MedStar_ Battle Surgeons Part 20

"You going to bet, fold, or just whine?" Tolk asked Jos.

Her tone of voice was like a sonic disruptor fired straight into his chest. To his surprise, he'd found that nearly getting killed while out trying to clear his head yesterday had not bothered him nearly as much as Tolk's new coolness toward him.

But that's what you told her you wanted, wasn't it?

He looked at his hand. What with holding the Queen of Air and Darkness, the Evil One, and the Demise, he was so far below negative twenty-three that there was no way he could win, given the mathematical laws of this particular galaxy. When his turn came, he folded.

Bets went into the hand pot. After the next card, Zan folded also.

Den dealt the remaining players-Tolk, I-Five, Bar-riss, and himself-another card. The Jedi dropped out.

Zan leaned back and said, "So, Den, weren't you go-ing to write a story about Phow Ji?"

The reporter paused a beat in his deal, then resumed. "Yeah."

"So when are we going to see it?"

"With any luck, never."

Jos thought this was odd, since Den seemed to have pretty high opinion of his abilities as a writer. He'd told his sabacc cronies a few days previously that he planned on eviscerating the Bunduki in pixels. Naturally, Den had cautioned them, this data wasn't to be considered broadband, as the Sull.u.s.tan had no great desire to be rendered into shaak fodder by Ji. "What happened?" Jos asked.

Den didn't answer. Tolk called, the hands were turned over, and she won with an even twenty-three. Of course.

"Lucky at cards, unlucky in love," Den said.

Tolk glanced at Jos, then smiled at Den. "So why won't we be seeing the story, Den?"

"Oh, you'll see it, if you bother to look. They... butchered it. I laid it out as how our friend Ji was the sc.u.m of the galaxy and that feeding him feetfirst to a hungry rancor was too good for him."

"And...?" Barriss said.

"And they... twirled it, so that now he doesn't sound... so bad." Den shuffled the cards.

"Not bad at all, I'm afraid. Seems the audience is tired of grim news at the moment.

According to my editor, they've been getting a lot of that lately-battles lost here, systems cut off there, and so on. Dooku's forces might be get-ting their metal behinds kicked in the long run-if you believe the Republic flacks, anyway-but it doesn't sound like that to the viewing public. They want he-roes."

"Phow Ji is not in any way, shape, or form a hero," Zan said. "He's a murderous thug who kills people for fun."

"A fact I went to great pains to point out, believe me. But that doesn't matter. Ji can be trimmed and lubed enough to fit the slot. So it has been decreed by voices louder than mine, and so, apparently, shall it be."

There was a moment of shocked silence as the other players digested this.

"That's not a twirl, that's a Cla.s.s-One troopship's gravity-gyro on full spin," Jos said.

"We gonna talk, or are we gonna play cards?" Den said, pa.s.sing the deck to him. "Your deal, Doc."

"The way my luck is running, talk is a whole lot cheaper," Jos said. "I'm already down fifty creds."

Zan looked like he'd just been hit with severe vestibu-lar disorder. "But-they can't make a coldhearted no-creche like Ji into somebody for people to admire!" he sputtered. "The man keeps trophies of all the people he's murdered!"

"Enemies of the Republic, each and every one," I-Five said. "That's how they'll twirl it."

"This is unbelievable news, Den," Barriss said. "You must be horribly disappointed."

Den was quiet-he seemed to be editing his thoughts. "It is. I am," he said finally. "But I'm not all that surprised. I didn't just fall off the purnix lorry yesterday, after all.

I've seen it happen to others. I've even had it done to me before-though never to this degree." He snorted. "Our warped Phow Ji will probably get a rich entproj contract out of it, if he doesn't dice the agent who offers it to him. 'The Hero of Drongar,' coming to your home three-dee soon."

"Sweet Sookie," Jos said.

"Heroes are transient," Den said, in a tone that sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than the other players at the sabacc table. "They come, they go, and they tend to die more often than everybody else in wartime. If one is real and another is a product of the media, it's all the same, in the long run. None of it really matters."

"I'm going to go out on a spiral arm here and guess you have no use for heroes," I-Five said.

Den shrugged. "They make good copy sometimes. Other than that, no."

"So there's nothing for which you would risk your life?"

"Good maker, no. I don't believe in all that spiritual stuff. I don't expect to be recycled as something higher up the food chain in another incarnation, or to see the Spectrum at the end of the galaxy, or discorporate and become one with the Force. For me, what you see is what you are, and when the lights go out, that's it. So why should I court the Eternal Sleep any sooner than I absolutely must? No risk, no loss. Heroes are, save for those who wind up being in the category completely by accident, either fools or selling something."

Jos looked at the droid. "What about you, I-Five? Given your construction, you could last five hundred, a thousand years or more. Would you put your durasteel neck and all those centuries on the line if there was a good chance somebody would ax it?"

I-Five said, "It would depend on why. I've mentioned before that I still have some memory damage I'm en-deavoring to repair, and it seems from some of the re-cently recovered bits that I may have performed some 'heroic' actions in my past." He fanned his cards. "I must say I'm interested in learning the circ.u.mstances."

Den shook his head, then looked at Barriss. "You, I expect it from-you're a Jedi, that's what you do. The medical folks-well, I've seen some of them who'd charge a particle cannon at the drop of a glove, so they're as crazy as clones, too, in my 'cron." He glanced at Jos, Zan, and Tolk. "No offense," he added.

"None taken," Zan said.

Den shifted his gaze back to I-Five. "But I didn't ex-pect to ever encounter a droid with delusions of valor. You, my metallic friend, are in need of some serious rewiring."

"And you," I-Five replied as he tossed a credit into the hand pot, "need a damper slapped on your cynicism chip."

Jos, Zan, and Tolk smiled. Zan took the deck of cards. "Maybe my luck will change," he said.

"It better not while you're dealing," Jos said.

Zan shuffled, then put the customary blank card at the bottom of the deck, marking where the shuffled cards stopped. He put the deck down for Barriss to cut. As she did so, he said, "I guess I'm what they'd call a de-vout agnostic. I don't know if there's something bigger than us or not, but I think that we should attempt to live our lives as if there is."

"A philosophy more beings should espouse," Barriss said.

Den rolled his eyes but said nothing.

There flashed into Jos's mind once again an image of CT-914's quiet grief for his comrade.

He looked up from his cards and saw Barriss watching him, a look of sympathy on her face.

He glanced at I-Five. The droid was studying his cards, but he appeared to sense Jos's attention, because he looked up. Jos had gotten quite good at reading the subtle shifts of luminosity in I-Five's photoreceptors, but this time the droid's expression was enigmatic.

The moment stretched.

"Jos," Zan said. "It's your turn."

"What are you going to bet?" I-Five asked.

What indeed?

Jos dropped his hand and stood. "I'm out," he said. "I'll see you all later."

Zan blinked. "Where are you going?"

"To pay a sympathy call," Jos said as he left.

35.

Jos walked across the compound, slipping an osmotic mask over his nose and mouth as he did so, because the concentration of spores in the air was unusually heavy. He was so preoccupied with his thoughts, however, that he barely noticed them, or the syrupy heat of midday.

He was thinking about s.p.a.ce travel.

His training was in medicine, not applied and theoret-ical physics-he smiled slightly, remembering the iras-cible Dr. S'hrah, one of his teachers, who had zero tolerance for any discipline outside medicine-"You're a doctor, not a physicist!" would be his take on Jos's woolgathering-but he knew the basics and the history, as did anyone with anything more than a dirt clod for a brain. Travel between star systems was made possible by moving through hypers.p.a.ce, an alternate dimension not all that different from reals.p.a.ce, in which superlu-minal velocities were easily reached. In ancient times, this had been thought impossible, since the legendary Drall scientist Tiran had proven conclusively, more than thirty-five thousand years ago, that time and s.p.a.ce were inseparable, and that the speed of light was an absolute boundary that could not be crossed.

But Tiran's Theory of Universal Reference did not prohibit anything traveling faster than light-it only disallowed traveling at the speed of light. If the "light-speed barrier"

could somehow be bypa.s.sed, one could theoretically shift easily from reals.p.a.ce to hypers.p.a.ce and back.

Galactic colonization had initially been accomplished by generation ships, and this made it impossible to knit the separate worlds together in a viable galactic civiliza-tion.

Finally, after centuries of experimentation and frustration, the best scientists of the Republic found a way to create and contain negative pressure fields strong enough to power a portable hyperdrive unit. At long last, affordable and ubiquitous superluminal travel had been achieved.

This accomplishment, of course, had quickly led to the Great Hypers.p.a.ce War and various other forms of unpleasantness, but that wasn't where Jos's thoughts had taken him today.

The problems of achieving FTL speed made a nice metaphor for breaking through to new concepts. If you could somehow make it past the initial barrier of perception, then the galaxy you found yourself in wasn't really all that different from the one you'd left behind. In his case, it was a galaxy in which artificial intelligences and cloned personalities had to be judged on an equal emotional footing with organics, but, once that concept was grasped, it proved to be not that hard to a.s.similate.

It did, however, require some adjustment-and some apologies.

Barracks CT-Tertium was the largest of the three gar-risons at Ground Base Seven, which was located at the edge of the Rotfurze Wastes, a region of severe ecologi-cal blight two kilometers from the Rimsoo. Jos requisitioned a landspeeder and was there in less than ten min-utes. He was far enough behind the lines to feel rela-tively unconcerned, although he could hear, on several occasions, the distant crackle of particle beams and the m.u.f.fled whump! of C- 22 frag mortars. Apparently the Separatists weren't all that worried about bota damage anymore.

At GB7 he was directed to a tiny 4.5-square-meter billet, barely large enough for the bunk-and-locker combination that const.i.tuted CT-914's home away from-actually, Jos realized, it was just his home. Un-less one counted the vat from which the clone had been decanted in Tipoca City on the waterworld Kamino, CT-914 had no place else he could call his own.

The bed had been made to military precision, the blankets as smooth as the surface of a neutron star. The locker was ajar, and closer inspection proved it to be empty.

What was puzzling, however, was the spot over the head of the bed, where the trooper's designation should have been. Instead of reading ct-914, the frame was empty.

Jos spied a Dressellian corporal nearby and hailed him. The Dressellian, surly like most of his species, saluted somewhat resentfully upon recognizing a supe-rior officer. Jos asked him where Nine-one-four was.

"In the recycling vats, most likely," was the shocking reply. "Along with most of his platoon. They were am-bushed by a Separatist guerrilla attack two days ago."

The Dressellian waited a moment, then, seeing that the human captain was not likely to be asking any more questions immediately, saluted again and continued about his business.

Jos slowly left the garrison, stunned. In the last hour or so he had come to think of Nine-one-four as exem-plifying all of his newfound knowledge of the clones' essential humanity, and to suddenly learn that he was dead was almost as big a shock as hearing of the death of an old friend or a loved one. He had felt compelled to seek the clone out and apologize to him, hoping that, somehow, such an expiation would simplify some of the challenges of an awareness that now included respect toward more than organic life alone.

But instead he'd found that CT-914 had joined his vat-brother, CT-915, in death. And Jos knew that it would be a long time, if ever, before their deaths, and all the others perpetrated by this war, would seem to be anything but senseless and despicable.

He tried to still his racing thoughts for a moment, to have a few seconds of silent respect for the fallen war-rior. But it seemed that, no matter how still he willed his mind to be, it kept filling up with images of Tolk.

On board the MedStar frigate, Admiral Tarnese Bleyd studied the flimsies before him, the results of his latest round of inquiries into any suspicious or surrept.i.tious 'casts from the personnel of Rimsoo Seven. With a growl he swept them off his desk and onto the floor.

Nothing - just the usual air and s.p.a.ce chatter to be expected. Nothing to give him the slightest clue as to who might have been spying on him when Filba died, or why.

Bleyd growled again, an almost subsonic sound, deep in his throat. As long as whoever on the other end of that spycam remained at large, he, Bleyd, was in danger. The recording might even now be circulating over the HoloNet, or being viewed in the private chambers of some investigative committee back on Coruscant. The situation was intolerable.

Think, curse you! Use that hunter's brain, those predatory instincts. Who would be the most likely be-ing to possess a surveillance cam, and who would have reason to shadow him, to attempt to record him in some kind of illegal activity?

Perhaps Phow Ji, that Bunduki martial artist he'd en-countered? Bleyd considered, then shook his head. Such undercover activity would be much too subtle for such a thug. Perhaps he should reconsider the possibility of Black Sun-His eyes narrowed in sudden thought. Was he coming at this from the wrong angle? He was a.s.suming that he had been the target of whoever had done the espionage. But what if he was wrong? What if Filba had been the subject?

Bleyd activated the flatscreen desk display, quickly constructing a new search algorithm.

In a moment he had the data he needed.

On several separate occasions there had been public complaints made by the Sull.u.s.tan reporter, Den Dhur, concerning Filba. While Dhur was hardly the only one in the Rimsoo to have some kind of grievance against the Hutt, the fact that he was a reporter meant he most likely had access to surveillance equipment.

Yes. Yes, it made sense. Dhur must have been recording the Hutt's actions at the time of the latter's death-and had, by unhappy coincidence, gotten the incriminating interchange between Filba and Bleyd.

Unhappy indeed, for the reporter...

Bleyd stepped out from behind the desk, wearing a grim smile. He would order Den Dhur arrested and brought up from planetside immediately. With any luck, there was still time to rectify this mess before-The door to his office opened.

Bleyd blinked in surprise. It was the robed figure of a Silent who entered, but Bleyd knew immediately who was hidden beneath the vestments.

Kaird, the Nediji. The Black Sun agent.

Bleyd stepped away from his desk. Almost automati-cally his hand slipped around to the back of his uni-form, releasing the knife from its hidden belt sheath. It slipped comfortably into the folds of his hand. It was a ryyk blade, much smaller than the traditional weapons fashioned and used by the Wookiee warriors of Kashyyyk, but no less deadly. It had proven the differ-ence between victory and defeat, between life and death, for him before, and he intended that it do no less now.

The bird-being folded back his hood, revealing his sardonic face and blazing violet eyes.

He c.o.c.ked his head in greeting.

"Admiral," he said. When he lowered his hands from the hood, the right one held a gleaming blade in it.

Bleyd did not reply to the greeting. He circled to his left, his knife held low by his right hip, the point ex-tended downward from the little finger side of his fist, edge forward, in a reverse grip.

Three meters away, Kaird kept the circle complete, moving to his left, and the short and stubby blade he held jutted upward from the thumb side of his grip, the edge also facing his opponent.