"And...?"

"And he was defeated in the Bunduki match."

Jos raised his eyebrows, then looked away from her toward the bare-chested men on the mat.

The ref backed away, and the men a.s.sumed fighting positions.

"No," he said.

"Yes. Master Danva was beaten by the local teras kasi champion, Phow Ji. Your new combat instructor."

Jos sighed. "I see. Well, it's only credits. And it's not like there's anything to buy around here..."

As they watched, the two fighters circled, watching each other. Cley kept his left side facing his opponent, his legs wide in a bantha-riding pose, left hand high, right hand low, fingers formed into loose fists.

Ji stood aslant to Cley, his right foot leading, his arms held wide, hands open. He looked vulnerable, but the in-vitation was false, Barriss knew. They were a step and a half apart, and Barriss recognized this as knife-fighting distance-just outside the range of a short blade.

They kept circling. Cley was too wary to fall for the obvious trap. It looked more like a jetz match than a fight, the delicate balance between them holding as one man shifted, ever so slightly, and the other responded with an equally subtle move.

The onlookers rumbled uncertainly, aware something was going on, but not sure what.

Then Cley made his move. He lunged, driven by pow-erful legs churning hard, and he was very fast. He launched a two-punch combination, a left and a right, low and high, and either would have been enough to end the fight, had they landed.

Ji didn't back away, but instead stepped in to meet the attack. His own punch crossed the centerline and de-flected Cley's highline strike a hair, just enough so that his. .h.i.t missed. Then Ji's punch caught Cley flush on the nose, but that wasn't the end of it. He continued his step in, put his right leg behind Cley's leading foot, caught the man's throat in the V of his thumb and fore-finger, and swept him, shoving him down onto the mat hard enough to momentarily imprint Cley's form into the resilient foam. Then he dropped into a deep squat and drove the elbow of that same arm into Cley's solar plexus. Cley's breath burst out in a rush.

Ji stood, turned his back to the fallen man, and walked away. Cley lay on his back, trying to regain his wind, unable to rise.

Just like that, the fight was over. Once the attack had been launched, the entire sequence had taken maybe three seconds, total.

"Sweet soalie!" Jos said. "What did he do?"

"Looks like he just cost you ten credits, Captain Von-dar," Barriss said.

Jos watched as the fight medic checked Cley over and decided that the man wasn't hurt badly enough to need more than first aid. He had never seen anything like that before-a fighter as experienced as Cley getting floored so fast and so easily. Phow Ji was good.

Jos had taken the basic training required of all mili-tary personnel, of course, and had learned a couple of tricks, but those were nothing compared to what he had just witnessed.

He still wasn't sure what he had seen. One moment the two men were jockeying for posi-tion-the next, Phow Ji was strolling away and Usu Cley was on his back trying to remember how to breathe.

What would it be like to know that you could really take care of yourself like that, when push came to shove?

That you could defeat a Jedi in hand-to-hand combat?

It was hard even to imagine. Of course, the fastest moves in the galaxy couldn't block a blaster's particle beam or a projectile from a slugthrower. Although he'd heard that Jedi were actually able-through the Force, he supposed-to antic.i.p.ate such attacks before they were launched, and thus block or avoid them-seeing the immediate future, in effect. He wasn't sure if he be-lieved that. But one thing was for sure: his credits would be on the new guy from now on.

Beside him, Barriss stiffened, and Jos looked up to see the fearsome Phow Ji approaching, wiping his face with a towel.

Seen up close, the man's features were lean and hard; his lips seemed set in an expression not quite a sneer. This was a man who knew just how dangerous he was, and wasn't shy about letting others know as well.

"You're a Jedi," he said to Barriss. It was not a question. His voice was even, quiet, but full of confidence. He ignored Jos as if the latter weren't there. Jos decided that was fine with him.

"Yes," she said. "But not fully fledged yet."

"I am Barriss Offee, a Padawan."

Ji smiled. "Still believe in the Force?"

Barriss raised an eyebrow. "You don't?"

"The Force is a tale made up by the Jedi to scare away anybody who would stand against them. Jedi are not impressive fighters. I hardly broke a sweat, dropping one a while back."

"Joclad Danva did not use the Force when you fought him."

"So he said." Ji shrugged, wiped his face with the towel again. "Hot day. You look a little sweaty yourself, Jedi. Here-"

He tossed the towel at her.

Barriss raised her hand as if to catch it. The towel stopped in midair. It hung there for maybe two seconds. Jos blinked. What in the-?

The towel dropped and landed at Barriss's feet. She had not taken her eyes off Ji. "The Force is real," she said, mildly.

Ji laughed and shook his head. "I've seen much better illusions from traveling carnival mages, Padawan." He turned and walked away.

Jos looked at the towel, then at Barriss. "What was that about?"

"An error in judgment," Barriss said. "I allowed my-self to become annoyed." She shook her head. "I have so far to go..." She turned and started back toward the compound. Jos watched her go for a moment, then picked up the towel and looked at it curiously. It was a perfectly normal sheet of absorbent syncloth, the kind that one usually did not see hanging in midair as if from an invisible hook. It was damp from the teras kasi mas-ter's sweat, but otherwise unremarkable.

He had just seen his first demonstration of the Force.

As shows went, it wasn't in the same league as dodg-ing blaster rays, turning invisible, or shooting laser beams from one's eyes-all of which he'd heard that Jedi could do. But it had been pretty impressive, all the same.

He wondered what else she was capable of.

When he'd looked at her, standing on the rise of ground outside the base, the wind blowing her robe be-hind her, he'd felt a powerful attraction-or thought he had, at least. There was a sense of inner strength and peace about her that appealed strongly to the healer that he, too, was at heart. But that same tranquillity also made her seem remote and unapproachable; more like a simulacrum of a woman than the real thing. Some men were attracted by the appearance of aloofness, but not Jos.

On top of that was this power she had. Though he'd heard about the Force all his life, he realized now that he'd never really believed such a thing could exist. Like so many others in his profession, Chief Surgeon Jos Vondar was a pragmatist-he believed in what was real, what was quantifiable and measurable. What he'd just seen had been-there was no other word for it-spooky.

A sudden crackle nearby caused him to start and spin around. The perimeter field was not far away, and something had brushed against it and gotten zapped for its trouble. The charge wasn't strong enough to kill, but it was definitely unpleasant to anything smaller than a Tatooine ronto.

Jos started back toward the cl.u.s.ter of huts. Not that there was anything in the jungle anywhere near that big to worry about; it had probably been a wriggler. This was the largest land-based life-form they'd noticed so far: a sluglike thing about five meters long and half a meter thick that undulated in a zigzag pattern across the ground. Its cilia could deliver a powerful electrical charge, enough to knock a grown man off his feet, but it wasn't usually fatal. All the terrestrial fauna they'd seen so far, even large ones like the wriggler, were inverte-brate. Supposedly there were aquatic creatures of much greater size and variety in Drongar's oceans, but he'd never seen one, and was just as glad to keep it that way.

His thoughts turned to Barriss again, and he sighed. It was pointless to wonder if he was attracted to her or not. Even if he was, and even if her Order condoned out-side relationships-something he had no data on, one way or the other-it was still impossible.

The Jedi were not the only ones with traditions.

Any further thinking on this was interrupted by the signature whine of approaching medlifters. Almost glad of the distraction, Jos started to trot back to the base.

6.

This run was a bad one. There were four full lifters, which meant sixteen wounded troopers. Three had died en route, and one was too far gone to attempt resuscita-tion-one of the nurses administered euthanasia while Jos, Zan, Barriss, and three other surgeons scrubbed up.

One of the clones was covered with third-degree burns; they had to cut his armor free. He had literally been cooked by a flame projector. Fortunately, one of the three working bacta tanks they had was empty, and the trooper was quickly immersed in a nutrient bath.

The condition of the remaining eleven ranged from critical to guarded, and were triaged accordingly. Jos pulled on his skin-gloves while Tolk briefed him on his first case.

"Hemorrhagic shock, multiple flechette injuries, head trauma..."

Jos glanced at the chrono. They were about ten min-utes into the "golden hour"-the time window most critical for a trooper's survival of a battlefield injury. There was no time to waste. "Okay, let's get him stabi-lized. He's lost a lot of blood, and he's got an asteroid belt's worth of metal in his gut. Pump in some vascolu-tion, stat..."

Barriss watched Jos at work for a minute, admiring his skill and quick decisions. Then she opened herself to the Force, letting it tell her where her abilities would be most needed.

She felt it guide her feet toward Zan's table, where the Zabrak was working on another trooper, a.s.sisted by an FX-7.

"Is there a problem?" she asked.

"Take a look," he replied.

She stepped closer. The naked body lay on the table, intubated and dotted with sensor lines and drips. He did not appear wounded or injured, but the skin was a mot-tled purplish color-it looked like one gigantic bruise.

"He's been hit with a disruptor field," Zan said. "Bioscan shows his central nervous system's been fried. I thought we could do something, but he's past that. Au-tonomic functions are stable on life sustain right now, but they won't last. And even if we could reestablish consciousness, he'd be nothing but meat."

"What can be done?"

He shook his head. "Nothing. We can harvest his or-gans, use 'em to patch up the next one who needs a kid-ney or a heart." He started to gesture to the droid, but Barriss stopped him.

"Let me try something first," she said. Zan blinked in surprise, but stepped back, indicating the patient was hers.

She stepped closer, hoping that her nervousness would not show. She extended her hands through the field and placed both palms on the clone trooper's chest.

Then she closed her eyes and opened herself to the Force.

It seemed to her that the Force had been with her, always, from her earliest memories of childhood. One of those was particularly vivid, and for some reason it often came to mind when she was about to invoke the power. She could not have been more than three or four, and had been playing with a ball in one of the Temple antechambers. It had rolled beyond her reach, through an open arch she had not yet explored. Barriss had followed the ball, and abruptly found herself in one of the gigantic main chambers. Far overhead, the vaulted ceiling loomed, and huge pillars rose majestically from the tessellated floor. Her ball was still rolling across that floor, but Barriss, awed by the sheer size and magnifi-cence of it all, wasn't about to go after it.

Instead, she made it come back to her.

She had not known she was capable of that. She sim-ply reached for it, and the ball stopped, hesitated, and then rolled obediently back to her.

As she bent to pick it up, she sensed someone behind her. She turned and beheld Master Yoda, standing in the far entrance to the antechamber. He smiled and nod-ded, quite evidently impressed with what he had just seen.

That was all. She remembered nothing after that, whether Master Yoda had gone on his way and she had continued playing, or if he had spoken to her, or if something else entirely had happened. One would think such an encounter with one of the most leg-endary Jedi of all would be impressed in one's brain far more thoroughly than the part about playing with a ball. But that was how it was. She even remembered the ball's color: blue.

That memory came to her now, as it did, sometimes fleetingly, sometimes in great detail, nearly every time she prepared to call on the Force.

Barriss felt the palms of her hands growing warm against the trooper's belly. She didn't have to visualize the process-she knew that healing energy was pouring from her into him.

No-not from her; through her. She was only the vessel, the conduit through which the Force did its work.

An unknown time later-it could have been a minute or an hour, as far as she knew-she opened her eyes and lifted her hands.

"Wow," Zan murmured behind her. He was looking at the readout panel. She saw that the trooper was stabi-lizing. Also, the discoloration had vanished; his skin was a healthy color.

"You must've been top in your cla.s.s. How'd you do that?" Zan asked, without taking his gaze from the panel.

"I did nothing," Barriss replied. "The Force can heal wounds on many occasions."

"Well, it sure worked on him." Zan gestured at the panel. "His brain wave pattern's within normal limits, and most of the secondary trauma seems gone. Pretty impressive, Padawan."

The FX-7 guided the gurney out. By the time Zan had finished changing gloves there was another body before him. "Stick around," he said to Barriss. "There's plenty more where he came from."

Seated on a bar stool, his left foot propped on a rung higher than the right foot, Zan adjusted the tuning mechanisms on his quetarra, bringing the strings into tune. The instrument had eight of these, bucky-fibers of varying diameters and texture, and eight was three more than Zan had fingers on either hand. The first time he had seen his friend play the thing, Jos had been impressed. The Zabrak's fingers had danced nimbly up and down the instrument's fret board, and he had now and then leaned way over and pressed his chin against the instrument, using it to fret the strings. The quetarra was a hollow, ornate, and beautifully grained pleek-wood box, polished to a dull sheen, with several holes in it, shaped something like a figure eight. A flat board protruded from the box, and eight geared turnkeys on a carved headpiece attached to the ends of the strings.

The cavalcade of war-torn bodies had finally stopped coming nearly five hours after the last lifters had ar-rived. During the final hour another lightning storm had pa.s.sed through-a bad one, with bolts stabbing down quite close to the camp. The entire area was electrostat-ically shielded, of course, but it was hard to remember that when the thunder was loud enough to shake the building, the sudden flares of white light through the win-dows left purple afterimages in his eyes, and the pungent scent of ozone filled the air, expunging even the stench of battle-charred flesh.

But the storm had pa.s.sed as quickly as it came, and by unspoken agreement everyone had wound up in the cantina. Jos had come in a few minutes late, and had been surprised at the relative silence within, until he saw Zan.

The antic.i.p.ation in the air was almost as piquant as the ozone smell had been. People sipped drinks or inhaled vapors or chewed spicetack, and watched Zan adjust the quetarra.

No one was even so much as glancing at the silent quadro box that usually provided canned music. The globe lights had been toned down to a soft, effulgent level. Various harmonic sounds rang out as Zan turned the keys, modifying the various tensions until the atonal notes came to blend together just right. At last, satisfied, he sat up a bit straighter on the stool, settled the instru-ment on his left leg, and nodded at the audience.

"I'm going to try two short works. The first is Borra Chambo's prelude to his masterwork, Dissolution by Self-Intention. The second is the fugue from Tikkal Remb Man's Insensate."

Zan began plucking the strings, and the music that came from that rapport between fingers and fibers filled the cantina with a haunting melody and a counterpoint ba.s.s line that, despite Jos's gripes about how much he hated cla.s.sical works, immediately swept the human into its embrace.

Zan was a master musician, there was no question of that. He should have been on a concert stage on some quiet, civilized world, where sentient beings appreci-ated such artistry, his talented hands occupied creating art with Kloo horn and omni box instead of wielding vibroscalpels and flexclamps.

War, Jos thought. What is it good for? Certainly not for the arts. He wondered how many other talents like Zan were being squandered in battles across the galaxy. Then he forced such depressing thoughts from his head and just listened to the music. There was little enough beauty on this world, he reminded himself-might as well enjoy it while it lasted.

Around him, others stood or sat quietly, caught in the musical web Zan was weaving. n.o.body spoke. No-body rattled dishware or clinked gla.s.ses. It was silent, save for the distant rumble of thunder and the sounds of Zan's quetarra.

Jos glanced around and saw Klo Merit. The Equani was easy to spot; he towered nearly a head taller than any other biped in the crowd. The pale gray fur and whiskers helped, too.

Jos was glad to see the Rimsoo's minder there. The Equani-what few were left, after a solar flare had scorched their homeworld-were intensely empathetic beings, capable of understanding and psychoa.n.a.lyzing nearly every other known intelli-gent species. Jos knew that Merit, in many ways, car-ried the emotional weight of the entire camp on his sleek, broad shoulders. Now, however, he seemed caught up in the spell Zan was weaving, just like every-one else. Good, Jos thought. He remembered a quote from Bahm Gilyad, who had formalized the rules and responsibilities of his profession five thousand years be-fore, during the Stark Hypers.p.a.ce Conflict: "The sick and the injured will always have a healer to salve their wounds, but to whom does the healer go?"

As Zan played on, Jos found it easier not to think about the war, or how tired he was, or how many shards of metal he had removed or perforated organs he had replaced in the last few hours. The music carried him to its depths, raised him to its heights, and re-freshed him like a week's worth of rest. He realized that, in a great many ways, his friend was doing for the doctors and nurses of Rimsoo Seven what the Jedi had done for the wounded clone troops-he was healing them.

Time seemed to stand still.

Eventually, Zan reached the end of the last composi-tion. The last clear note shivered away, and the silence was nearly absolute. Then the cantina patrons began whistling and clapping, or pounding their empty drink mugs on tabletops. Zan smiled, stood, and bowed.

Den Dhur was standing next to Jos, who hadn't no-ticed when the reporter had come in.

"Your partner's good," Dhur said. "He could be working the cla.s.sical circuit, making serious credits at it."