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“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” Tolk said. Her eyes, above her mask, didn’t seem to be smiling. She wasn’t looking at him.

Jos glanced at the patient. Nikto were reptilian in appearance, with a couple of dozen small horns haloed around the face and crown, and a larger pair on the chin. There were four or five different subspecies; this one had greenish gray skin, which meant it was a mountain and forest dweller. His clothes had been cut off, and there were several stanched wounds on his torso.

The procedure would be the same as with any patient, in that Jos would have to track the wound channels and mine the shrapnel, then repair injured organs. And he’d have to work with what was there, because he was pretty sure there weren’t any cloned Nikto organs in the bank.

Getting to the shrapnel wouldn’t be easy. The Nikto’s scales had shifted to overlap the entry points. This was an autonomic reaction, evolved over millennia, to keep the wounds as sterile and protected as possible until they healed. Usually that worked quite well—but usually there weren’t several big chunks of durasteel sealed in a Nikto’s viscera.

“We need to relax the muscles enough to be able to lift his abdominal scale plates,” he said to Paleel, the circulating nurse who wasn’t scrubbed sterile. “Find out what does that to a Nikto.”

“Already got it,” the nurse said. “Myoplexaril, variant four. Three milligrams per kilo of body weight, IV.”

“Okay. What does he weigh?”

“Sixty kilograms.”

Jos did the math. “Give him one eighty of Myoplexaril, vee-four, IV push.”

Somebody had started an intravenous big-bore, TKO, which was good. Running IVs was a primitive process at best, and, on top of that, Jos had never enjoyed starting them on reptiloids—finding a vein under scaled skin was always a challenge. But all the osmotic drips were in use at the moment, so he had to make do with what was available. Threndy, the other nurse, filled an injector with muscle relaxant, double-checked the medicine vial and dosage, and pressed the injector against the IV’s Rx portal.

It would take a moment for the pharmaceutical to do the trick. Jos said, “Threndy, why don’t you finish the instrument sort? Paleel, go and get a second reptiloid kit, just in case. Tolk, over here and help me categorize wounds.”

The nurses moved.

With Tolk now standing next to him, if they kept their voices down, they could have a private conversation. “You okay?” he asked.

She kept her gaze on the patient. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t seem fine. Since you got back from MedStar, you’ve seemed, well …distant.”

She looked at him, then back at the patient. “Looks like this one got hit in the spleen—if they have spleens.” She pointed at a puncture wound with a stat-patch.

“Tolk.”

She sighed. “What do you want me to say, Jos? It wasn’t a visit to a pleasure dome. I saw people spewed into space like ripe poptree seeds. The lucky ones died right away.”

“People die here every day,” he said. “You seem to be able to deal with that.”

“Not the same,” she said.

“It wasn’t like you did it, Tolk.”

She gave him a sharp glance, and was about to say something when the patient’s abdominal plate relaxed and retracted—and a gush of purplish hemolymph from one of the now exposed wounds lanced out and hit him squarely in the chest.

The next few minutes were occupied with stopping the flow of vital fluid. The nurses and droids handled that, while Jos stepped away from the table. He’d have to change clothes and rescrub. Which meant a serious conversation with Tolk wasn’t going to happen now.

Blast.

But he wasn’t going to drop it. Something was wrong, something over and above the trauma of what had happened. There was something that Tolk wasn’t telling him. And he wouldn’t rest until he knew what it was.

Barriss Offee was having a hard time concentrating on her work.

In front of her, in a bed in the recovery ward, a trooper lay—or rather, most of him did. His legs had been chewed by shrapnel up to midthigh. The solution was