Star Wars - [Medstar 01] - Battle Surgeons (by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry)

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CONTENTS

Title

Clone Wars Timeline

Acknowledgment

Epilogue

About the Authors

Copyrights

MEDSTAR I:

BATTLE SURGEONS

A Clone Wars Novel

Michael Reaves and Steve Perry

BALLANTINE BOOKS * NEW YORK

With the Battle of Geonosis (EP II), the Republic is plunged into an emerging, galaxy-wide conflict. On

one side is the Confederacy of Independent Systems (the Separatists), led by the charismatic Count

Dooku who is backed by a number of powerful trade organizations and their droid armies. On the other

side is the Republic loyalits and their newly created clone army, led by the Jedi. It is a war fought on a

thousand fronts, with heroism and sacrifices on both sides. Below is a partial list of some of the important

events of the Clone Wars and a guide to where these events are chronicled.

MONTHS (after Attack of the Clones)

0 THE BATTLE OF GEONISIS (Star Wars: Episode IIAttack of the Clones (LFL, May ’02)

0 THE SEARCH FOR COUNT DOOKU (Boba Fett #1:The Fight to Survive (SB, April ’02)

+1 THE BATTLE OF RAXUS PRIME (Boba Fett #2:Crossfire (SB, November ’02)

+1 THE DARK REAPER PROJECT (The Clone Wars (LEC, MAY ’02)

+1,5 CONSPRIRACY ON AARGAU (Boba Fett #3:Maze of Deception (SB, April ’03)

+2 THE BATTLE OF KAMINO (Clone Wars I:The Defense of Kamino (DH, June ’03)

+2 DURGE VS. BOBA FETT (Boba Fett #4: Hunted (SB, October ’03)

+2,5 THE DEFENSE OF NABOO (Clone Wars II:Victories and Sacrifices (DH, September ’03)

+6 THE DEVARON RUSE (CLONE WARS IV:Target Jedi (DH, May ’04)

+6 THE HARUUN KAL CRISIS (Shatterpoint(DR, June ’03)

+6 ASSASSINATION ON NULL (Legacy of the Jedi #1 (SB, August ‘03)

+12 THE BIO-DROID THREAT (The Cestus Deception(DR, June ’04)

+15 THE BATTLE OF JABIIM (Clone Wars III:Last Stand on Jabiim (DH, February ’04)

+24 THE CASUALTIES OF DRONGAR (MedStar Duology:Battle Surgeons (DR, July ’04,Jedi

Healer (DR, October ’04)

+30 THE PRAESYTLIN CONQUEST (Jedi Trial(DR, November ’04)

+31 THE XAGOBAH CITADEL (Boba Fett #5:A New Threat (SB, April ’04)

Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been

reported to the publisher as “unsold or destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have

received payment for it.

Star Wars: MedStar I: Battle Surgeons is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are

products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A Del Rey Book

Published by The Random House Publishing Group

United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random house, Inc., New York,

and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

www.starwars.com

www.delreydigital.com

ISBN 0-345-46310-2

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition: July 2004

OPM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my son Dashiell

“Never tell me the odds”---M.R.

For Diane, and for Cyrus, the new kid in town.---S.P.

RMSU-7

The Jasserak Lowlands of Tanlassa, Near the Kondrus Sea

Planet Drongar

Year 2a.b.o.g.

Bloodgeysered, looking almost black in the antisepsisfield’s glow. It splattered hot against Jos’s

skin-glovedhand. He cursed.

“Hey, here’s an idea—would somebody with nothingbetter to do mind putting a pressor field on that

bleeder?”

“Pressor generator is broken again, Doc.”

Republic battle surgeon Jos Vondar looked awayfrom the bloody operating field that was the clone

trooper’s open chest, at Tolk, his scrub nurse. “Ofcourseit is,” he said. “What, is our mech droid on va

cation? How am I supposed to patch up these rankweedsuckers without working medical gear?”

Tolk le Trene, a Lorrdian who could read his mood aseasily as most sentients could read a chart, said

nothingaloud, but her pointed look was plain enough:Hey, Ididn’t break it.

With an effort, Jos throttled back his temper. “Allright. Put a clamp on it. We still have hemostats, don’t

we?”

But she was ahead of him, already locking the steelpincer on the torn blood vessel and using a

hemospongeto soak and clear the field. The troopers of this unithad been too close to a grenade when it

exploded, andthis 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 morewounded 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 tokeep the sweat from running into his eyes. “Air

cooler’smalfunctioning again,” she said. Jos didn’t reply. On a civilized world, he would have sprayed

sweat-stop onhis face before he scrubbed, but that, like everythingelse—including tempers—was in short

supply here onDrongar. 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 bewetter. And smellier. This was a

nasty, nasty world atthe best of times; it was far worse with a war going on.Jos wondered, not for the

first time, what high-rankingRepublic official had casually decided to ruin his life bycutting orders shipping

him to a planet that seemed to be all mold and mildew and mushroomlike vegetationas far as the eye

could see.

“Iseverything broken around here?” he demanded ofthe room at large.

“Everything except your mouth, sounds like,” Zansaid pleasantly, without looking up from the trooper he

was working on.

Jos used a healy gripper to dig a piece of metal thesize 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 thewounded lung. The stat, created of cloned tissue

and atype of adhesive made from a Talusian mussel, immediately sealed the laceration. At least they still

had plentyof those, Jos told himself; otherwise, he’d have to usestaples or sutures, like the medical droids

usually did, and wouldn’tthat be fun and time-consuming?

He looked down at the patient, spotted another gleamof shrapnel under the bright OT lights, and

grabbed it gently, wiggling it slowly out. It had just missed theaorta. “There’s enough scrap metal in this

guy to buildtwo battle droids,” he muttered, “and still have someleft over for spare parts.” He dropped

the metal into thesteel 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 thepan, 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’sclean,” she said. “I think you got it all.”

“We’ll know if he starts clanking when he walks.” Anorderly 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

facemask, and before he’d finished there was anothertrooper supine in front of him.

“Sucking chest wound,” Tolk said. “Might need anew lung.”

“He’s lucky; we’re having a special on them.” Josmade the initial incision with the laser scalpel. Operat

ing on clone troopers—or, as the staff of Rimsoo Seventended to call it, working the “assembly

line”—waseasier 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 noworry 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

wouldmuch rather be back in the cubicle the two of themshared, playing his quetarra, tuning it just right

so thatit would produce the plangent notes of some Zabraknative skirl. The music Zan was into lately

sounded liketwo krayt dragons mating, as far as Jos was concerned,but to a Zabrak—and to many other

sentient species inthe 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 morethan entertainers these

days. Certainly on this world.

The remaining six surgeons in the theater weredroids, and there should have been ten of them. Two ofthe

other four were out for repairs, and two had beenrequisitioned but never received. Every so often Jos

went through the useless ritual of filing another22K97(MD) requisition form, which would thenpromptly

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 hadfinished resecting, and the lung,

grown from culturedstem cells along with dozens of other identical organsand kept in cryogenic stasis for

emergencies such asthis, 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 Durossurgeon who specialized in amphibious and

semiaquaticspecies. He looked up from his current patient—anOtolla Gungan observer from Naboo,

who had had hisbuccal 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 notsooner.”

“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 hewent. He had learned long ago to cope with

whateverwas wrong now and not worry about future problemsuntil he had to. It was the mental

equivalent of triage, he had told Klo Merit, the Equani physician who wasalso 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

positioneddifferently. A large part of mental hygiene lies simply inknowing when you are no longer being

truthful withyourself.”

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 afew 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 thetrooper’s innards.

Jos nodded. True enough; the Fett clones were allidentical, 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 considerablediversity of physiological structure and

functionality;human hearts all worked the same way, for example,but the valves could vary in size, the

aortal connectionmight be higher in one than in another . . . there were amillion and one ways for

individual anatomies to differ.It was the biggest reason why surgery, even under thebest of conditions,

was never 100 percent safe.

But with the clones, it was different—or, rather, itwasn’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

monozygotictwins.See one, do one, teach one, had been the mantraback on Coruscant, during Jos’s

training. The instructors used to joke that you could cut a clone blindfoldedonce 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 themobile unit’s hall and

die. And, clones or not, hecouldn’t let that happen. He’d become a doctor to savelives, 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?”

In the distance, explosions echoed.It could have beenthunder,Jos thought nervously. He hoped it had

beenthunder. It rained here pretty much every day, and mostnights, for that matter; big, tropical storms

that torethrough with howling winds and lightning strikes thatlanced at trees, buildings, and people.

Sometimes the shield generators went down, and then the only thingsprotecting the camp were the

arrestors. More than afew troopers had been cooked where they stood,burned black in a heartbeat by

the powerful voltages.Once, after a bad storm, Jos had seen a pair of bootsstanding with smoke rising

from the hard plastoid, five body-lengths away from the blackened form of thetrooper who had been

wearing them. Everything in thecamp worth saving had arrestors grounded deep inthe swampy soil, but

sometimes those weren’t enough.

Even as these thoughts went through his head, he heard the staccato drumming of rain on the OT roof

begin.

Jos Vondar had been born and raised in a small farmtown on Corellia, in a temperate zone where the

weather was pleasant most of the year, and even during the rainy season it was mild. When he was

twenty he’dgone from there to Coruscant, the planetary capital ofthe Republic, a city-world where the

weather was carefully calibrated and orchestrated. He always knewwhen it would rain, how much, and

for how long.Nothing in his life up to now had prepared him for the apocalyptic storms and the almost

vile fecundity ofDrongar’s native life-forms. It was said that there wereplaces in the Great Jasserak

Swamp where, if you werefoolish enough to lie down and sleep, the fungal growthwould cover you with

a second skin before you couldwake up. Jos didn’t know if it was true, but it wasn’thard to believe.

“Blast!” Zan said.

“What?”

“Got a chunk of shrapnel intersecting the portalartery. If I pull it loose, it’s gonna get ugly in here.”

“Thought you said you had this one signed, sealed,and transported.” Jos nodded to Zan’s circulating

nurse, who opened a fresh pack of skins for Jos to slip his hands into. He wiggled his fingers, then

stepped inalongside his friend. “Move over, horn head, and let arealdoctor work.”

Zan looked around. “A real doctor? Where? Youknow one?”

Jos looked down at the patient, whose interior workings were brightly illuminated by the overheads and

the sterile field. He lowered his hands into the field, feelingthe slight tingling that always accompanied the

move.Zan pointed with the healy grippers at the offendingchunk of jagged metal. Sure enough, it was

angled into the portal vessel, blocking it. Jos shook his head. “How come they never showed us stuff like

this in school?”

“When you get to be chief of surgery at CoruscantMed, you can make sure the next batch of

dewy-eyedwould-be surgeons has a better education. Old Doc Vondar, nattering on about the Great

Clone Wars andhow easy these kids today have it.”

“I’ll remember that when they bring you in as a teaching case, Zan.”

“Not me. I’ll dance at your memorial, Corellianscum. Maybe even play you a nice Selonian etude, per

haps one of the Vissencant Variations.”

“Please,” Jos said as he gingerly spread tissue apart toget a better look. “At least play something worth

hearing. Some leap-jump or heavy isotope.”

Zan shook his head sadly. “A tone-deaf Gungan hasbetter taste.”

“I know what I like.”

“Yeah, well, Ilike keeping these guys alive, so stopembarrassing yourself in public and help me get this

liver working.”

“Guess I’d better.” Jos reached for a set of healys anda sponge. “Looks like it’s the only way he’ll have

afighting chance, with you as his surgeon.” He grinnedbehind his mask at his friend.

Working together, they managed to extricate theshrapnel from the artery with minimal damage. When

they were done, Jos looked around with a sigh of relief.

“Well, kids, looks like a perfect record. Didn’t lose asingle trooper. Drinks are on me at the cantina.”

The others grinned tiredly—and then froze, listening.Rising over the steady pounding of the rain on the

foamcast roof was another sound, one they knew verywell: the rising whine of incoming medlifters.

The break was over, as most of them were, before it had begun.

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CONTENTS TitleCloneWarsTimelineAcknowledgment12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940EpilogueAbouttheAuthorsCopyrights MEDSTARI:BATTLESURGEONS ACloneWarsNovel MichaelReavesandStevePerry BALLANTINEBOOKS*NEWYORK WiththeBattleofGeonosis(EPII),theRepublicisplungedintoane...

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Star Wars - [Medstar 01] - Battle Surgeons (by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry)

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