Steve Perry - Battle Surgeons

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A long time ago in a galaxy

far, far away. . . .

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 2 a.b.o.g.

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

va-cation? 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 mid-night, 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,

immedi-ately 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 any-thing 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.

Operat-ing 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 in-dividuals. 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 doc-tors working in the cramped operating chamber.

Zan Yant, a Zabrak surgeon, was two tables away, hum-ming 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 de-cent 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 computer-ized filing systems and bureaucracy.

He quickly determined that the sergeant—the rem-nants 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 pa-tient 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 pa-thetic 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 real-ized 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 Cor-uscant 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

indi-viduals 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 instruc-tors 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. Every-one in the chamber froze momentarily.

"Sweet Sookie," Jos said. "Now what?"

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

been thunder. It rained here pretty much every day, and most

nights, for that matter; big, tropical storms that tore through with howling winds and lightning strikes that

lanced at trees, buildings, and people. Sometimes the shield generators went down, and then the only things

protecting the camp were the arrestors. More than a few 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 boots

standing with smoke rising from the hard plastoid, five body-lengths away from the blackened form of the

trooper who had been wearing them. Everything in the camp worth saving had arrestors grounded deep in

the 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 farm town 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'd gone from there to Coruscant, the planetary capital of the Republic, a city-world where the weather

was care-fully calibrated and orchestrated. He always knew when 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

of Drongar's native life-forms. It was said that there were places in the Great Jasserak Swamp where, if

you were foolish enough to lie down and sleep, the fungal growth would cover you with a second skin

before you could wake up. Jos didn't know if it was true, but it wasn't hard to believe.

"Blast!" Zan said.

"What?"

"Got a chunk of shrapnel intersecting the portal artery. 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

in alongside his friend. "Move over, horn head, and let a real doctor work."

Zan looked around. "A real doctor? Where? You know one?"

Jos looked down at the patient, whose interior work-ings were brightly illuminated by the overheads and

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

move. Zan pointed with the healy grippers at the offending chunk 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 Coruscant Med, you can make sure the next batch of dewy-eyed

would-be surgeons has a better education. Old Doc Vondar, nattering on about the Great Clone Wars and

how easy these kids today have it."

"I'll remember that when they bring you in as a teach-ing case, Zan."

"Not me. I'll dance at your memorial, Corellian scum. Maybe even play you a nice Selonian etude,

per-haps one of the Vissencant Variations."

"Please," Jos said as he gingerly spread tissue apart to get a better look. "At least play something worth

hear-ing. Some leap-jump or heavy isotope."

Zan shook his head sadly. "A tone-deaf Gungan has better taste."

"I know what I like."

"Yeah, well, I like keeping these guys alive, so stop embarrassing yourself in public and help me get this

liver working."

"Guess I'd better." Jos reached for a set of healys and a sponge. "Looks like it's the only way he'll have a

fighting chance, with you as his surgeon." He grinned behind his mask at his friend.

Working together, they managed to extricate the shrapnel 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 a single 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 very well: the rising whine of incoming medlifters.

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

The drop from orbit to the planet was faster than nor-mal, the pilot explained to her, because of the

multitude of spores.

"Dey gum up everyt'ing," he said, in thickly accented Basic. He was a Kubaz, gray-green and

pointy-headed, a member of the long-snouted species whose enemies referred to them derisively as

"bug-eating spies." As a Jedi Padawan and a healer, Barriss Offee had learned early not to be judgmental

of a species because of its looks, but she knew that many in the galaxy were less open-minded.

" 'Specially d'ventilators," he went on. "D'rot'll eat t'rough d'best filters we got in a hour, mebbe less; y'got

to change 'em every flight—you don't, d'Spore Sickness get into d'ship and get into you. Not a good way to

go, b'lieve it, coughin' up blood 'n' cooking in y'own juices."

Barriss blinked at the graphic scenario. She looked out of the small shuttle craft's nearest viewport; the

spores were visible only as various tints of red, green, and other hues in the air, and an occasional spatter of

minute particles against the transparisteel, gone before she could see them clearly. She probed a bit with

the Force, getting nothing like a sentient response, of course,

merely a chaotic impression of motion, a furious muta-bility.

"D'spores are, um, adepto ... uh ..."

"Adaptogenic," she said.

"Yeah, dat's it. Every time d'mechanics and d'medics come up wit' new treatments, d'spores change,

y'know? And d'treatments, dey stop workin'. Weird t'ing is, dey don't cause problems at ground level, only

when y'get up above d'trees, y'know?"

Barriss nodded. It didn't sound pleasant. In fact, very little about this planet sounded pleasant, even though

her information on it was still sketchy. According to the hurried briefing at the Temple on Coruscant, the

Re-public's forces and those of the Separatists were more or less evenly balanced on Drongar. The war

here was lim-ited mostly to ground troops; very little fighting took place in the air because of the spores. On

the ground, things were even worse in many ways. Among the prob-lems the forces on both sides

encountered were monsoons with devastating electrical storms, soaring temperatures, and humidity over 90

percent. As if that weren't enough, the atmospheric oxygen level was higher than that found on most worlds

habitable for humans and hu-manoids. This often caused dizziness and hyperoxy-genation for nonindigenous

life-forms, and, for the Separatists' battle droids, rust. Hard to believe, Barriss thought, but even the

incredibly tough durasteel alloy of which the droids were constructed would oxidize if conditions were

extreme enough. The high oxygen con-tent also limited military engagements, for the most part, to

small-arms fire: sonic pistols, small blasters, slugthrowers, and the like, because of the high risk of fire from

laser and particle beam armament.

What kept both sides struggling for control of this

pestilential quagmire of a world was bota, a plant somewhere between a mold and a fungus,

which, to date, had been found almost nowhere else in the galaxy. It grew thick on this backwater planet,

but all attempts to transplant it offworld had failed. The plant was ex-tremely valuable to both sides,

because, like the spores and other flora and fauna on Drongar, bota was highly adaptogenic in its effects.

Many species could benefit from it—humans used it as a potent broad-based an-tibiotic, Neimoidians

sought it as a narcotic painkiller, Hutts utilized it as a valuable stimulant almost as pow-erful as glitterstim

spice, and many other species found it useful for still other functions. Moreover, the stuff had virtually no

side effects, making it a true wonder drug.

Processed by freeze-drying, the resulting product was readily transportable. Its only drawback was that,

once harvested, it had to be processed quickly or it degener-ated into a useless slime. And, to make things

worse, the plant was quite delicate. Explosions going off too close to it could shock it to death, and it

apparently burned like rocket fuel when ignited, despite the gen-eral dampness of the landscape. Since

bota was the rea-son both sides were here, this was yet another reason for military engagements to be

limited—fighting over a field of the stuff would be useless if it burned up, died, or went sour before it could

be collected.

Bota was also one of the main reasons Barriss was here. It was true that her primary mandate was to

aug-ment the doctors and surgeons who cared for Republic troops, using her skills as a healer, but she was

also sup-posed to keep an eye on the harvesters, to make sure that the bota was being packed and shipped

to offworld Republic ports as it was supposed to be. The harvesting

operations had been folded in with the Rimsoo proce-dures to save money and expedite shipment. Neither

she nor her superiors had any problems with that. Any advantage the Republic could gain over the

Confeder-acy was valuable and desirable—the Jedi certainly had no love for the rogue Count Dooku, who

had caused the deaths of so many of them two standard years ear-lier on Geonosis.

She strongly suspected that she was here for another reason as well: that this assignment was part, or all,

of her trials. Her Jedi Master, Luminara Unduli, had not told her that such was the case, but not all

Padawans were warned in advance that they were about to be tested. The nature of the trial, and whether

or not the Padawan would know about it beforehand, were mat-ters left entirely to the discretion of the Jedi

Master.

Once, about six months ago, she had asked Master Unduli when she could expect to begin her Jedi trials.

Her mentor had smiled at the question, and said, "Any-time. All the time. No time."

Well. If her sojourn on this world was to be her trial by fire, the test that would determine whether or not

she had what it took to be a Jedi Knight, she would proba-bly know before too—

The transport slewed in a sudden yawing turn, inertia shoving Barriss hard into the seat. The ship's

internal gravity field had obviously been turned off.

"Sorry 'bout dat," the pilot said. "Dere's a Sep'ratist battery in dis sector, an' every now and den dey try

t'track one'a us an' knock us down. Standard procedure to t'row in a few 'vasive maneuvers on de way

down. Kanushka!"

The exclamation of surprise in the Kubaz's native tongue drew Barriss's attention. "What?"

"Big battle goin' on, off t'starboard. Coupla mech units an' troops goin' at it—dere, y'see? I'll do a

fly-over—we're high 'nough, dey can't hit us wit' hand weapons. Hang on."

The pilot made a broad turn to the right. Barriss looked down at the scene. They were, she estimated,

about a thousand meters high, and the air was reason-ably clear; they were below the main spore strata,

with no clouds or mist to block her view.

As a Jedi Padawan, she was knowledgeable in the ways of war. And she had been trained in personal

com-bat with her lightsaber from an early age, so her obser-vation was more critical than most.

The trooper units moved across a field of short, stubby plants, with the sun at their backs—a sound

tac-tical move when facing biological opponents, but of lit-tle use against battle droids, whose

photoreceptors could easily be adjusted to tune out glare. There were perhaps two hundred troopers; they

had a slight numer-ical advantage over the droids, which, Barriss esti-mated, had maybe seventy or eighty

units on the field. From this height, the crescent attack formation of the Republic force was apparent as it

sought to envelop the droids and gain superiority in field of fire.

The battle droids were mostly of the Baktoid Bl se-ries, as nearly as she could tell from high overhead.

There were also several B2 super battle droids, which were basically the standard model with an armored

cas-ing overlay and more weaponry. They had broken into quads, each unit of four fanning out to deal with

the tactic of envelopment, concentrating its fire on the same section of troopers.

Classic formations on an open battlefield, she knew,

just as she knew that the outcome would be decided by which side could instigate the most accurate

firepower the fastest. She could almost hear the voice of her Mas-ter echoing in her memory:

It does not matter how fast you are if you miss the target. It is the one who hits the most who will

have the victory.. .

Blaster beams lanced through the engaging forces, which were now separated by no more than a short

sprint's distance. Vapor boiled up from misses that hit vegetation, and small fires quickly flared here and

there. Troopers fell, seared black and smoking, and battle droids ground to a halt, scorch marks and flashes

of electricity on their white metal chassis marking where blasterfire had struck.

It was all eerily silent, no sound reaching this height as the pilot slowed to give her a longer look.

It appeared that the Republic forces would win this engagement—both sides seemed to be losing

combat-ants at the same rate, and in such a case, the side with the larger force would win—though the

victory would be costly. A unit that lost eight out of ten troops won only in the technical sense.

"We can't hang 'round," the pilot said. "D'filters'll be in d'red in 'nother fifteen minutes an' we're five

away from Rimsoo Seven. I like t'have a margin 'f error."

The shuttle craft gained speed, and they left the battle behind.

Barriss mused on what she had seen as the transport shot over lowland vegetation and steaming,

miasmic swamps. Whatever else this assignment might be, it cer-tainly was not going to be dull.

Jos was snatching a few precious moments of sleep in the cubicle he shared with Zan when he heard the

trans-port's approach.

At first, only half awake, he thought it was another medlifter bringing in more wounded, but then he

real-ized the repulsor sound was pitched differently.

It has to be the new doc, he thought. No one else in their right mind would make planetfall on

Drongar without being ordered to.

He pushed through the osmotic field that covered the cubicle's entrance; it had been set to let air circulate

freely, but it kept out the eight-legged, bi-winged in-sects they'd come to call "wingstingers" that constantly

buzzed about the unit. He'd heard that the newer-model fields came with an entropic overlay feature that

bled energy from the air molecules as they passed through the selective barrier, thus lowering the inside

tempera-ture by a good ten degrees. He'd put in a requisition for a batch of them; with any luck, they might

arrive a day or so before the war ended.

Blinking in the harsh light of Drongar Prime, he watched the transport spiral down to the pad. He no-ticed

Zan, Tolk, and a few others emerging from the OT as well. It was a time of relative quiet at Rimsoo Seven,

which meant that triaged patients weren't queued up, waiting for surgery and treatment, and that the

surgeons weren't in a life-and-death race with time to save them. They were enjoying the respite while it

lasted.

A couple of Bothan techs ran up to the shuttle and sprayed the exterior with spore disinfectant. This

par-ticular batch of chemicals, Jos knew, would probably be good for another standard month; it took about

that long for the spores that attacked the craft's seals to de-velop immunities to the spray. Then various

chemical

precursors would have to be altered, and molecular configurations shifted just enough to produce a new

type of treatment that would once again be effective— for a time. It was a constant dance that went on

be-tween the guided mechanisms of science and the blind opportunism of nature. Jos wondered, not for the

first time, what the odds were of the spores mutating into a more virulent pathogen that could strip-mine a

pair of lungs in seconds instead of hours.

Then the shuttle's hatch opened, and so did Jos's mouth—in surprise.

The new doctor was a woman—and a Jedi.

There was no mistaking the simple dark garb and ac-coutrements of the Order, and certainly no

mistaking the shape beneath them as anything other than femi-nine. He'd heard that the latest addition to

the team was a Mirialan—which meant human, basically—a member of the same species as himself,

whose ancestors had spread in several ancient diasporas across the galaxy, colonizing such worlds as

Corellia, Alderaan, Kalarba, and hundreds more. Humans were ubiquitous from one spiral arm to the other,

so to see another one—male or female—arrive here was no great surprise.

But to see a Jedi, here on Drongar—that was surpris-ing.

Jos, like most other beings intelligent enough to ac-cess the HoloNet, had seen the recorded images of the

Jedi's final stand in the arena on Geonosis. Even before that, the Order had been spread mighty thin across

the galaxy. And yet one of them had been assigned here, to Rimsoo Seven, a ragtag military medical unit

on a world so far off the known space lanes that most galactic car-tographers couldn't come within a

parsec of locating it on a bet.

He wondered why she was here.

Colonel D'Arc Vaetes, the human commander of the unit, received the Jedi warmly as the latter

disembarked from the transport. "Welcome to Rimsoo Seven, Jedi Barriss Offee," he said. "Speaking for

everyone here, I hope you will be—"

But before he could finish his sentence, Vaetes stopped, for a sound was rising in the thick, humid air—a

sound every one of them at Rimsoo Seven knew very well.

"Incoming lifters!" shouted Tanisuldees, a Dressel-lian enlistee. He was the aide-de-camp to Filba, the

Hutt supply officer. He pointed to the north.

Jos looked. Yes, they were coming, sure enough—five of them, black dots against the sky, which at this

time of day was a faint verdigris in color, like the algae that coated the surface of the Kondrus Sea. Each

medlifter could carry up to six wounded men—clones and possi-bly other combatants. That meant at least

thirty in-jured, possibly one or two more.

After the first moment of realization, everyone began moving purposefully, each doing his, her, or its duty

to prepare. Zan and Tolk headed for the OT at a run. Jos was about to follow, but instead he turned and

moved quickly to where the Jedi, looking slightly confused, was standing.

Vaetes took her hand and gestured toward Jos. "Jedi Offee, this is Captain Jos Vondar, my chief

surgeon. He'll get you briefed and prepped for what's coming." The colonel sighed. "It's something we're all

quite used to, sadly. What's even more sad is that you'll get used to it as well, very quickly."

Jos wasn't quite sure what the proper protocol for greeting a Jedi was, but he didn't see much point in

worrying about it at the moment. "Let's hope the Force is with you, Jedi Offee," he said, having to raise his

voice to be heard over the rising whine of the repulsors. "Because it's going to be a long, hot day." He

started toward the open landing area in the camp's center, where the initial triage calls were pronounced on

the wounded as they came off the lifters.

Barriss Offee moved quickly to keep up with him. He trusted she was willing to tackle whatever was in

store. She's a Jedi, Jos told himself—she's probably got what it takes.

For her sake—and the troops'—he hoped so.

The full-spectrum light in his office was dimmed—as a Sakiyan, Admiral Tarnese Bleyd could see farther

into the infrared than most beings, and he preferred to spare himself the harsh glare that many of the

galaxy's species needed for illumination. Most sentients considered themselves enlightened to some degree,

but to those who could see things as they really were, the rest of the galactic population was stumbling

about half blind. Un-fortunately, the sighted few were all too often handi-capped by the blindness of the

masses.

Bleyd frowned. He knew himself to be one of the Re-public's most capable admirals: smart, clever, and

deft. Given the proper venue, he could have risen easily to the top of the military's chain of command in

short order. Become a fleet commander, at the least; perhaps even a Priority Sector High Commander. But

instead, his supe-riors had seen fit to shunt him to this Maker-forsaken, backrocket planet in the hind end of

nowhere, to pre-side over the administration of a lowly MedStar, a med-ical frigate fielding Rimsoo units

charged with patching up clones and collecting an indigenous plant.

He feared for the stability of a commonwealth that could make such ill-advised decisions.

Bleyd stood and moved to the large transparisteel view-

port. Drongar filled a quarter of the sky "below" him. Even from orbit the planet looked vile and pestilential.

From the surface, he knew the sky would have a sickly copper tint caused by the clouds of spores

constantly adrift in the upper atmosphere, and the rampant, al-most virulent growth that covered everything.

He shivered, rubbing his upper arms. His skin was the color and texture of dark, burnished bronze, but

that didn't mean Tarnese Bleyd didn't feel the cold occasion-ally. Even when the temperature was set to a

comfort-able thirty-eight degrees.

The only parts of the planet, with its vast, continent-spanning jungles and marshlands, that remotely

re-minded him of the veldts of his homeworld were the few isolated patches where the bota grew. He

couldn't even see those from orbit. By far the largest fields were on Tanlassa, the bigger of two

landmasses in the south-ern hemisphere. The Jasserak engagement—the only ac-tive conflict zone on the

planet, at the moment—was taking place on the Tanlassan western shore.

Bleyd turned away from the port and made a gesture. A hologrammic display appeared before him,

showing a translucent image of the rotating planet. Alphanumerics cascaded on either side of the globe.

The admiral brooded on the stats. He knew most of them by heart, and yet he often felt compelled to

review them. Some-how, it was comforting to know everything about the planet that was going to make

him rich.

According to the Nikto survey team that had first discovered the system, nearly two centuries ago,

Dron-gar was a relatively young world, with a radius of 6,259 kilometers and a surface gravity of 1.2

Standard. It had two small moons—nothing more than captured asteroids, really. There were three other

planets in the

system, all gas giants orbiting in the outer reaches, which meant Drongar was well shielded from meteor

and cometary impacts. Drongar Prime was approxi-mately the same size as Coruscant Prime, but it burned

hotter. That explained Drongar's current near-tropical climatic zonation. But the lack of a large moon to

stabi-lize its obliquity meant that, in a few hundred million years, Drongar would probably become a

"snowball" world as cold as, or colder than, Hoth.

Bleyd gestured again, and the holo faded. He thought about Saki, his homeworld. True, it was mostly

tropical as well, with large stretches of jungle and marshes—but not like Drongar. Neimoidia and Saki

together couldn't match Drongar for sheer fetid, noisome area.

Saki also had forests, and savannas, and lakes ... and, unlike Drongar, a stable axis, anchored by the

gravity of a single, large moon. Thus, seasonal varia-tions on Saki were mild, the air was sweet, and the

hunting was good. Saki Prime was an older star, its spectrum shifting more toward the red. From the

planet's surface it looked like a swollen crimson jewel hanging in the azure sky.

Bleyd had heard it said on occasion that Sakiyan were too insular, that they tended to stay on their own

world rather than venture out into the galaxy and play with the big kids. He never responded to these

charges. He knew that, if most of the other sentients voicing the complaint could spend even one day on

Saki, they would under-stand why few of its children ever wanted to leave.

True, he had left—but only because circumstances had forced him to seek his fortune offworld. His

pride-father, Tarnese Lyanne, had invested heavily in various black-market and smuggling operations—far

too heav-ily. Shiltu the Hutt, a Black Sun vigo, had double-crossed

Lyanne. Clan Tarnese had been ruined—and Bleyd had left to find employment in the Republic military.

But one day he would return. That was never in doubt. And he would return in style.

The Sakiyans were a proud and predatory race— Bleyd's ancestors had been legendary hunters. It was

his monthrael to be no less of a legend than they.

Bleyd stopped reminiscing. He could not afford to lose his focus now. A decison had to be made, a

decision that could determine the rest of his life's course.

But there really was only one choice. If the Republic was unable or unwilling to recognize his abilities,

then it was the Republic's loss, not his. He had known all along, after all, that it was up to him to make

certain that he came out of this war wiser—and richer.

Much richer.

With sufficient credits Bleyd could reclaim his clan's holdings. It was too late to wreak any sort of

delayed re-venge on Shiltu—the old reprobate had died a decade before from sudden massive cellular

hemorrhage, a sort of full-body stroke that had ended the Hutt's life far too quickly and painlessly, in

Bleyd's opinion.

But it was just as well that he not be tempted. Re-venge, he knew, was an expensive and dangerous

lux-ury. Retiring from the war a rich man would be his best vengeance upon a military too foolish to know

what they had in him,

If Filba continued to come through . ..

Bleyd was certainly not blind to the irony that re-quired him to trust another Hutt in dealing with Black

Sun again. It was risky—very risky. Allying with Black Sun was like gambling with a Wookiee: even when

you know he's cheating, sometimes it's best to let him win. But the stakes were too high to walk away

from. With

the credits they stood to make, he could become a landed person, perhaps even enter politics. He closed his

eyes, picturing it: the wealthy Senator from Saki, with his own palatial spire on Coruscant, affecting the

lives of trillions with his every command ... he could certainly get used to such a lifestyle.

Yes, it was risky. Going after the big game always was. But he'd hunted razor-tailed tigers in the Dust

Pits of Yurb; he'd fought lyniks that had tasted his blood and therefore knew every move he would make;

he had even trapped a nexu, one of the most ferocious beasts in the galaxy.

He was more than capable of outwitting even a many-headed beast such as Black Sun.

His secretary droid appeared in the doorway. "Admi-ral, you asked to be reminded of the time."

Bleyd glared at the droid, annoyed at being pulled back from his visions of glory. "Yes, yes. All right, you

have reminded me. Go on about your business."

The droid, a standard protocol unit, quickly shuffled away. It knew better than to hesitate when Bleyd

told it to move.

The admiral glanced down at his desk and the moun-tain of flimsies and datapads there. Bleyd set to

work. It would be best to have a clear mind, unencumbered by trivial business, so that he could concentrate

on his plans. He had to keep things running smoothly; there was far too much at stake for any mistakes to

be made at this point. Bleyd thought of the billions of credits he would realize from the Hutt's scheme.

Those billions would buy him the top floor of a monad in Corus-cant's prestigious equatorial belt, and

servants to cater to his every whim. The means to accomplish all this was

there—all he had to do was be brave enough to seize the opportunity.

Den Dhur swaggered into the cantina.

It wasn't much of a swagger, but after all, he was a Sullustan, waist-high to and only half the weight of

most of the patrons within. It was understandable that conversation didn't cease and heads turn to mark his

progress. He could live with that.

What was harder to live with were the lights and the noise. There were fluorescent globes on every

table, and a quadro unit near the door was pounding out some-thing loud and thumping and syncopated that

they called music these days. Big milking surprise, he told himself; a noisy cantina. Who'd have

thought? But the fact that it was unremarkable didn't make it any less unpleasant.

Added to the wail blasting from the speakers were the patrons. Most of them were military and all were

chat-tering loudly, which only added to the cacophony. Like all Sullustans, who had evolved for

underground living, Den had relatively large eyes and sensitive ears com-pared to most sentients. He was

wearing polarized droptacs and sonic dampeners, but even so, he knew he was going to have a walloping

headache if he stayed in here too long. Still, he was a reporter, and places like this were where the most

interesting stories could be heard. Assuming one could hear anything through this din...

He ascended the ramp, designed for shorter and leg-less species, to the bar, gaining enough height to put

him on eye level with the tender, whom he signaled with a wave.

The tender, a phlegmatic Ortolan, came over. He looked at Den without speaking—at least, without

speaking anything Den could hear. Most Ortolans con-versed in ultrahigh or ultralow frequencies. Even the

Sullustan's ears, sensitive as they were, weren't as good as the blue-furred flaps the tender sported. Den

was sure the chunky, long-nosed alien wore sonic dampeners as good as his own, if not better.

Fortunately the dampeners had selective blocking— either that, or the Ortolan was good at lip-reading,

be-cause when Den said, "Bantha Blaster," the tender promptly began pouring liquids into a glass, building a

swirly orange-and-blue concoction. He was pretty good, Den noted. In a matter of moments the Ortolan

handed the drink to Den. "On the tab," the tender said, his voice low and resonant.

Den nodded. He took a long, slow sip. Ah ...

The first drink of the day was the best. After a few more, you couldn't really taste them.

He had enough swallows to blunt the harsh edges of the lights, then looked around. First thing a good

re-porter did upon spacing to a new planet was find the lo-cal watering holes. More stories came out of

cantinas than anywhere else. This one certainly wasn't much: a dilapidated foamcast building in the middle

of a swamp—most of the planet seemed to be either jungle or swamp, Den had noticed on the shuttle

coming down—set up to serve the clone troops, soldiers, and as-sorted support staff; the latter mostly

medics, given that this was a Rimsoo.

Lightning flickered outside, leaving, in his eyes, a mo-mentary faint blue afterglow to everything. Thunder

boomed almost simultaneously, hurting his ears even with the dampeners. If the weather here worked the

same way it did on most planets Den was familiar with, the rumbles dopplering through the sky meant

immi-nent rain. He watched as most of the cantina's occu-pants repositioned themselves. Uh-huh. Roof

leaks. The regulars undoubtedly knew the spots where the wa-ter would drip through. He watched gaps

opening in the crowd as they shifted to new areas, their movements al-most unconscious. Rain's coming,

don't stand there, you'll get drenched. Unless, of course, you were a water species, in which case the leaky

spots were prized. One person's trash, another person's treasure ...

Another thunderclap—a sound easily differentiated from that of artillery, if you'd been in and out of war

zones for as much time as he had—sounded. In the mo-mentary ringing silence that followed, heralding

drops of the storm pattered on the foamcast roof. Within sec-onds, the sky opened up, and the drumming of

the rain became a constant barrage.

And, just as he'd anticipated, the leaks began stream-ing.

The water puddled on the floor for the most part, without hitting anybody as it cascaded. A newbie here

and there was surprised and awarded laughter by his comrades for his soaking. At the end of the bar, an

Ishi Tib mechanic stripped out of his lube-spotted coveralls and undulated under a steady stream, moving

his eye-stalks and clacking his beak in time to the music.

Den shook his head. What a life. Cantina-crawling in yet another dung-hole, all in the service of the

Public's Need to Know.

A blast of hot, wet wind swirled over him as the door seal parted. Den knew without even turning around

who had entered; he could tell by the smell of damp Hutt that suddenly filled the room.

The Hutt shook himself, ignoring the annoyed looks and exclamations the spray of water brought from

nearby patrons, and slithered toward the bar. He came to a stop on the ground level next to Den.

Den drained the last of his drink and took a moment to compose himself before looking at the Hutt.

"Filba," he said. "How's it flopping?"

The Hutt didn't seem surprised to see him here—no doubt he'd been notified of the arrival of the press.

He hardly spared Den a glance. "Dhur. Why aren't you out somewhere making up more lies about honest

working folk?"

Den smiled. "I can make them up just as well in a dry—well, relatively dry—cantina." Honest working

folk, my dewflaps, he thought. If honest work came anywhere near Filba, the huge gastropod would

proba-bly shrivel up and die like his remote ancestors did when covered in salt.

The tender approached. "Dopa boga noga," Filba growled in Huttese, holding up two fingers.

The tender nodded and drew two mugs of something yellow and fizzy, which he set in front of the Hutt.

Filba knocked them both back, barely taking a breath be-tween them.

"Not one to savor your drink, I see," Den said.

Filba turned one enormous, bilious eye in his direc-tion. "You have to drink Huttese ale fast," he

ex-plained. "Otherwise it eats through the mug."

Den nodded in sage comprehension. The tender filled his glass again, and the reporter raised it. "War and

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