Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 04_ Agents of Chaos 01_ Hero's Trial - James Luceno [39]
Leia watched him place the handgun in his pack. “Promise me that’s for a quick-draw contest,” she said worriedly.
At first glance the attaché case dangling from the hand of the fair-complected human in the inexpensive trousers looked to be an ordinary valise, something the snatch-and-run thieves who worked the Bagsho terminal on Nim Drovis wouldn’t have been interested in. The firmness of the man’s grip might have persuaded some that the case was more valuable than it seemed, but the man himself was enough to give even the most desperate thief pause. His walk was entirely too confident and his loose-fitting jacket didn’t fully disguise the width of his shoulders. More important, he was trying a bit too hard to appear nondescript.
He cleared immigration without incident and followed a routing line for the pubtrans flitter that would take him to the Sector Medical Facility.
Nim Drovis had changed since the days Ism Oolos had run the facility. In amends for what the Death Seed plague had wrought during Seti Ashgad’s reign on nearby Nam Chorios, the New Republic had financed a weather station to regulate the teeming rain that had been a quotidian event, and the Jedi Knights had negotiated an accord between the Drovians and the Gopso’o tribes. The opportunistic molds and fungi that had reproduced so exuberantly had been brought under control, and even the canals of Old Town weren’t the fetid swamps they once were. Slug ranching had become big business.
Arriving at the renovated medical center, the man with the attaché case took secret delight in the number of armed Drovian guards roaming the grounds, blaster rifles cradled in tentacles or clenched in pincers. Submitting to a routine scan at the entrance, he was admitted to a spacious reception area staffed by Drovians and humans, some of whom may well have been descendants of Nim Drovis’s original Alderaanian colonists.
The man proceeded to the Drovian female receptionist at the front desk. “I have an appointment with Dr. Saychel.”
“Your name?” she asked, around the quid of zwil lodged in her cheek. “Cof Yoly.”
She motioned him to a seat. Moments later, she motioned him back to the desk, where a human voice addressed him through an intercom.
“This is Dr. Saychel. You asked for me?”
“Yes. I believe I contracted a case of trichinitis on Ampliquen.”
“Why didn’t you have it treated there?”
“The med center refused to honor my insurance.”
Saychel fell silent for a moment. “Take the door to the left of the desk and follow the routing lines to the lab.”
The routing lines took him past examination rooms and primitive operating theaters, in and out of wooden buildings, and finally through a maze of dimly lighted corridors that ended at the isolation ward, where victims of the Death Seed plague had been quarantined twelve years earlier. Saychel, the station chief of Nim Drovis, was wearing a partially sealed anticontamination suit and macrolens goggles.
“Welcome to Bagsho, Major Showolter,” Saychel said warmly. “I didn’t figure someone of your stature would come all this way.”
“Actually, I won the coin toss,” Showolter said.
“I guess I can understand everyone’s interest.”
Showolter and Saychel knew each other from Coruscant, where they had worked together in an Intelligence safe house in the bowels of the governmental district, and had occasionally hobnobbed with the likes of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Lando Calrissian. Saychel’s thick blond hair had since become a yellow-white helmet, and his cheeks were reddened by patches of burst capillaries.
“I’m certain it’s you,” Saychel said, “but I’d prefer to double-check.”
Showolter nodded and spread his arms for the scanner Saychel produced from one of the biohazard suit’s pouch pockets. “That’s what we pay you for, Professor.”
The scanner quickly located the implant Showolter wore in his right biceps and verified his identity.
“So where