Michael Reaves - Medstar I, Battle surgeons

Contents

For my son Dashiell

Never tell me the odds.M. R.

For Dianne, 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.

B lood geysered, looking almost black in the antisepsis fields glow. It splattered hot against Joss skin-gloved hand. He cursed.

Hey, heres an ideawould 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 troopers 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 didnt break it.

With an effort, Jos throttled back his temper. All right. Put a clamp on it. We still have hemostats, dont 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 ones chest had been peppered full of shrapnel. The recent battle in the Poptree Forest had been a bad onethe 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 Joss forehead to keep the sweat from running into his eyes. Air coolers malfunctioning again, she said. Jos didnt reply. On a civilized world, he would have sprayed sweat-stop on his face before he scrubbed, but that, like everything elseincluding temperswas 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 Hnemthe 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 patients 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, hed have to use staples or sutures, like the medical droids usually did, and wouldnt 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. Theres 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 dont know why they even bother putting armor on em.

Got that right, Zan said. Stuff wont stop anything stronger than a kids pellet gun.

Jos put two more fragments of the grenade into the pan, then straightened, feeling his lower back muscles protest the position hed been locked into all day. Scope im, he said.

Tolk ran a handheld bioscanner over the clone. Hes clean, she said. I think you got it all.

Well 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 hed finished there was another trooper supine in front of him.

Sucking chest wound, Tolk said. Might need a new lung.

Hes lucky; were having a special on them. Jos made the initial incision with the laser scalpel. Operating on clone troopersor, as the staff of Rimsoo Seven tended to call it, working the assembly linewas 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.

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 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 Zabrakand to many other sentient species in the galaxyit 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 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 computerized filing systems and bureaucracy.

He quickly determined that the sergeantthe remnants of his armor had the green markings that denoted his rankindeed 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 sergeants pleural cavity. The patient was wheeled over for suturing as Jos stretched, feeling vertebrae unkink and joints pop.

Thats the last of them, he said, for now.

Dont get too comfortable, said Leemoth, a Duros surgeon who specialized in amphibious and semiaquatic species. He looked up from his current patientan 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 pathetic 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 Sevens resident empath. Merit had blinked his large, brown eyes, their depths so strangely calming, and said that Joss attitude was healthyup to a degree.