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A drunken Wookiee. That would no doubt make things more interesting at some point in the evening.

Den shifted his gaze, noticed Klo Merit near a wall, a drink in one furry hand and an introspective expression on his face. Equani weren’t particularly tall, maybe half a dozen centimeters above most folks, but they were massive; Klo probably outweighed the Wookiee, with an Ugnaught or two tossed in. Den started to shout a greeting, then decided not to. From his expression, the minder looked like he could use a dose of his own medicine.

“Den?”

Surprised, he turned and saw Tolk le Trene by the table he was standing on. She, too, looked entirely too serious for such a party.

“Have you seen Jos?”

Den shook his head. “Just got here myself a minute ago.”

“I need to find him,” she said, more to herself than to him. The rest of her words were lost in the general vocal noise.

“What?” he shouted. But she just turned and disappeared into the crowd without another word.

There had been something in that look—Den wasn’t sure just what it had been, but it put him in mind of the old Sakiyan saying about a flensor flying over one’s bonepit. It made his dewflaps horripilate. Brrr!

Finally, he spotted I-Five.

The droid was standing not too far from Epoh Trebor, speaking to the human entertainer. He was gesticulating with far more emphasis than was customary with him. Den couldn’t tell what I-Five was saying—even Sullustan hearing couldn’t help when there was this much ambient noise in a room—but whatever it was, Trebor was laughing at it.

Seems pretty obvious that the elemental’s out of the magnetic bottle, he thought. I-Five had obviously already implemented what the reporter had already come to think of as the “inebriation algorithm.”

I-Five was, not to put too fast a spin on it, drunk.

It was also quite apparent that the droid hadn’t shirked on the writing of his program. Den could see that his friend’s photoreceptors were shining more brightly. That, coupled with the excess body language, and the laughs I-Five was getting out of a veteran entertainer, made it obvious that the droid was anything but a surly drunk.

Den grinned. Mission accomplished. He’d wanted to do his friend a favor by helping him find a way to cast off the shackles of propriety, to loosen up. Good. I-Five deserved no less. After all, if organic sentients chafed in those shackles, how much more must the artificially intelligent suffer?

And the really good news was that I-Five wouldn’t even wake up with a hangover.

Den decided it was high time he joined the party.

He jumped off the table and began to weave his way to the bar. “Excuse me. Coming through here. Low being walking. Pardon, citizen. Hey, watch the ears, floob…!”

Jos sat on his cot, staring at the wall, feeling as miserable as he ever had in his life. His days were spent wading in blood, up to his armpits in the mangled bodies of clone troopers who were little more than particle cannon fodder. His one real friend, a brilliant musician and surgeon, had been killed by the war, snuffed out in a heartbeat. The only other bright spot in this sea of bleakness, the woman he loved, had pulled away from him—and she wouldn’t even tell him why.

Jos stared, unseeing. He was a surgeon, he had seen people die before the Republic had called him into its service—he’d dealt with it. He’d just shrugged it off.

But he’d been wrong to think that helped. On days when death was with him from the moment he started work to the moment he finished, when he worked to the point of bleary-eyed dullness, over and over and over, it still took its toll.

Tolk had been the antidote. Tolk had stood beside him, and regardless of how the relationship might ostracize him from his family and friends back home, she had been worth it.

But now…

Now his days were dark, and the nights darker. He could see no end to it. This war could go on for years, decades; it had happened before. He could grow old here, cutting and pasting ruined bodies until one hot morning he would