As Civil War between the Republic and the Separatists rages across the galaxy, nowhere is the fighting more fierce than on the swamp world of Drongar, where a beleaguered mobile hospital unit wages a never-ending war of its own . . .
A surgeon who covers his despair with wise-cracks; another who faces death and misery head-on, venting his emotions through beautiful music . . . A nurse with her heart in her work and her eye on a doctor . . . A Jedi Padawan on a healing mission without her Master . . . These are the core members of a tiny med unit serving the jungle world of Drongar, where battle is waged over the control of a priceless native plant, and an endless line of medlifters brings in the wounded and dying—mostly clone troopers, but also soldiers of all species.
While the healers work desperately to save lives, others plot secretly to profit from the war—either by dealing on the black market or by manipulating the events of the war itself. In the end, though, all will face individual tests, and only those of compassionate hearts and staunch spirits can hope to survive to fight another day.
Release date:
December 6, 2005
Publisher:
Random House Worlds
Print pages:
320
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RMSU-7 The Jasserak Lowlands of Tanlassa, Near the Kondrus Sea Planet Drongar Year 2 A.B.O.G.
1
Blood geysered, looking almost black in the antisepsis field’s glow. It splattered hot against Jos’s skin-gloved hand. He cursed.
“Hey, here’s an idea—would somebody with nothing better to do mind putting a pressor field on that bleeder?”
“Pressor generator is broken again, Doc.”
Republic battle surgeon Jos Vondar looked away from the bloody operating field that was the clone trooper’s open chest, at Tolk, his scrub nurse. “Of course it is,” he said. “What, is our mech droid on vacation? How am I supposed to patch up these rankweed suckers without working medical gear?”
Tolk le Trene, a Lorrdian who could read his mood as easily as most sentients could read a chart, said nothing aloud, but her pointed look was plain enough: Hey, I didn’t break it.
With an effort, Jos throttled back his temper. “All right. Put a clamp on it. We still have hemostats, don’t we?”
But she was ahead of him, already locking the steel pincer on the torn blood vessel and using a hemosponge to soak and clear the field. The troopers of this unit had been too close to a grenade when it exploded, and this one’s chest had been peppered full of shrapnel. The recent battle in the Poptree Forest had been a bad one—the medlifters would surely be hauling in more wounded before nightfall to go with those they already had.
“Is it just me, or is it hot in here?”
One of the circulating nurses wiped Jos’s forehead to keep the sweat from running into his eyes. “Air cooler’s malfunctioning again,” she said. Jos didn’t reply. On a civilized world, he would have sprayed sweat-stop on his face before he scrubbed, but that, like everything else—including tempers—was in short supply here on Drongar. The temperature outside, even now, near midnight, was that of human body heat; tomorrow it would be hotter than a H’nemthe in love. The air would be wetter. And smellier. This was a nasty, nasty world at the best of times; it was far worse with a war going on. Jos wondered, not for the first time, what high-ranking Republic official had casually decided to ruin his life by cutting orders shipping him to a planet that seemed to be all mold and mildew and mushroomlike vegetation as far as the eye could see.
“Is everything broken around here?” he demanded of the room at large.
“Everything except your mouth, sounds like,” Zan said pleasantly, without looking up from the trooper he was working on.
Jos used a healy gripper to dig a piece of metal the size of his thumb from his patient’s left lung. He dropped the sharp metal bit into a pan. It clanked. “Put a glue stat on that.”
The nurse expertly laid the dissolvable patch onto the wounded lung. The stat, created of cloned tissue and a type of adhesive made from a Talusian mussel, immediately sealed the laceration. At least they still had plenty of those, Jos told himself; otherwise, he’d have to use staples or sutures, like the medical droids usually did, and wouldn’t that be fun and time-consuming?
He looked down at the patient, spotted another gleam of shrapnel under the bright OT lights, and grabbed it gently, wiggling it slowly out. It had just missed the aorta. “There’s enough scrap metal in this guy to build two battle droids,” he muttered, “and still have some left over for spare parts.” He dropped the metal into the steel bowl, with another clink. “I don’t know why they even bother putting armor on ’em.”
“Got that right,” Zan said. “Stuff won’t stop anything stronger than a kid’s pellet gun.”
Jos put two more fragments of the grenade into the pan, then straightened, feeling his lower back muscles protest the position he’d been locked into all day. “Scope ’im,” he said.
Tolk ran a handheld bioscanner over the clone. “He’s clean,” she said. “I think you got it all.”
“We’ll know if he starts clanking when he walks.” An orderly began wheeling the gurney over to the two FX-7 medical droids that were doing the patching up. “Next!” Jos said wearily. He yawned behind his face mask, and before he’d finished there was another trooper supine in front of him.
“Sucking chest wound,” Tolk said. “Might need a new lung.”
“He’s lucky; we’re having a special on them.” Jos made the initial incision with the laser scalpel. Operating on clone troopers—or, as the staff of Rimsoo Seven tended to call it, working the “assembly line”—was easier in a lot of ways than doing slice and stitch on individuals. And, since they were all the same genome, their organs were literally interchangeable, with no worry about rejection syndrome.
He glanced over at one of the four other organic doctors working in the cramped operating chamber. Zan Yant, a Zabrak surgeon, was two tables away, humming a classical tune as he sliced. Jos knew Zan would much rather be back in the cubicle the two of them shared, playing his quetarra, tuning it just right so that it would produce the plangent notes of some Zabrak native skirl. The music Zan was into lately sounded like two krayt dragons mating, as far as Jos was concerned, but to a Zabrak—and to many other sentient species in the galaxy—it was uplifting and enriching. Zan had the soul and the hands of a musician, but he was also a decent surgeon, because the Republic needed medics more than entertainers these days. Certainly on this world.
The remaining six surgeons in the theater were droids, and there should have been ten of them. Two of the other four were out for repairs, and two had been requisitioned but never received. Every so often Jos went through the useless ritual of filing another 22K97(MD) requisition form, which would then promptly disappear forever into a vortex of computerized filing systems and bureaucracy.
He quickly determined that the sergeant—the remnants of his armor had the green markings that denoted his rank—indeed needed a new lung. Tolk brought a freshly cloned organ from the nutrient tanks while Jos began the pneumonectomy. In less than an hour he had finished resecting, and the lung, grown from cultured stem cells along with dozens of other identical organs and kept in cryogenic stasis for emergencies such as this, was nestled in the sergeant’s pleural cavity. The patient was wheeled over for suturing as Jos stretched, feeling vertebrae unkink and joints pop.
“That’s the last of them,” he said, “for now.”
“Don’t get too comfortable,” said Leemoth, a Duros surgeon who specialized in amphibious and semiaquatic species. He looked up from his current patient—an Otolla Gungan observer from Naboo, who had had his buccal cavity severely varicosed by a sonic pistol blast the day before. “Word from the front is, another couple of medlifters will be here in the next three hours, if not sooner.”
“Time enough to have a drink and file another pathetic plea for a transfer,” Jos said as he moved toward the disinfect chamber, pulling off the skin-gloves as he went. He had learned long ago to cope with whatever was wrong now and not worry about future problems until he had to. It was the mental equivalent of triage, he had told Klo Merit, the Equani physician who was also Rimsoo Seven’s resident empath. Merit had blinked his large, brown eyes, their depths so strangely calming, and said that Jos’s attitude was healthy—up to a degree.
“There is a point at which defense becomes denial,” Merit had said. “For each of us, that point is positioned differently. A large part of mental hygiene lies simply in knowing when you are no longer being truthful with yourself.”
Jos came out of his momentary reverie when he realized that Zan had spoken to him. “What?”
“I said this one has a lacerated liver; I’ll be done in a few more minutes.”
“Need any help?”
Zan grinned. “What am I, a first-year intern at Coruscant Med? No problem. Sewn one, sewn ’em all.” He started humming again as he worked on the trooper’s innards.
Jos nodded. True enough; the Fett clones were all identical, which meant that, in addition to no rejection syndrome concerns, the surgeons didn’t have to worry about where or how the plumbing went. Even in individuals of the same species there was often considerable diversity of physiological structure and functionality; human hearts all worked the same way, for example, but the valves could vary in size, the aortal connection might be higher in one than in another … there were a million and one ways for individual anatomies to differ. It was the biggest reason why surgery, even under the best of conditions, was never 100 percent safe.
But with the clones, it was different—or, rather, it wasn’t. They had all been culled from the same genetic source: a human male bounty hunter named Jango Fett. All of them were even more identical than monozygotic twins. See one, do one, teach one, had been the mantra back on Coruscant, during Jos’s training. The instructors used to joke that you could cut a clone blindfolded once you knew the layout, and that was almost true. Ordinarily Jos wouldn’t be working on line troops, but with two of the surgical droids down for repairs, the only option was to let the injured triage up out in the mobile unit’s hall and die. And, clones or not, he couldn’t let that happen. He’d become a doctor to save lives, not to judge who lived and who didn’t.
The lights abruptly blinked off, then back on. Everyone in the chamber froze momentarily.
“Sweet Sookie,” Jos said. “Now what?”
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