Star Wars_ MedStar 02_ Jedi Healer - Michael Reaves [65]
The human suit stood, its rolls of foamcast fat quivering. “I’ll contact you in a day or two,” Kaird said.
“May frost never dim your vision.”
Kaird left, and Lens considered what the Black Sun enforcer had said. If this revelation about the bota checked out, it would be a major bit of intelligence to pass along. The course of the war here would almost certainly be altered quickly.
Very quickly.
Jos plodded toward his kiosk. He no longer shared it with Tolk, nor with Uli. She’d moved back into her own three days ago, saying she needed space to think. Uli was still in the single unit that he’d moved to soon after Tolk moved in. These days, Jos spent most of his time either in the cantina or in the OT. He only went back to his quarters when he needed sleep—and he desperately needed it now.
The drone of medlifters began. They quickly built into such a cacophony that he couldn’t even guess how many there were. He shook his head. That was going to be bad for whoever was on—
His comlink cheeped.
He answered, knowing it was bad news. “What?”
Uli said, “There’s been an explosion and big fire at the AIA hydrogen plant, Jos. A hundred people seriously hurt. We’ve got nine lifters worth headed our way, thirty-some wounded, most of them bad burns and—”
“I just finished my shift. I can barely lift my hands, much less use them to operate.”
“I know. But one of the droid surgeons just blew a gyrostabilizer, and it’ll take hours to repair it. We’re shorthanded in the OT. Colonel Vaetes said to call.”
Jos sighed. “Kark,” he said. But there was no heat in the word, only a great weariness. Would this never end?
In the OT, the first patients from the fire started arriving as Jos gloved up. He saw Tolk, and this time she nodded at him. A small gesture, but it made him feel a little better. At least they had that much.
He moved to a table as a pair of droids slid a patient onto it from the gurney. A clone, and scorched pretty badly. “What do we have here?”
“Third-degree burns over twenty-six percent of his body,” one of the droids, a surgical diagnostic unit, intoned. “Second-degree over an additional twenty-one percent. First-degree over seventeen percent. In addition, he has a lacerated small intestine from what seems to be a splinter from a shattered hydrogen tank, left lower quadrant, transversely; puncture wounds in his left lung, which is collapsed; and a fragment embedded in his left eye.”
“Separatist droids attacked the plant?”
“No, sir,” the SDU droid said. “It was an industrial accident.”
Wonderful.
“Isn’t bad enough the Seppies’re killing people—now we’re blowing ourselves up. Crack open a burn kit,” Jos told Threndy. “Somebody hit him with enkephalin, a hundred milligrams. And get the ultrasonic scrubber— he’s going to need at least half his skin replaced…”
Jos somehow managed to keep it together for another five patients, saving them all.
Then he killed the next one.
He was halfway through the first stage of a pneumonectomy, on a nonclone human patient, working on the left lung with a laser scalpel, when he nicked the man’s aorta. Blood spewed from the clamped vessel in a geyser that shot nearly all the way to the ceiling.
“Get a pressor on that!”
Tolk and Threndy had been pulled away to help Uli and Vaetes, who were doing a heart transplant, but the surgical assistant droid quickly focused the pressor field on the cut artery with mechanical precision, a perfect placement. Unfortunately, the field strength was not quite sufficient, and the wound continued to ooze.
“Kick it up,” Jos ordered. “What’s the field strength?”
“Six-point-four,” the droid said.
“Go to seven.”
“But doctor, that will exceed tissue parameters—”
“Override. Seven, I said.”
Even as the droid complied, Jos realized his mistake. The man lying before him was not a Fett-clone, one whose circulatory system’s wall strengths had been augmented