The chill he felt over the rest of his body, however, was nothing compared to the cold in his soul.

Tolk...

She couldn't be dead. No cosmos could be so cruel as to allow such a travesty. After he had worked so hard for so long, healing so many wounds, saving so many lives, it was inconceivable that the one life that meant the mostto him could be lost.

Do you really believe that?

I have to, Jos told himself. / have to.

Uli stepped up next to him. "I'm caught up," he said. "Need.ahand?"

Jos let the nurse wipe his brow, then shook his head. "I'm good." He couldn't recall telling a bigger lie in his entire life, but there was nothing the boy could do to help him-not on any level. He just had to keep working. He excised and debrided burns, amputated and reat-tached limbs, stanched bleeding, drained wounds, ligated bleeders . , The sufferers pa.s.sed beneath his healing hands, and Jos kept working, hoping that their injuries would be his anodyne.

In the cantina, Den Dhur worked the room. He pulled in every favor he had built up since he'd stepped off the transport months ago. All the drinks he'd bought for techs and grunts, all the unauthorized uses of his private comm to let people call their families, creches, litters, and so on back home, the creds he had tent until payday . . . he begged, cajoled, wheedled, shamelessly. This was a big story, and he needed access to it.

Bits and pieces began to drift in, and eventually to coalesce. Den tallied them.

From an Ugnaught shuttle mechanic, he heard that one of the supply sections that had spewed its contents into vac had been the electronics small-parts storage. Which, according to the mech, meant that those replacement harmonizers and crystal stabilizers the dome-d.i.n.ks were waiting on to stop the mopakky snow? They were gonna be part of the meteor shower lighting up the sky soon as they hit atmosphere, blood, y'know?

Talk about your vaporware . , .

From a comm droid that had been on duty when the accident happened, before the emergency status shutdown had hit, Den heard that there had been 186 people stationed on the affected decks. Some of them had made it past the blowout doors before they'd automatically sealed. Some had not. There were probably pockets of air in the affected section, rooms that could be shut and seals rigged, but with life support off, it was going to get milking cold in there real fast, and until the blowout was patched, no heat or air would be forthcoming.

There were emergency suits in disaster lockers, of course, mostly thin vac suits with limited air supplies, but no way to tell how many people could get to those.

From a Kubaz transport shuttle pilot, Den got an updated body count. At least twenty-six frozen corpses were pinwheeling through s.p.a.ce in the vicinity of Med-Star. "It been one major 'plosion t' 'ject dat many, you bet," the pilot said, his trunk curling up and down in horror.

And that was pretty much all he could get that was of substance. There were a few people from this Rimsoo up there, card-playing friends like Tolk and Merit, and for all Den knew they could be two of the many trapped-or worse, twisted and ruptured ice sculptures...o...b..ting the damaged ship. Den was a reporter; he'd seen friends and acquaintances killed in brush wars all over the galaxy, but that never made it any easier. He had to shift into his objective mode, turn off his personal feelings, if he was to do his job. But of late, that had been getting harder and harder to do. When Zan Yant died, it had hurt, more than he'd thought possible. It was one thing to play the cynic for the people around him, to shrug it all off with a what-can-you-do? att.i.tude, but when it was just him, alone, with n.o.body watching, it wasn't as easy as it had been back when he'd been young and full of himself and going to live forever.

Den sat and tossed down Bantha Blasters like there was no tomorrow, wondering how many people he knew for whom that was literally true. Despite the latest influx of wounded, the cantina was full of people who had nowhere else to be, waiting to hear news, be it good or bad.

Teedle rolled up. "Need a refill, sweets?"

"No. I'm good."

As the little droid rolled away, Den stared at his mug, Good-that was a word he was finding less and less useful and fitting when talking about himself.

Maybe it was time to get out of the field. Just find a nice quiet planet somewhere, work the local news beat, and leave the war zones to the young ones who still thought it glorious and exciting. Yeah, the big stories could be found, even on worlds like Drongar, supposedly far from the "main action," but more and more they were all starting to sound the same: war. Lots of beings dead, maimed, injured, all for the greater glory of the Republic. Details in the full 'cast, coming up ...

He raised a hand, signaled Teedle. Maybe he did need another shot. At least these shots you can walk away from. Well, up to a point. . .

Barriss entered, brushing snow from her robe, and saw Den sitting alone at a table, staring into his empty mug. She moved toward him. "Mind some company?"

He smiled tipsily at her, waved at the chair across from him. "What's your pleasure, Jedi?

I'm buying."

"Thanks, but no." She sat. "I have to get back to the OT soon. What's the latest?"

He told her, and Barriss nodded. When it had happened, she hadn't felt a disturbance in the Force, and that bothered her immensely. There were days when, during battles on the planet's surface, she had read the swirling ethereal currents with uncanny detail. Master Yoda was said to be able to sense major disturbances pa.r.s.ecs away-even, sometimes, of things yet to happen, though Barriss wasn't sure if she believed that part. But of the explosion on the orbiting frigate, she had not gotten even a glimmer. She was but a Padawan, true, but still she counted her insensitivity as a personal failing. She felt certain that Obi-Wan Ken.o.bi or Anakin Skywalker would have sensed it immediately. She had lived with the Force as long as she could remember-certainly longer than Anakin. How could she not have felt the event?

"You okay?" Den asked.

She nodded. No reason to burden him-there was nothing he could do to help. The little Sull.u.s.tan shook his head, as if he knew better, but said nothing.

Then, perhaps because she was not expecting it, the Force abruptly rose swirling in her, and imparted to Bar-riss a sudden knowledge that stunned her: The explosion on MedStar bad not been an accident.

The reporter must have seen her reaction in her face. "What?"

Barriss breathed deeply, trying to regain her center, The absolute certainty of the insight had left her shaken, unable for a moment to speak.

She had to do something with this knowledge. She had to tell somebody. Not Den, not a reporter, but somebody, Someone who was in a position to do something about it.

It was the same conviction she had felt when the transport had blown up months ago, before the relocation. They had never found out who had been responsible for that. She had reported her feelings to Colonel Vaetes, who had been polite but dismissive, obviously preferring to rely on more solid evidence than what he considered mysticism. Perhaps he would be bit more open-minded this time. This act of sabotage was a thousand times worse than the last one. Something had to be done.

15.

Jos, exhausted but still too worried about Tolk to rest, wandered through the medical ward. The surgical patients in recovery were all as stable as they were going to get, and the operating tables were empty, for the time being. The thought of going back to his kiosk, of being by himself in the cold silence, was anathema. He needed something to do.

Ahead, one of The Silent stood impa.s.sively near one wall, a faint cloud of breath-fog issuing from within the cow! at slow and regular intervals. It was cooler here than in the OT, but at least they had enough blankets and heat-paks to keep the patients warm. The Silent seemed unaffected by the cold.

Barriss stood next to the bed of a trooper who had some new kind of infection. One of the local microbes had apparently undergone a mutagenic shift and become deadly, a cause of considerable concern. What could afflict one trooper could afflict them all.

"Hey," Jos said.

Barriss looked away from the sick trooper, who was either asleep or in a coma. "h.e.l.lo,"

she said.

"How is he?"

"No change. None of our antibiotics, antivirals, or an-timycotics seems to be working."

"Spectacillin?" Spectacillin was the current reigning champ, a broad-spectrum RNA polymerase inhibitor capable of stomping on the most virulent of the Drongaran bugs.

She shook her head. "He's got a fever we're barely keeping down with a.n.a.lgesic suppressors and coma induction, a white blood cell count off the charts, and his kidneys are starting to shut down. He's got fluid in his lungs, an erratic heartbeat secondary to cardiac tampon-ade, and his liver is working overtime and getting tired. Only good thing is, he doesn't seem to be shedding pathogens, so he's not contagious."

Jos moved in, looking at the patient, whose chart identified him as CT-802. "Fast as everything mutates here,it might cure itself."

"It better hurry, if it doesn't want to kill its host. I've done what I can, but it isn't enough. I've been keeping him stable by working on him through the Force, but I can't keep that up forever." Barriss's voice was calm and even, in contrast to her strained and haggard expression. "I don't think he'll see another sunrise, Jos."

Jos stood there for a moment, remembering a conversation he'd had with Zan Yant in this same room. He hadn't known Barriss that long, but here in the swamps, among the dead and dying, fast kinships were established among the medics. The war was the problem, and they all did their best to be part of the solution, any way they could, as little as that might be.

He took a deep breath. "There might be something else we can try."

She looked away from the patient to him, her gaze questioning.

When Zan had died, it had fallen to Jos to clean out his friend's belongings. He had packed up most of the stuff-the quetarra, clothes, book readers, and the like-and had it shipped to Zan's family, back on Talus. But hidden away under Zan's cot had been something he hadn't included in the personal effects package: Zan's supply of processed bota.

It was illegal to possess the stuff here. All the harvested and stabilized bota went to other worlds and systems, where it was worth its weight in precious gems. Like out-world plantations where the locals produced fruit and crops too expensive for them to eat, or firestone pits where every day miners found stones worth more than a year of their pay, or anyplace else where those who did the scut work reaped none of the rewards, bota was deemed too valuable to waste on troopers.

But Zan hadn't accepted that. He'd managed to get hold of a small amount of the miracle growth and field-tested it as much as was feasible, given the necessarily clandestine nature of his protocols. Even under less-than-ideal conditions, bota had cured every resistant infection a Fett-clone had developed on this world. The irony of being on a planet where the plant grew like a weed and not able to use it to save lives had not been lost on either Zan or Jos. Zan had risked his career and liberty to secretly treat patients with it. Jos hadn't been willing to go that far, but he had turned a blind eye to his friend's illegal actions.

He became aware that he had been standing there too long without responding. Time to make a decision, Jos. Can you do anything less than what your friend did?

"Wait here," he said. "I'll be right back."

He left the ward and headed for his kiosk. The snow was knee-deep and still falling, but some of the maintenance droids had been set to clearing walkways, so it wasn't that big a problem-yet. Of far more immediate concern was the lack of warm clothing for everyone. Jos was an ectomorph, tall and thin; his body radiated heat very effectively, which was useful in a tropical climate, But right now the temperature under the dome was about ten degrees less than either of the planetary poles, and for the first time in his life he found himself regretting his lack of body fat. He was wearing practically his entire wardrobe: two pairs of army-issue pants and socks, a heavy shirt, a durnis-hide vest, and a blanket as a makeshift poncho. He had two surgeon's caps keeping his head warm, a sweatband worn low to cover his ears, three pairs of thinskin gloves, and he was still cold.

If that harmonic malfunction wasn't fixed soon ...

On his way to his quarters Jos noticed several members of Revoc's retinue heading for the cantina. He waved, and they waved back. Most of them were taking the unexpected exile fairly well. Trebor and the other headlin-ers had been bivouacked in a quickly constructed barracks, and there they had mostly stayed. No one had been allowed to evacuate yet, either to another Rimsoo or to MedStar, because the more the malfunctioning dome was attenuated to allow transports through, the more dis-combobulated the harmonics seemed to become. The majority of the incoming lifters were being rerouted to Rimsoos Five and Fourteen, the closest nearby units, but they could only handle so many extra cases, so some still had to be allowed through here.

Zan's supply of processed bota was now under Jos's cot. He'd kept it, not quite sure what to do with it. Now he knew that, on some level, he'd been waiting for an opportunity like this.

What the Republic didn't know wouldn't hurt them, and it could save a trooper's life-a life that Jos now knew was worth as much as anyone's. At some point, you had to start taking a stand. Jos wasn't certain of much in his life, but he knew one thing for sure: letting a man die when you could save him was wrong. And vac take anybody who said otherwise. "Jos?"

He looked up and saw Vaetes approaching. His blood went icy faster than a cryovascular transfusion. He tried to steel himself for the news that Tolk had been in the wrong place at the wrong time on MedStar, that they had confirmed the ID, that he would never see her smile again-"Tolk's okay. I just got word."

Jos' relief was so great that he almost sobbed. He felt like the legendary world-carrying giant Salta must have felt when he had transferred his burden to a pedestal of platinum cast for him by his brother Yorell. "Thank you" was all he could manage. Alive! Tolk was alive!

"She won't be coming back down anytime soon, I'm afraid. The explosion took out four decks in the ventral hull area, including, as I'm sure you know, the docking bays. She's helping tend to the injured."

"Doesn't matter," Jos said. "As long as she's safe."

"Merit's okay, too."

"I knew he was off base," Jos said. "Didn't know he'd gone upstairs." He noticed then that the colonel still wore a grim expression. "What?"

"I recently spoke with Jedi Offee, and, based on some tests we ran pursuant to her suggestions, we've confirmed that this was not an accident. It was sabotage. Probably the same person or persons who blew up the transport."

Jos stared at him, unable to process, for a moment, what Vaetes had just said. Sabotage?

Again? They'd never found out who had destroyed the bota transport, and now the same thing had happened, this time on a much larger scale.

The news was shocking. There were supposed to be some rules, some accords, even in war.

Hospital ships had heen considered inviolate ever since the Great Hyper-s.p.a.ce War. Even though the orbiting ships were easy targets, the concept of damaging or destroying one was anathema to civilized beings.

Or had been, until now . . .

16.

Den seemed to be spending pretty much all his time in the cantina lately. He wasn't 100 percent okay with that, although it had its advantages. For one thing, it was the warmest place in the Rimsoo, by far. For another, it was the easiest place to meet people, and people were usually the starting points for the kind of stories that he did best.

And third, of course, there were the drinks.

It took a lot to get a Sull.u.s.tan drunk-truly, seriously, falling-down-and-missing-the-floor drunk. Jos had tried to explain the physiology of it to him once, using a lot of jawbreaking words like glycolysis, mitochondria, and polymorphic chemisorption-the gist of it all being that his body's cells were very selective about which molecules they used and how. Which meant that an amount of liquor that would have most carbon-based species sitting with arms or tentacles around each other's shoulders, singing old Corellian drinking songs, merely gave him a pleasant buzz.

He was buzzed now, and saw no reason not to get a little bit more so. He'd cleared his bar tab when the payment for his last story-the puff piece for Beings holozine on Uli Divini, Boy Surgeon-had come in. Now he signaled Teedle, who rolled over to his table. "Another Johrian whiskey, Teedle-on the rocks."

"You got it, hon." She wheeled away, and Den shouted after her, "And I mean ice" He'd learned the hard way that the serving droid's idiomatic programming in Basic was not as extensive as it could have been.

Teedle shot back over her shoulder, "I suppose you want it in a gla.s.s, too?"

Den laughed. The comeback had been unexpected-whoever'd initiated her neural programming had at least had a sense of humor.

He glanced at the remnants of green liquid in his gla.s.s and swirled it about, thinking about recent conversations he'd had with both Jos and I-Five. The droid had said once that all of his kind had a sense of humor. Den wondered how much of Teedle's personality had been programmed in, and how much was intrinsic. There was supposedly a very simple test, developed centuries ago, which postulated that if one could carry on a conversation with another, unseen ent.i.ty and not be able to tell if that ent.i.ty was organic or cybernetic, then said ent.i.ty had to be considered self-aware.

He'd never really heard of any droid being put to that test-at least, not in a widely publicized way. Which wasn't surprising-after all, if you're the CEO of a huge manufacturing corporation like Cybot Galactica or Industrial Automaton, you don't want your product suddenly thinking it has the same rights as a sentient organic.

He was sure I-Five could pa.s.s the test easily. Perhaps Teedle could, too.

Teedle brought his drink. "On the rocks, hon. Solid H2O."

Den took a sip of the whiskey. It was cold and yet fiery, warming his insides. He shook the gla.s.s, listened to the ice globes tinkle together. There certainly wasn't any shortage of the frozen stuff these days. It had been over a week now since the force-dome had first malfunctioned, and still no indication as to when it was going to be fixed. They had at least stabilized the temperature, albeit at a not-terribly-comfortable minus six degrees.

It had stopped snowing, but only after three kiosks had buckled under the weight. It wasn't as bad as being stuck in an outpost on Hoth-that he knew from experience-but it definitely wasn't pleasant.

From what he'd heard, there were at least two vital parts that had to be brought in from outside the system. Until they were delivered, it was going to be a long, cold winter.

He noticed a couple of the entertainers at a table not too far from him. He'd love to work up something on them-they were getting antsy about being stuck here, and who could blame them? Their schedules were already hopelessly shot. Doing a story about their plight, 'however, would require revealing the dome's malfunction, and the powers-that-be had decided that, for now, that fact was cla.s.sified. He'd gotten a bit persnickety about it, but Vaetes had been adamant. Den couldn't see how the Separatists could take advantage of the knowledge, since everyone was claiming it was a malfunction. Still, the lid remained firmly in place, and was likely to stay there fora while.

Little to do, then, except have another drink. The sabotage of MedStar certainly wasn't expediting matters. As far as Den had been able to determine-which wasn't much, even with his sources-the explosion had definitely been intentionally set. That in itself was horrifying enough-blowing up a hospital ship was an act of barbarism, not war-but the fact that it might be linked to the earlier transport explosion seemed to indicate that, somehow, a spy walked among them.

Needless to say, he wasn't being allowed to file that bit of news, either. Not via official channels.

He shook his head. It seemed absurd-a spy, in an out-of-the-way Rimsoo on a star-forsaken world like this? To think that, when he'd drawn this a.s.signment, he'd come steeling himself for boredom and enforced idleness. The time he'd spent at Rimsoo Seven had been anything but boring.

As he finished his drink, he saw I-Five enter the can-tina. He made an inviting gesture, but the droid headed instead for the bar, where Teedle was.

The two droids spoke for a moment. Den was close enough to overhear the conversation.

Usually he had no compunctions at all about eavesdropping, but since this conversation was in Binary instead of Basic, there wasn't a lot to be gleaned from the rapidfire clicks, beeps, and whistles exchanged.

After a moment, Teedle went on her way and I-Five joined Den at the table.