It was the Force.

She thought she heard someone speak then, a quiet and familiar voice, which she couldn't quite place.

Let go, it said. Don't struggle against it. Take a breath and sink beneath it. . .

No! I can control this, use it, wield it-/ Or-you could die.

Barriss felt the care and concern in that voice, and on some level below her conscious mind she knew it was right. Even as she inhaled a breath and relaxed into the mighty current, she recognized the speaker: Master Unduli.. .

Barriss found herself sitting on her bed, blinking as if she had just come out of a deep sleep. She didn't need to check the room's chrono to know that time had pa.s.sed. She had taken the bota injection at midday. She now sat in the dark.

She stood, walked to the window, cleared it, and looked out. The faint glimmer of the force-dome was not enough to hide the stars in the clear night sky above. The constellations were halfway through their nightly dance; it was around midnight. She had been . . . gone .., for twelve hours, at least.

Gone to a place where she had never been. Where, she suspected, few, if any, had ever been.

She turned away from the window. She felt refreshed, as if she had slept soundly. She was not hungry, or thirsty; nor did she feel the need for the 'fresher. She smiled. The memory of the experience was still potent, pinwheeling in her mind in a glory of light and sound and smells and tastes and touch . . .

This was what her relationship with the Force could be. This was how it should be, all the time . . .

She frowned, feeling a tiny tug at her memory. The flaw. The coming disaster to the camp.

In the cosmic totality of what she had just experienced, it was nothing, utterly insignificant when compared to the warp and woof of the whole; still, it was there, along with the uncountable other flaws. And she knew that, while they were somehow necessary in their total number, and they couldn't all be eliminated, in some cases individual ones could be-and should be-repaired.

The camp was in deadly danger. She had been shown this for a reason-this she knew. Just as she knew she had to do something about it.

27.

I he cantina was about as full as Den had ever seen it. After a moment, he realized why: the HNE troupe members were about to dust, as s.p.a.cer lingo had it-they were on the morrow leaving Drongar to finish the remnants of their tour, and they were partying the night away.

As Den and I-Five entered, the reporter nearly staggered back, as though struck a physical blow. The sweet scent of spicestick and gum, the tang of various alcoholic beverages, and-most of all-the combined odors of a dozen or more species, all mixed into the heavy, wet air, produced a miasma as thick and strong as Gungan bouillabaisse. He glanced at I-Five. "You're sure you want to go through with this?"

"It seems the perfect atmosphere to me."

"To me it seems more like the kind of atmosphere you'd find twenty klicks or so down under the clouds on Bespin."

Den eyed the place askance. Many of the performers were dancing-or attempting to-egged on by the Modal Nodes doing a variety of favorites loud enough for the high notes to injure ears on MedStar. Den had been in a great many loud, crowded, and unruly bars over the course of his career, and he felt safe in ranking this one right down there among the worst.

I-Five seemed undisturbed. "Tradition, remember?" he said to Den. Then he squeezed between two dancing Ortolans and vanished.

Den sighed. I'd better keep an eye on him, before someone or something decides to use him for a toothpick.

How he was going to manage this was a good question: Sull.u.s.tans were among the more height-challenged sentients in the civilized galaxy. Nonetheless, he pushed ahead, weaving and dodging legs, spurs, tentacles, and various other supporting limbs. He saw no sign of I-Five. Concerned about his own safety-at least as far as the issue of mashed toes went-Den finally climbed up on a table, next to a clone trooper who had pa.s.sed out.

This action put him about at eye level with those who were of average height. Several species who were taller were mixed into the group as well, most notably a Wook-iee member of the troupe he'd noticed at the first and only show. That one stood head and shoulders over just about everyone else. He seemed to be enjoying his ale very much, and was perfectly willing to share it with others, mostly by sloshing it on them from above.

A drunken Wookiee. That would no doubt make things. more interesting at some point in the evening.

Den shifted his gaze, noticed Klo Merit near a wall, a drink in one furry hand and an introspective expression on his face. Equani weren't particularly tall, maybe half a dozen centimeters above most folks, but they were ma.s.sive; Klo probably outweighed the Wookiee, with an Ugnaught or two tossed in. Den started to shout a greeting, then decided not to.

From his expression, the minder looked like he could use a dose of his own medicine.

"Den?"

Surprised, he turned and saw Tolk le Trene by the table he was standing on. She, too, looked entirely too serious for such a party.

"Have you seen Jos?"

Den shook his head. "Just got here myself a minute ago."

"I need to find him," she said, more to herself than to him. The rest of her words were lost in the general vocal noise.

"What?" he shouted. But she just turned and disappeared into the crowd without another word.

There had been something in that look-Den wasn't sure just what it had been, but it put him in mind of the old Sakiyan saying about a flensor flying over one's bonepit. It made his dewflaps horripilate. Brrr!

Finally, he spotted I-Five.

The droid was standing not too far from Epoh Trebor, speaking to the human entertainer. He was gesticulating with far more emphasis than was customary with him. Den couldn't tell what I-Five was saying-even Sull.u.s.tan hearing couldn't help when there was this much ambient noise in a room-but whatever it. was, Trebor was laughing at it.

Seems pretty obvious that the elemental's out of the magnetic bottle, he thought. I-Five had obviously already implemented what the reporter had already come to think of as the "inebriation algorithm."

I-Five was, not to put too fast a spin on it, drunk.

It was also quite apparent that the droid hadn't shirked on the writing of his program.

Den could see that his friend's photoreceptors were shining more brightly. That, coupled with the excess body language, and the laughs I-Five was getting out of a veteran entertainer, made it obvious that the droid was anything but a surly drunk.

Den grinned. Mission accomplished. He'd wanted to do his friend a favor by helping him find a way to cast off the shackles of propriety, to loosen up. Good. I-Five deserved no less. After all, if organic sentients chafed in those shackles, how much more must the artificially intelligent suffer?

And the really good news was that I-Five wouldn't even wake up with a hangover.

Den decided it was high time he joined the party.

He jumped off the table and began to weave his way to the bar. "Excuse me. Coming through here. Low being walking. Pardon, citizen. Hey, watch the ears, floob . . .

Jos sat on his cot, staring at the wall, feeling as miserable as he ever had in his life.

His days were spent wading in blood, up to his armpits in the mangled bodies of clone troopers who were little more than particle cannon fodder. His one real friend, a brilliant musician and surgeon, had been killed by the war, snuffed out in a heartbeat.

The only other bright spot in this sea of bleakness, the woman he loved, had pulled away from him-and she wouldn't even tell him why.

Jos stared, unseeing. He was a surgeon, he had seen people die before the Republic had called him into its service-he'd dealt with it. He'd just shrugged it off.

But he'd been wrong to think that helped. On days when death was with him from the moment he started work to the moment he finished, when he worked to the point of bleary-eyed dullness, over and over and over, it still took its toll.

Tolk had been the antidote. Tolk had stood beside him, and regardless of how the relationship might ostracize him from his family and friends back home, she had been worth it.

But now . . .

Now his days were dark, and the nights darker. He could see no end to it. This war could go on for years, decades; it had happened before. He could grow old here, cutting and pasting ruined bodies until one hot morning he would fall over and die himself.

What was the point?

As a doctor, Jos knew about depression. Postsurgical patients were often low after life-altering events, and, while he would send the seriously affected ones to minders, he had been trained to deal with the symptoms if there wasn't proper backup available. But understanding depression didn't make him immune to it. There was knowing, and then there was feeling.

The idea of leaving it all behind was tempting, oh, yes. He was capable of it, if it came to that. He knew just where a slight nick with a vibroscalpel would bleed the most. Take a little anticoagulant, open a major blood vessel, then slowly fall asleep-and not wake up.

Death would be painless that way, or with any of a dozen drugs he could take off the shelf that would do the trick just as well. A final salute, and then the Big Jump.

Suicide was rare among his people-few Corellians took that route, and none of Jos's family had ever done so, as far as he knew.

At the moment, it didn't feel like the worst thing that could happen to him. He could easily make it look like an accident, thus sparing his family the shame, and at least some of the grief.

Jos shook his head again. How had he come here? This was a place he had never dreamed he could be, thinking in detail about how to end his own life.

He remembered what he had been trained to tell those patients who had fallen so low: watt.

Don't do something that can't be reversed. Life is long; things change. A month, a year, five years from now, your situation could reverse-look at how many people came from nothing, grew rich, lost it all, and then rebuilt their fortunes. Look at those who were afflicted with a debilitating or even fatal illness, who stayed around long enough for a cure. Even those who lost a spouse, or a child or a parent, and later found happiness. The bottom line was: alive, you have a chance. There are no possibilities for the dead.

Jos sighed, a deep and ragged breath. Yes. Those were the things he told his patients, and they were all true.

An old memory rose up from his days at Coruscant Med. The instructor, a grizzled and gray human named Leig Duwan, who must have been well over a hundred standard years old, had spoken of his days on Alderaan. The old man smiled a lot, and he was grinning as he told the story, There had been a bad time in Duwan's life-his father had died, his mother had been hospitalized, and his sister had gone missing on a frontier expedition. Duwan had failed an exam, and it looked as if he might be dropped from medical school. He had, he'd told the cla.s.s, seriously considered suicide. Instead, he'd muddled through somehow, and eventually things did get better.

One day, he met a man on the street. The man stopped him and said, "I want to thank you, Doctor Duwan, for saving my life."

Duwan had heard this many times, of course, and he had deflected the praise with practiced ease: "It's my job, citizen. No thanks are-"

"No," the man interrupted. "I wasn't your patient. I was undergoing a period of deep depression and was suicidal. I had decided to end it-I'd already obtained the means-and was on my way to a private place where I would do it. But I gave myself one out: if, on my journey, any person I pa.s.sed was to smile at me-just one-I would not go through with it.

"I was on the street, outside the hospital, and you were on your way in. You smiled and nodded at me. And here lam."

The point of his story, Duwan said, was not whether his medical expertise had saved someone. The point was that, because he had gone through his own darkness, and had kept going long enough to be able to smile at a stranger, he had saved that man's life. There were thousands more over the years whom he had, with some skill and much luck, also managed to keep alive. Being useful to others was not an unworthy thing, even if you had nothing else.

Jos looked at the chrono. He had rounds to make, postop patients to check. If he killed himself, somebody else would have to take over his rounds. That would be an imposition, causing somebody to have to cover for him.

It would be ... impolite.

He could manage to face another hour. That's all you have to do, he told himself. Just an hour, the next hour. Do your rounds, make your reports.

He could get through another hour. And after that. . .

Well. Time enough to worry about that when he got there. For now, this hour was all that mattered.

28.

Jos finished his rounds. He knew about the farewell party for the HNE troupe, and normally there would be little reluctance on his part to join them. But now ...

What if Tolk was there?

Seeing her in the OT was bad enough; he wasn't sure he could handle seeing her in a social setting. What if she was there with someone else?

He shook his head. At least in the cantina he wouldn't be drinking alone. Sooner or later he would run into her again. It just wasn't that big a base.

To deep with it. Jos marched out of the OT, feeling much like a man walking to his own execution.

It was crowded in the cantina. Also hot, noisy, and smelly. Maybe Jos wouldn't encounter Tolk after all in this crowd.

That hope didn't last long. It was, in fact, Tolk who found him, before he could get his first drink. He turned around and there she was, right there, her gaze fixed on his face, searching it for-what?

He didn't know what to say. He knew he should say something, but she was so lovely, even just in her scrubs, with her hair up and exhaustion evident in her face, that she stole the breath from his lungs.

"Tolk . . . ," he managed. "I-"

"I've been thinking a lot, Jos. There's more to all this than just how we feel about each other. There's more to this war than just here, what we do-who we are to each other. I need some time to process it, on my own." She took a breath. "I'm requesting a transfer to Rimsoo Three."

His mouth was dry. Rimsoo Three was over a thousand klicks north, across the Sea of Sponges. "What are you saying? Can't we at least talk about it?"

"No, not yet."

Jos blew out a big breath. He didn't want to say it, but it had to be said: "Does this mean we're through?"

She hesitated. "It means we're apart for a while."

There was no way to dissuade her, he saw. But if she transferred out, he'd never see her again. Of that he was sure.

"I have to go," she said. And with that, she was gone.

Jos made his way to the bar. He was numb. What had happened? What had gone wrong? What had he said or done?

He still couldn't believe it. Done. Gone. Just like that.

His mind scrambled frantically for some purchase, something to hold on to. As chief surgeon, he could refuse to let her transfer out, could say she was too valuable here-but what good would that do? How could they work together? Play sabacc together? How could they-Questions swirled around in his head like dust motes, like a swarm of fire gnats.

He needed a drink.