Star War®: MedStar I: Battle Surgeons

by Michael Reaves

  “So I’m running my thumb cam, recording the kid, getting some basic how-does-it-feel-to-be-going-home? stuff for the viewers. All of a sudden, braap-zap! somebody cuts loose with a pulse carbine, just waving it back and forth like a pressure hose and cutting troops down, left, right, and center. One of the insurrectionists, undercover on a suicide run.

  “The security guys come running, but they’re not getting there fast enough. The shooter is walking right at us, he sees me, and I can see that he sees me, and I know I’m about to have my datachip pulled. Everyone’s yelling, ‘Run!’ at me. Are they kidding? I’m so milking terrified I can’t even breathe, much less run.

  “But then this kid, who isn’t even armed, steps in front of me, quite deliberately. He catches a bolt in the gut—it was meant for my head—and goes down. The shooter’s carbine runs dry right then, the secs open up on him, and that’s the end of that.

  “I squat down next to this poor human kid and I see he’s not going to make it. So I ask him, ‘Why’d you do it?’

  “And the kid says, ‘You’re so little.’”

  Yant stopped chewing and looked at Den, puzzled.

  “I think he knew I was an adult, intellectually,” Den continued. “But at that moment, when danger threatened, he equated small stature with youth. He jumped in front of me because that’s what humans do—they protect their young. I thanked him before he died.” Den paused. “Know what he said?”

  Yant shook his head.

  “He said, ‘It’s okay. Would you tell my mother I love her?’”

  They were both quiet for a moment. Yant ran one hand lightly over his stubby horns and sighed. “That’s so sad.”

  “There’s more.” Den looked at his hands, saw they were knotted together. He unlaced his fingers, feeling them crackle.

  “The shooter? He was also a human. He was fourteen. I didn’t get to him before he died, but one of the secs did. The shooter’s last words were, ‘Tell my mother I love her.’ Brothers in death, children saying good-bye to their mothers.”

  Yant shook his head again.

  “These are the stories you get on the front, my friend. These are the stories that people need to know.” Den shrugged. “Not that it slows war down a microsecond, but at least they know it isn’t all grand fun—not when you have children killing each other, and mothers’ hearts breaking over it.”

  Somehow, the potential skewering of Filba didn’t seem as bright and shiny now as it did when Den had sat down to eat.

  “I’m sorry,” Yant said.

  “Yeah,” Den said. “Aren’t we all?”

  19

  Jos sometimes—not often, these days—felt as if he could call a dying patient back to life; that by dint of pure will, he could keep someone critically injured alive, refusing to let Death claim him.

  It helped, of course, if his surgical procedure went well. Sometimes, however, even when the operation was technically correct, something went sour, and no matter how hard he tried, no matter how much he wished it otherwise, the patient expired.

  So it was with the clone trooper on the table now. The surgery had been relatively easy as these things went: a bit of shrapnel had nicked the pericardium, and there had been bleeding into the pericardial sac with associated cardiac tamponade. But the blood had been drained, the wounds repaired, and that should have been that. Instead, the trooper had ceased breathing, the repaired heart had stopped, and all efforts to jump-start things had failed. Had Jos been a religious man, he would have said the man’s essence had departed.

  This was the last patient, though, and he had managed to keep five others alive, including one who had sustained massive injuries to three organ systems that needed replacement: a multipunctured and deflated lung, a ruptured spleen, and a severely lacerated kidney.

  Why had that one survived and this one died? It was totally unexpected, totally inexplicable, and totally frustrating.

  Medicine was not an exact science, he knew—the patients often confounded things. You’d think that genetically identical clones would have pretty much the same reactions to physical stress, but that certainly didn’t seem to be the case with these two.

  Back when Jos had been a fairly fresh student in medical school, he had frequented a Bamasian restaurant that had become all the rage among his peers. The food was cheap but good, and the servings large; the place was within walking distance of the student housing complex, and it was open all day and all night—perfect for students. Bamasian cuisine was varied, spicy, and something of an acquired taste, but Jos liked it. At the end of each meal, the traditional complimentary dessert was a small, sweet, baked bread ring, about the size of a bracelet. Cooked into the treat was a protein-circuit onetime holocaster. When you broke the ring, the ’caster projected a bit of Bamasian wisdom that glimmered and hung in the air for a few seconds before the organic circuitry decayed. The aphorisms were amusing to the medical students, who tended to eat as a pack for the family-style discounts. Often they would all break the bread rings at the same instant, then try to read the homilies before they faded away. Some of them were real howlers: “Avoid dark alleyways in bad neighborhoods.” Or “Being rich and miserable is better than just being miserable.” Or “Beware smiling politicians…”

  One evening, when Jos was exhausted from a long series of exams and tricky procedures he had mostly fumbled, and feeling overwhelmed by things he had never thought to see, never even considered might be a part of his training, he had cracked his sweetened bread ring open and gotten a message that had seemed personally crafted for him alone:

  “Minimize expectations to avoid being disappointed.”

  At the time, it had struck him as oddly useful, if somewhat obvious, wisdom. If he didn’t expect anything, he wouldn’t be distressed if it didn’t happen. He tried to plug it into his life, and found it helped. Sometimes he forgot, of course. Sometimes he expected to be able to save them all. He was a good surgeon; maybe, given the circumstances, even a great surgeon, and he never expected to lose a patient who had even the smallest chance of survival. When it happened, it was always a shock. And always disappointing.

  It was hard to admit, even to himself, but there were times when he even caught himself feeling resentful toward the never-ending parade of wounded and dying troops. There were times, when they wheeled in a Twi’lek with a nearly severed lekku, or a Devaronian with one of his livers perforated, that a small part of him relished the opportunity to do something different. Because at this point it really did feel like he could build a stratosphere-piercing tower just from the sheer tonnage of shrapnel he’d pulled out of the clone troopers. Not to mention paint it red with their blood.

  Jos sighed as he headed for the dressing room. It was too bad he didn’t have a Bamasian bread ring now to offer him solace…

  Barriss was on her way to the medical ward when she passed a trooper standing in the hall outside the main operating theater. He didn’t seem to be doing anything other than simply standing there, staring at a blank wall.

  To the unaided eye, they all looked alike, but to one who was connected to the Force, this was not the case. She knew this one. He had been her patient.

  She stopped. “CT-Nine-one-four,” she said.

  He looked at her. “Yes?”

  She could feel his question roiling in his mind, and she smiled. “You might all look alike, but you aren’t all the same. Your experiences shape you as much as your heritage. The Force can recognize this.”

  He nodded. She regarded him. “You have no problems with your blood pressure,” she said, and it was not a question—she knew it was true.

  “No. I feel fine—physically.”

  “Why, then, are you here?”

  She felt rather than saw Jos Vondar emerge from the OT behind her, was aware of him listening.

  “I helped transport another trooper here yesterday. CT-Nine-one-five.”

  “Ah. And how does he fare?”

  “I don’t know. He’s still in surgery.�
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  Jos drifted over. “Nine-one-five? He, ah, didn’t make it.”

  The wave of grief that broke from CT-914 and washed over Barriss was sudden and strong. To look at his face, however, it was hardly apparent that he felt this deep emotional chord. He said, “Unfortunate. He was”—he hesitated, just a heartbeat or two,—“a good soldier. The loss of someone so well trained is…regrettable.”

  Barriss could see that, even without the Force, Jos picked up on something either in CT-914’s tone of voice or his body language, as subtle as both were. He said, “You knew him?”

  “He was decanted just after me. We trained together, were posted here together, we were part of the same cohort.” CT-914 hesitated again. “He…I thought of him as my brother.”

  Jos frowned. “But you’re all brothers, in a sense.”

  “True.” The clone trooper straightened. “Thank you for your efforts to save him, Doctor. I’m going back to my unit now.”

  He turned and strode away. Barriss and Jos watched him go. “If I didn’t know better,” Jos said, “I’d say that he was upset.”

  “And how is it that you know better? Wouldn’t you feel upset if it had been your brother?”

  She half expected him to answer with a wisecrack—his standard response under circumstances like these. He didn’t, however. Instead, he frowned. “He’s a clone, Barriss. Those sorts of feelings are bred out of them.”

  “Who told you that? True, they are standardized, trained, and toughened, but they are not mindless automata. They’re made from the same kind of flesh and mind as are you and I, Jos. They bleed when cut, they live and die, and they grieve at the loss of a brother. CT-Nine-one-four is in emotional pain. He covers it well enough, but such things can’t be hidden from the Force.”

  Jos looked as if she had just slapped his face. “But—but—”

  “The clones are bred for combat, Jos. It’s what they were designed to do, and they accept it without question. Were it not for war, they would not exist. A hard life as a soldier is better than no life at all. But even without the Force, you felt it,” she said, her voice gentle. “Stoic as he tried to be, it came out. Nine-one-four grieves. He suffers the loss of his comrade. His brother.”

  Jos stood speechless. She felt emotion radiating from him as she had from CT-914. “It never occurred to you before, did it?”

  “I—it—of course, I…” He ran down. No. It hadn’t occurred to him, not like this. She could see that.

  How blind those who did not know the Force were. How sad for them.

  “Surgeons are notorious for their lack of bedside manners,” she said. “They tend to view and treat injuries without worrying about the whole patient, even with ‘real’ people. Most beings consider clones nothing more than blaster fodder—why should you be any different?”

  Jos shook his head, confusion still bubbling in his thoughts. She felt badly for him. One of the drawbacks to the ability to use the Force was that you sometimes learned things that you weren’t expecting, things that you weren’t capable of properly understanding, much less able to do anything about. Over and over again, Barriss had discovered that power brought knowledge, and that this was a decidedly mixed blessing.

  “I’m sorry, Jos. I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, no, it’s fine. I’ll see you later.” He gave her a patently fake smile and walked away. He looked as if the weight of the planet had just been dropped on his shoulders.

  Jos walked across the compound, a damp heralding wind and suddenly overcast sky cooling the muggy afternoon somewhat as—big surprise—another storm approached. He had gotten pretty good at judging these things after all the months here. He knew he had two, maybe three minutes before the sky would open up.

  “Jos?” Tolk said. “You okay?”

  She had come up to walk beside him. He hadn’t even noticed her in his preoccupation with this new and suddenly troubling knowledge.

  “Me? I’m fine.”

  “No, you aren’t. Remember who I am. What is it?”

  He shook his head. “Just had a blindfold removed I didn’t know I was wearing. Something I took for granted, never really thought about before. I’m…feeling pretty stupid.”

  “Well, how unusual is that?”

  He looked at her, saw the smile, and appreciated her trying to cheer him up. He managed a small smile of his own. “Bet you scored ‘sharpshooter’ on your basic weapons tests.”

  “Actually, I rated ‘master’ with the pulse rifle, and dropped down to ‘sharpshooter’ only with the sidearm blaster.”

  “Figures. I was ‘basic marksman’ with both, which means I can’t hit the side of a Destroyer—from the inside.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  He stopped. The rain was almost here. She put her hand on his shoulder, and, oh, yes, he wanted to talk about it. Later—when they were holding each other, kissing, and happier than he’d been since he had been conscripted. Then he’d talk about it. She’d be hard-put to shut him up, then.

  But now…

  “Not really, no,” he said. The touch of her hand on his shoulder was almost hypnotic in its comfort.

  The storm hit then. Big, fat drops, a few at first, pattered—and then the deluge. They stood together in the rain, not moving.

  20

  Jos had hoped that Klo Merit could shed some light on his newfound and uncomfortable knowledge about clones, but so far, the minder was more stirring up mud from the murky bottom of his thoughts than pumping in clarity.

  Clarity seemed a forlorn hope right now.

  “So, what exactly are we talking about here when you say ‘expertise’?”

  Merit said, “Well, you can tell a lot about how much somebody knows by listening. See this ring?” He held his hand up so that Jos could view it. The piece of jewelry was a deep golden band of metal with a thumbnail-sized stone inset into it. The stone glittered in the overhead light of Merit’s office, flashing multiple colors—reds, blues, greens, and yellows in a kind of rolling pattern, as Merit moved his hand. It was quite impressive.

  Jos nodded. “Very nice. Some kind of firestone?”

  Merit smiled. “Yes. And your question marks you as somebody who knows a little about them, but not much. You recognize it as a firestone, but that’s only a small step into the subject.”

  Jos shrugged. “I’m a surgeon. You want to know about kidney stones, I’m your boy.”

  “Somebody who didn’t know anything about gems would say, ‘That’s nice—what kind of stone is it?’ Somebody who knows a little more will comment as you did. A person with a bit more knowledge might say, ‘Is that a Gallian firestone, or a Rathalayan?’ They know there is a difference between those two and probably that this is one or the other.

  “Now, a real expert will look at my ring and say, ‘Ah, a black Gallian firestone, very nice. Is it a crystal or a boulder matrix?’ Because he can tell that many specifics just by looking at it—that it is a firestone, that it comes from Gall, that it is a black. But the way it’s mounted, he can’t see the back of it, so he can’t tell the matrix. It’s a boulder, by the way, which denotes the kind of rock in which firestone is sometimes found, and the term black refers to the background colors upon which the flashes shine.”

  Jos shook his head. “So now I’m educated about gems.”

  Merit smiled broadly. “No, you aren’t. You couldn’t tell a real one from a fake, and you don’t know anything else about them other than what I just told you. How valuable is it, do you think?”

  “Even if you found it in the Jasserak Swamp, I still couldn’t afford it.”

  “It’s worth more than a blue-white diamond of the same size. And do you know about the curse?”

  “ ‘Curse’?”

  “Yes. Firestones are supposed to be unlucky. But that was a canard, started by diamond merchants who were losing business to firestone sellers. Only thing unlucky about them is not owning one.”

  Jos smiled. “Okay, I take your point.
At least part of it.”

  “So take the rest of it. You weren’t an expert on clones because you never tried to be. Other than knowing how to cut and glue them back together, which is sufficient for your needs, why would you bother? Before the war, there weren’t enough clones around to make it a concern. Out of sight, out of mind. You deal with their physiology, not their psychology.”

  “That’s true.”

  “But clones aren’t the only beings you probably haven’t thought much about. What about droids?”

  “Droids? What about them?”

  “Do you consider them people?”

  “Only in the same sense that a tetrawave is. They’re machines.”

  “But they think. They interact. They function.”

  Jos looked perplexed. “Okay, but…”

  “Work with me for a minute,” Klo continued. “Just for the sake of argument, have you ever met a droid that expressed worry, or fear, or that had, say, a sense of humor? That seemed…self-aware?”

  Jos was silent. Yes. He had. I-Five came immediately to mind. “But they don’t feel pain. They can’t reproduce—”

  “Aren’t there people with neuropathic disorders who don’t feel pain? And who runs the assembly line in a droid factory, building more droids?”

  Jos laughed. “You can switch a droid on and off, disassemble it, put it back together, and it won’t blink a photosensor. Of course,” he added, “you can do that to me too, but only after a fourteen-hour shift.”

  “I’m not saying they are exactly like you and me. But if you stop and think about it, a self-aware construct that has an emotional content and a job isn’t simply a dumbot welding seams on next year’s landspeeder.”

  “You aren’t helping here. I’m still trying to get my mind around the concept of clones as people, and now you’re throwing droids at me.”