Star Wars_ Shatterpoint - Matthew Woodring Stover [19]
"Take it easy." He propped her legs on his kitbag to help maintain blood pressure to her brain. "Try to stay calm. You can live through this."
Boots clattered on permacrete behind him: a militia squad sprinting toward them. "Help is on the way." He leaned closer. "I need the meet point and the recognition code for the team."
"What? What are you talking about?"
"Listen to me. Try to focus. Before you go into shock. Tell me where I can find the upcountry team, and the recognition code so we'll know each other."
"You don't-you don't understand-this isn't happening-"
"Yes. It is. Focus. Lives depend on you. I need the meet point and the code."
"But-but-you don't understand-"
The militia behind him clattered to a stop. "You! Korno! Stand away from that woman!"
He glanced back. Six of them. Firing stance. The lightpole at their backs haloed black shadow across their faces. Plasma-charred muzzles stared at him. "This woman is wounded. Badly. Without medical attention, she will die."
"You're no doctor," one said, and shot him.
CAPITAL CRIMES
He had plenty of time to get familiar with the interrogation room.
Four meters by three. Duracrete blocks flecked with gravel whose shearplanes glinted like mica. The walls from waist-high to ceiling had once been painted the color of aged ivory. The floor and lower walls used to be the green of wander-kelp. What was left of both paint jobs flaked in patches rimmed with mildew.
The binder chair that held him was in better condition. The clamps at his wrists were cold and hard and had no weakness he could touch; those at his ankles sliced pale gouges into the leather of his boots. The chest plate barely let him breathe.
No windows. One glowstrip cast soft yellow from the joining of wall and ceiling. The other one was dead.
The door was behind him. Twisting to watch it hurt too much. The durasteel table in the center of the room was dented and speckled with rust-he thought it was rust. Hoped it was. On the far side of it was a wooden chair, its bow back stripped from wear.
His vest and shirt were tattered at the shoulder where the first bolt had struck. The skin beneath was scorched and swollen with a black bruise.
Set on stun, the bolt had barely penetrated his skin, but the concussive force of the steam-burst still hit like a club. It had picked him up and spun him. The pounding in his skull implied that at least one shot had caught the side of his head. He didn't remember.
He didn't remember anything between that first shot and waking up in this binder chair.
He waited.
He waited a long time.
He was thirsty. Uneasy pressure in his bladder somehow made his head hurt worse.
Studying the room and assessing his injuries could occupy only so much of his time. Much of the rest of it, he spent replaying Flor's death.
He knew she was dead. She had to be. She couldn't have lived more than a minute or two after the militia stunned him; without his Force-hold to pinch off that brachial artery, she would have bled out in seconds. She would have lain on that filthy sidewalk staring up at city-dimmed stars while the last of her consciousness darkened, faded, and finally winked out.
Again and again he heard that wet splattering thwop. Again and again he carried her back under cover. And stopped her bleeding. And tried to speak with her. And was shot by men he'd thought were coming to help.
Her death had gotten inside him, down below his ribs. It ate at him: a tiny pool of infection that grew through the hours in that room until it became a throbbing abscess. Pain and nausea and sweats. Chills.
A fever of the mind.
Not because he was responsible for her death. It ate at him because he wasn't.
He'd had no idea she was about to walk into a blaster bolt. The Force never offered the faintest hint of a clue. No trace of a bad feeling-or rather: no hint that all the bad feelings he'd had were about to add up to something