Jedi Trial: Star Wars Legends (Star Wars - Legends) by David Sherman & Dan Cragg

Author:David Sherman & Dan Cragg [Sherman, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780345463081
Publisher: Random House Worlds
Published: 2005-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Odie and Erk sat in the aid station, listening to the thunder of the guns supporting Halcyon’s attack. The assault had been going on for ten or fifteen minutes before the chief surgeon accosted them.

“You can walk now, Lieutenant, so shove off,” he told Erk. “I’ll need all the space I can get in this station in the next few minutes.”

Odie, who’d been keeping Erk company while he was in the aid station, helped him to his feet. “Doctor, when will you be able to see him again?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” the surgeon replied. “Not for a while. He may have to go into a bacta tank to regenerate the skin. We’ll have to send him up to the Respite for that. In the meantime, he needs to keep that burn clean. If infection sets in, he could be in real trouble. Here.” He grabbed a medpac and shoved it at Odie. “You don’t seem to have anything better to do—take care of him for the next couple of days. Everything you need is in there, including painkillers. Hear those blasters? I want you out of the way before the casualties start streaming in here. Now go!”

“We need to hunker in a bunker, Odie,” Erk said, then corrected himself quickly: “No—no more bunkers for us. Let’s head over to the command post. Maybe we can be of some help there.”

But before they could get out of the aid station, casualties from the ongoing assault started coming in and all the pair could do was step aside and wait for the flow of injured to stop. It didn’t, and what they saw on the litters bearing the wounded was horrible. Odie gasped and put her hands to her mouth; Erk blanched at the sight of the mangled bodies. Never had either of them seen so much destruction of living beings. Erk had done all his killing at high speed in the soundless reaches of space or far above the ground in atmosphere environments. It had been a clean bloodletting, more like playing a hologame than actually killing anyone. Now he was seeing what weapons technology could do to living bodies up close, where he could smell the blood and burned flesh.

The surgeons established a triage. One had the job of examining each litter case as it came in and, depending on whether he thought the victim could be saved or not, determining where to put the soldier; these decisions were made in a matter of seconds. The unsaved far outnumbered the saved.

The worst were the burn cases, clones stripped of their armor, so badly incinerated that their limbs had been reduced to charred sticks, their faces to blackened skulls, uniform fragments fused to their flesh. Yet somehow they lived. None of these were put into the saved category. Others lay in pools of their own blood, limbs missing, internal organs exposed. Still others had obviously died before they were brought to the field hospital. They lay still on their litters, bodies bouncing as the litter bearers jounced them along.

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