Star Wars_ MedStar 02_ Jedi Healer - Michael Reaves [81]
Amazing how easily the lie came out of him—amazing, and not a little bit dismaying. But it worked. She looked at him with starry-eyed love. “Come back to Sullust soon,” she whispered. She nuzzled his dewflaps one more time, and then turned and ran up the ramp.
Den moved back behind the field radius. The transport, silent save for the thrum of the repulsorlifts, rose quickly and disappeared into the glare of Drongar Prime.
Den walked slowly back to his kiosk. It had been so easy to lie to her. One could argue that it was a small incident, trivial and unimportant. One could argue that he’d lied out of beneficence, to save her from hurt feelings. One could argue all kinds of things, but none of them had any more validity or authenticity than a Neimoidian’s handshake.
He was a scoundrel.
Eyar was sweet and sincere and trusting. He admired those qualities in her. But how long would it be before those same attributes filled him with impatience, or annoyance…
Or contempt?
He was hardly worthy of Eyar’s admiration.
Den stopped in the middle of the compound. This was bad. He was having cold feet all the way up to his armpits, and he had no idea what to do about it.
He looked about. From where he was standing, he had two options, each of which lay in practically opposite directions. To his left was the cantina, with its amazing and highly therapeutic varieties of distillates. To his right was Klo Merit’s office, where he could talk to the minder, or at the very least make an appointment to do so later. He needed to work this out.
How?
It took Den nearly two minutes of standing in the broiling sun before he turned and trotted off, a direction finally chosen.
30
The throbbing of the medlifters, the shouts and cross talk of personnel running to the triage area, the screams and groans of the troopers—it was a litany of sounds and cries that Jos had responded to so many times that it seemed he could do it in his sleep by now.
Sleep. There was a laugh. The truncated periods of naps and dozing that the medics of Rimsoo Seven managed to snag on good days wasn’t anything even close to good sleep hygiene. Of course, they had delta wave inducers, but cramming six to eight hours of uninterrupted cycling through the four stages and REM periods into a ten-minute nap just didn’t replenish the brain the same way that real-time sleep did. The only solution was a proper night’s rest, and that was a luxury seldom afforded.
Most of the time, the patients were clone troopers. For Jos, the hardest cases were not the completely alien species. They were the nonclone individual humans, because their anatomies were familiar to him, and yet subtly different from one another. When operating on such a human patient, he had to be very careful not to let his hands and brain fall back into familiar patterns that might work on a clone, but be just off enough to kill another human being. It had already happened once.
Truly alien individuals didn’t come through the OT very often. The few who did were usually on Drongar in some kind of observation or clerical capacity. And they often provided most of the moments of both humor and horror.
The last time they’d had an unexpected incident like that had been when Jos had been drenched in the Nikto’s life fluids. This time, it had been Uli who experienced the shock of the new.
The young surgeon had been working on a female Oni. The Oni were a fairly bellicose species, by all accounts, that hailed from the Outer Rim world of Uru. What this one was doing on Drongar no one seemed to know for sure—probably a mercenary. In any event, she had caught a projectile from a slugthrower, and Uli was probing for it when there was a blue-white flash, a sound like someone whacking a nest of angry wingstingers, and the young surgeon bounced backward and hit the wall.
He wasn’t hurt that much, as was evidenced