Jedi Healer: Star Wars Legends (Medstar, Book II) (Star Wars - Legends) by Michael Reaves & Steve Perry

Author:Michael Reaves & Steve Perry [Reaves, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780345492685
Publisher: Random House Worlds
Published: 2005-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

30

The throbbing of the medlifters, the shouts and cross talk of personnel running to the triage area, the screams and groans of the troopers—it was a litany of sounds and cries that Jos had responded to so many times that it seemed he could do it in his sleep by now.

Sleep. There was a laugh. The truncated periods of naps and dozing that the medics of Rimsoo Seven managed to snag on good days wasn’t anything even close to good sleep hygiene. Of course, they had delta wave inducers, but cramming six to eight hours of uninterrupted cycling through the four stages and REM periods into a ten-minute nap just didn’t replenish the brain the same way that real-time sleep did. The only solution was a proper night’s rest, and that was a luxury seldom afforded.

Most of the time, the patients were clone troopers. For Jos, the hardest cases were not the completely alien species. They were the nonclone individual humans, because their anatomies were familiar to him, and yet subtly different from one another. When operating on such a human patient, he had to be very careful not to let his hands and brain fall back into familiar patterns that might work on a clone, but be just off enough to kill another human being. It had already happened once.

Truly alien individuals didn’t come through the OT very often. The few who did were usually on Drongar in some kind of observation or clerical capacity. And they often provided most of the moments of both humor and horror.

The last time they’d had an unexpected incident like that had been when Jos had been drenched in the Nikto’s life fluids. This time, it had been Uli who experienced the shock of the new.

The young surgeon had been working on a female Oni. The Oni were a fairly bellicose species, by all accounts, that hailed from the Outer Rim world of Uru. What this one was doing on Drongar no one seemed to know for sure—probably a mercenary. In any event, she had caught a projectile from a slugthrower, and Uli was probing for it when there was a blue-white flash, a sound like someone whacking a nest of angry wingstingers, and the young surgeon bounced backward and hit the wall.

He wasn’t hurt that much, as was evidenced by a stream of curses. The usual buzz of instrument requests and readout quotes came to a stop. Threndy, the nurse who had been assisting, helped Uli to his feet.

“You okay, Uli? Need any help?” Jos called.

“I’m good, thanks. But what in the seven skies of Sumarin was that? I never—”

He was interrupted by a tripedal medical droid that came in, moved to Uli’s side, and spoke briefly to him. Jos couldn’t hear the conversation, but after a moment Uli and Threndy both broke into laughter.

“What’s up?” Jos asked.

“Apparently, Oni females are electrophoretic. I must’ve brushed against a lobe of her capacitor organ during my probe.” Uli shrugged. “Kinda wish I’d known about it sooner …”

Jos chuckled.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.