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.

Copyright © 2004 by Lucasfilm Ltd