she said. Her voice was flat and somewhat distant.
Silence stretched. “Want some stimcaf?”
“That’d be nice.”
He busied himself preparing the drink. “How was Great-Uncle Erel?”
Tolk looked away from him, at her bag. “Fine.”
Even allowing for the recent past horrors, something in her demeanor struck Jos as odd. “Tolk? Are you okay?”
She waved one hand. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just tired, is all. It’s been a…trying time.”
“Got that.” He hesitated. “We could go down to the cantina, get something to eat, maybe a drink?”
She looked at him. “You know, Jos, I’m really not up for it.”
“Okay, sure. We can stay in, no problem. Uh, I can go pick something up at the chow—”
“Jos,” she said, and her voice had a slightly brittle tone to it, which he’d heard far too many times from far too many next-of-kin. “I—I think I just need to get some rest.”
“Oh. Oh, okay, sure.” He hesitated, unsure of what to say. She didn’t seem particularly happy to see him. Yes, she was tired, and of course it had been traumatic—but Tolk was a surgical nurse. She had seen more people die in a month than many nurses saw pass away in a decade, and under far more unpleasant conditions. She was as tough as durasteel. How could an explosion that she hadn’t even been directly involved in affect her so?
He glanced at his chrono. “My shift starts in a few minutes,” he said, and was slightly shocked to realize he was grateful for an excuse to leave. “I’ll …comm you when I’m done, if that’s okay?”
“That—that would be fine,” she said.
He hugged her, and again she seemed to stiffen under his hands. He kissed her, and she returned it, but it was like kissing his sister—there was not even a hint of fire in it.
As he walked through the falling snow toward the OT, Jos felt a sudden sense of nameless dread envelop him. Tolk had come off the transport changed. He didn’t know how or why, but she wasn’t the same woman who had gone up there.
Something was wrong. Something was very wrong…
Den sensed that something was different when he took his usual place at the sabacc table. It took him a moment to identify what it was. Then he