Jos opened his mouth, then closed it. He was making an honest effort to find the answer to that question, but his mind was having none of it. He found himself think-ing about the formchair again. Wonder how much one costs...

After another fairly fruitless ten minutes, Merit glanced at the chrono and said, "We have to stop."

Jos felt relieved, and then felt irritated at himself for feeling relieved. "I guess I'm just not a very introspec-tive sort," he told Merit at the door. "My family and clan are big on tradition, not communication. My dad's idea of a revealing moment is forgetting to lock the 'fresher."

"All you need to know about yourself is in you," the minder replied. "You may have to dig a little deeper and a little harder, but it's there."

"Maybe the Padawan could help me," Jos mused. "Can't Jedi read minds, that kind of thing?"

"I wouldn't know. The Equani species is-was-by nature rather resistant to the powers of the Jedi. But I think you need to find your own answers instead of looking to others for them."

The multiple-repulsor drone of incoming medlifters filtered into Barriss's sleep, and the siren that sounded almost immediately afterward meant that everybody within earshot needed to get to the OT. Now.

She dressed hurriedly and headed for the triage area. It was only twenty meters from her cubicle, but the hu-midity was so high today, she felt that she was wading through a pool of heated fleek oil.

When she got to the building, she stopped, momen-tarily unable to believe her eyes.

Thirty-five or forty wounded troopers lay on stretchers, on gurneys, on the floor itself, being tended by doctors, nurses, droids, techs-anybody, in short, who could help. Most of the troops were b.l.o.o.d.y, and many were burned, with weep-ing red blisters and scorched black patches. Some were missing arms and legs.

Some were all of those things, and more.

Still more injured were incoming. She could barely hear the whine of the lifters' repulsor fields over the cries and groans of the wounded. Barriss swallowed, nauseated. Even doctors could be overwhelmed by too much gore. Nothing she had ever seen in her wartime experience so far had been anything close to this.

Tolk was calling triage, and it was short and to the point. Barriss watched her for a moment. To anybody outside the medical field and the battlefield, triage would seem remarkably cruel, but she knew it was the most efficient way to save the most patients.

"This one won't make it," Tolk said, rising from the side of a sergeant whose legs had been blown off above the knees. His skin was chalk white, and from the red, ragged stumps the last of his life's blood was dripping slowly. Following behind Tolk was a droid, which at-tached a pulse-sticker to the dying clone's shoulder. A large, red x glowed rhythmically.

Tolk moved quickly to the next patient, examined him briefly. "Shrapnel wounds to the belly and groin. Surgery, category three."

The droid put a sticker on the man's shoulder. The number 3 throbbed on it.

Barriss bent to examine the trooper closest to her - a lieutenant. He was awake and alert; his only injury seemed to be that his left arm was gone, blown off in a ragged stump just above the elbow. A constrictor around the stump had stopped the bleeding. His gaze met hers.

"I'm good," he said through clenched teeth. "Take care of my men."

"He can wait," Barriss said to Tolk. "Five."

Tolk nodded at the droid, who affixed a number 5 pulse-sticker to the man's good shoulder.

When there were fewer doctors than patients, one had to rank the injured as to survivability and the time neces-sary to keep them alive. Rimsoo category numbers ran from 1 through 6; category X was reserved for injuries that appeared mortal or very time-consuming to treat. The rating system was more complex than it appeared. The injury, survival chances, and need for immediate treatment all had to be taken into account. A severed artery might bleed out in a minute and all it would take to save the patient would be a simple staple or suture tie, so it would be best to treat him first, whereas a man with his leg blown off but heat-cauterized from a blaster bolt could be left until more life-threatening injuries had been dealt with. Making these decisions, the Padawan knew, was often as much intuition as science.

A 6 meant a patient might survive if treated, but indi-cated treatment could consume a lot of time and effort, and there were no guarantees he would make it. But 6 could also mean that the injury was not likely to be fa-tal if not treated right away. Either way, a 6 waited. A 5 meant survival chances were higher and treatment less time-intensive, and so on down the count. The triage caller had to use experience to make the decisions, and thus had to be knowledgeable in treating the kinds of injuries coming in. A droid stepped up to Barriss. "I am to a.s.sist you, Padawan," it said. In one hand it held a pad of pulse-stickers.

Barriss nodded, turned to the next stretcher, and gasped. Before her was a terrible sight: a trooper with all four limbs burned down to stumps, and nothing but red, suppurating tissue where his face had been. On Coruscant, or Corellia, or any of the other hundreds of civilized worlds, technology could attach cybernetic limbs and reconstruct his face-he would be a strange hybrid of machine and man, but at least he would be alive and relatively functional. But here on Drongar, they had no facilities even remotely capable of such things. She bit her lip and turned to the droid a.s.signed to her. "Category X," she said.

The droid applied the sticker, then looked at her. "A purgation of fire," it said. Barriss thought it was an odd comment for a droid to make, but she had no time to wonder about it.

The wounded were being brought in so fast that she had to keep moving or be overrun.

She had damped down on her connection to the Force as much as she could; extrasensory experience of this much agony at this close range carried a real possibility of synaptic overload. Even closed down as she was, she could still feel the pain, the fear, the horror of it all pounding and scrabbling at her mind. She swallowed dryly and kept moving. There were some here she knew she could heal with the Jedi arts she had learned, but it would take too long. Not even the Force could mitigate the cold and brutal equations of triage.

Ahead of her, Tolk continued moving through the maze of dead and dying, followed by her droid, desig-nating who would live and who would almost certainly die. The fact that they were clones, all identical in ap-pearance, in no way lessened the horror; in fact, in a strange way it increased it-at least that was so for Bar-riss. Seeing the same body wounded and traumatized in a thousand different ways gave the whole scene a sur-real aspect, as if it had no beginning and no end, a per-petual loop of pain and death.

She knew she had to focus, had to utilize the re-sources at hand wisely.

Tolk moved to the next patient, slipped in a patch of blood, recovered her balance. She veered toward Bar-riss, who was looking at another wounded trooper. The Jedi shook her head.

Another x, its red glow waxing and waning like the flow of lives all about them, was applied by the droid.

They were dying like wingstingers. .h.i.tting a zap field, and nothing Jos did seemed to matter. A repaired artery held without leaking, but the patient was too far into shock to come back, even with his blood volume pumped to the max. Another patient, without a mark on him, was smiling one second and dead the next. A scanner showed that a sliver of metal, thinner than a needle, had pierced the corner of his eye and gone deep into his brain.

Despite the floor-level pressor fields, those working in the OT were at times up to their ankles in blood, urine, feces, lymph and spinal fluid. The air coolers and dehu-midifiers were still not working, and the stench, com-bined with oppressive wet heat, overwhelmed the scents of antiseptics and astringents. The surgeons cut and re-sected and transplanted with practiced efficiency, their nurses and what few droids they had at their sides, and yet the patients still didn't make it. Commands, both shouted and whispered, filled the reeking air: "-need twenty cc's coagulin, stat-"

"-rotate the bacta tanks, no one gets more than ten minutes-"

"-keep that field going, even if you have to hand-crank it-"

After two hours' work Jos was five for five-none of them had lived. He was beginning to reel with exhaus-tion-it was taking nearly all he had just to keep his hands steady.

"Get a pressor on that, stat!"

He worked like a man possessed, exerting every bit of his skill, every trick he had learned in the day-to-day war against Death from the day he'd hit dirt here, and Death laughed at him at every turn, ripping the fading lives out of his and the other doctors'

grasps with insult-ing, infuriating ease. The law of averages said things like this would happen, that there would be bad days and nothing to be done for it. But still Jos raged against life's dark foe, fighting it for all he was worth.

The sixth one died on the table and couldn't be re-vived.

Time blurred. He looked through a long and dark tunnel, with nothing visible in it except the patients be-fore him. He pa.s.sed through exhaustion, through his second and third winds-and still the wounded and the dying kept coming, their eyes beseeching him under the stark, unforgiving lights.

His life was painted in red and white. He had been born here doing this, had lived all his life here doing this, and would die here doing this...

And then, as Jos sealed the latest patient, a double-lung and liver implant who would probably die, too, Tolk touched his arm.

"That's it, Jos. That's the last one."

He didn't understand what she was saying at first. It made no sense-how could there be an end to some-thing that was endless? He blinked, as if coming into the light from a great darkness. Slowly, her eyes above the mask came into focus. "Huh?"

"We're done. We can rest now."

Rest? What was that?

He stumbled away from the table. Tolk moved to help him. "Careful," he mumbled. "Someone turned up the gravity." He peeled his gloves off, his hands fumbling, and tossed them at the waste hopper. They missed. He thought about going to pick them up, but the idea of bending over was too much to bear. He might never get up.

He looked around. Others were finishing, or had just finished working on injuries, and they, too, had the look of stunned exhaustion-the same look that had been on the common face of all those who had come under his knife.

"How-how bad was it?"

"Bad." He saw streaks of moisture along the top of her mask, where it had soaked up her tears.

"Did we save any?"

"A few."

He tried to walk, staggered. She grabbed his arm, steadied him. "I don't want to know the percentages, do I?"

"No. You don't."

Jos felt himself slump even more. "I feel like I just went ten rounds in an arena on Geonosis." He wanted-needed-a drink, but that was far too much effort to contemplate, too.

All he could think of now was finding a flat spot where he could collapse. It didn't even have to be flat. A pile of rocks would do...

He looked across the tables at Zan. His friend managed to lift his hand in a half salute or wave. Jos re-turned it, then staggered toward the door.

And once outside, he heard the sound of more incoming lifters.

Jos started to laugh. And, for a long, frightening moment, he couldn't stop.

14.

Want to see something interesting?" Dhur asked.

Jos, Zan, Tolk, and Barriss were in the cantina, all drinking some form of alcohol, except the Jedi. It had been four days since that h.e.l.lish influx of wounded. These days interesting was a loaded term, as far as Jos was concerned. But, as long as it didn't involve slicing into wounded troopers, he decided he was up to it.

"Have a seat," Jos said. He waved at the tender, who nodded and started mixing. He knew who Dhur was and what the Sull.u.s.tan drank by now.

Dhur sat and pulled a small device from his pocket, a stressed-plastoid and metal sphere, about the size of a human child's fist. He held it up.

Jos squinted at it. "Can't say I'm overly enthralled," he said. "Wait-" He took another drink, set the mug down, and squinted at the device again. "Nope," he said. "Still not enthralled."

"Looks like a spiceball," Zan said. "That would be interesting."

Jos raised his mug in silent agreement.

Barriss said, "It's from a cam droid. Military grade, looks like."

"Give the Jedi first prize," Dhur said. "I got this from a harvester, who happened across it in the field after a recent sortie by the Separatists. Apparently it was pretty much destroyed in the battle except for pa.s.sive func-tions-couldn't move, no weapons online...

even its comm was out."

"Still not exactly front-page news, now, is it?" Jos said. "There are pieces of blown-apart droids all over the place."

"Think I broke a tooth on one in my grainmush this morning," Zan added.

The server arrived with Dhur's drink. "Put it on Von-dar's tab," Dhur said. He looked at Jos. "Money back if you don't think it's worth it."

Jos nodded at the droid, which registered the transac-tion and moved off. It wasn't as if he had anything else to spend his pay on here.

"Just a wild guess," Zan said, "but I'm thinking it's not the sphere itself we're interested in here."

"Can't get anything past you, can I? Watch." Dhur set it on the table and activated it.

The holoproj rezzed up from the sphere, one-sixth life-sized. There were some broad-leaved trees, a lot of burned-out or blown-up droids, and a few clone troop-ers lying about.

Everything was canted, at an odd, low angle, as if recorded from a few centimeters above the ground.

"I've seen dead troopers, too," Jos said. "Lots of them. Don't even have to go into the jungle for that, we've got a service brings 'em right to your door."

"Shut up, Jos," Tolk said, without any heat in her voice.

After a moment, a trio of humans appeared, working their way through the downed machines and bodies. They wore black-and-purple thinskins and jump boots, with slugthrower carbines slung over their shoulders.

"Those are Salissian mercenaries," Barriss said. "I had heard that Dooku had some working for him here."

Dhur said, "Yep. Some are mechanics, some run the harvesters-not many battle droids are programmed to pick the local produce, which is why, ultimately, we are all here on this fetid dungheap of a world. A few are special troop, recon, like that, who can go places and do things droids don't do too well-climb trees, covert those kinds of things.

Sometimes only a humanoid will do. And Salissians will do just about any-thing as long as there's a few credits at the other end of it. Ugly bunch of folks, just as soon shoot you as look at you. Probably rather shoot than look at you," he added to Jos.

Jos smiled indulgently and glanced at Zan. "They're so cute when they're that size, aren't they?"

The three mercenaries were scavenging, picking up tools and weapons from the battle site and checking the clone bodies. There was no sound, and the image occa-sionally wavered a bit, breaking into digital blocks and then steadying again.

"Droid was on its last power reserves," Dhur said. "Cam went dead a few minutes after this was captured. Just sheer luck it happened to be pointing the right way."

Suddenly the three Salissians froze. They dropped their weapons and raised their hands, then backed away from their fallen blasters.

"It seems somebody has caught our mercenaries off-guard," Tolk said.

A moment later, a man walked into the cam's frame, a blaster rifle held on the trio.

Jos looked at the human. The odd angle made recog-nition difficult, but still, he felt he knew this guy. He leaned to one side, studying the holo from a different perspective. Of course-it was-"Phow Ji," Barriss said. Her voice was soft.

As they watched, Ji smiled-then threw his gun to the ground. It struck in a silent splatter of mud.

Tolk, Jos, and Zan reacted in surprise. Barriss did not. "What's he think he's doing?" Zan said.

Tolk was watching the holo closely. "He knows what he's doing," she said. Jos said nothing. As far as he knew, neither Zan nor Tolk had seen the combat teacher in action, although Tolk's cold-reading skills had obviously told her Ji was no one to trifle with.

Jos looked at Barriss. She shook her head, but Jos was pretty sure she, like Tolk, knew what was about to hap-pen, because he was pretty sure he knew as well.

And Zan was about to find out...

The holo flickered again as Ji moved in and the three Salissians went for him-A moment later, all three mercenaries were on the ground, and darned if Jos could tell what had happened.