Star Wars_ MedStar 02_ Jedi Healer - Michael Reaves [6]
Jos glanced at Uli, and then at Tolk, who said, “Uli seems to be doing okay. The orderly droids just wheeled his first patient out and they weren’t heading toward the morgue. He’s a cute kid.”
Jos shook his head. “Yeah. Cute.”
He risked a quick look around. They were still two doctors and three FX-7 surgical droids short of a full unit, and that was going to cost them today—
Even as he thought his, he saw a masked-and-gowned figure step up to one of the empty tables. The sterile field kicked on, and the figure gave a bring-’em gesture to the orderly droids.
“I don’t know who that is,” Tolk said as Jos was about to ask.
After months of work in this tropical pesthole, the OT doctors could recognize each other even when faces and heads were covered with surgical masks and caps. Which meant this was a new player. And that raised the question: why hadn’t anybody told him, Captain Vondar, the chief surgeon, that they had a new guy?
A fresh bleeder opened up, sprayed blood in a fan, and Jos suddenly had other things to worry about.
Nine patients later, Jos caught an easy one, a simple lacerated lung he was able to glue-stat shut in a few minutes. Tolk began to close, and Jos looked around. They didn’t have a new patient prepped. Things had slowed down, finally. He looked at the triage droid—it was I-Five today—and the droid held up that many digits, indicating the number of minutes before they would have another one ready.
Jos stripped off his sterile thinskin gloves and slipped on a fresh pair, thankful for the moment’s breather.
“I could use a hand over here,” the new surgeon said, “if you don’t have anything pressing.”
The voice was deep, and it sounded older than he’d usually heard in this operating theater, where most of the surgeons and doctors were the age equivalent of humans twenty to twenty-five standard years. Jos moved over three tables, squeezing past Leemoth, who was working on a Quaran Aqualish who had deserted from the Separatists. He looked at the procedure the new surgeon had in progress on a clone trooper.
“Heart–lung transplant?” he asked.
“Yep. Took a sonic pulse, blew out myocardium and alveoli all over the place.”
Jos looked at the new organs, fresh from the clone banks. The dissolving staples holding the arteries and veins together were X-style—he hadn’t seen those since medical school. This guy was older—they must be scraping the bottom of the recycler for doctors now. First a kid, now somebody’s grandfather, he thought. Who’s next—med students?
“You want to do those nerve anastomoses distally there?”
“Sure.” Jos regloved, took the adapto-pressor suturing tool offered by the nurse, and began the microsutures.
“Thanks. Ohleyz Sumteh Kersos Vingdah, Doctor.”
If the man had slapped him across the face, Jos wouldn’t have been more surprised. That was a clan-greeting! This man was from Corellia, his homeworld, and more, he was claiming kinship on his mother’s side. Amazing!
“Lose your manners, son?”
“Uh, sorry. Sumteh Vondar Ohleyz,” Jos said. “I’m, uh, Jos Vondar.”
“I know who you are, son. I’m Erel Kersos. Admiral Kersos—and your new commander.”
And here was another whack across the face. Erel Kersos was his mother’s uncle. They had never met, but Jos knew about him, of course. He had left the homeworld as a young man, and never returned …because he had…
Jos tried not to let his shock show. This was astonishing, flat-out unbelievable. Of all the Rimsoos on all the worlds in all the galaxy, what were the chances of running into Great-Uncle Erel in this one?
“Maybe we might have a chance to talk later—if you feel that’s proper,” Kersos said.
“Uh, yeah. Right. I’d like that. Sir.”
Amazingly, his hands did not shake as he finished the suturing. His great-uncle, clan-shunned for sixty years, here on Drongar. And running the show.
What were the odds?
Kaird of the Nediji watched the Jedi healer working on the