"Steve Perry - Battle Surgeons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

kid-ney or a heart." He started to gesture to the droid, but Barriss stopped him.
"Let me try something first," she said. Zan blinked in surprise, but stepped back, indicating the patient
was hers.
 She stepped closer, hoping that her nervousness would not show. She extended her hands through the
field and placed both palms on the clone trooper's chest.
Then she closed her eyes and opened herself to the Force.
It seemed to her that the Force had been with her, al-ways, from her earliest memories of childhood. One
of those was particularly vivid, and for some reason it of-
ten came to mind when she was about to invoke the power. She could not have been more than three or
four, and had been playing with a ball in one of the Temple antechambers. It had rolled beyond her reach,
through an open arch she had not yet explored. Barriss had followed the ball, and abruptly found herself in
one of the gigantic main chambers. Far overhead, the vaulted ceiling loomed, and huge pillars rose
majestically from the tessellated floor. Her ball was still rolling across that floor, but Barriss, awed by the
sheer size and magnifi-cence of it all, wasn't about to go after it.
Instead, she made it come back to her.
She had not known she was capable of that. She sim-ply reached for it, and the ball stopped, hesitated,
and then rolled obediently back to her.
As she bent to pick it up, she sensed someone behind her. She turned and beheld Master Yoda, standing
in the far entrance to the antechamber. He smiled and nod-ded, quite evidently impressed with what he had
just seen.
That was all. She remembered nothing after that, whether Master Yoda had gone on his way and she had
continued playing, or if he had spoken to her, or if something else entirely had happened. One would think
such an encounter with one of the most leg-endary Jedi of all would be impressed in one's brain far more
thoroughly than the part about playing with a ball. But that was how it was. She even remembered the ball's
color: blue.
That memory came to her now, as it did, sometimes fleetingly, sometimes in great detail, nearly every
time she prepared to call on the Force.
Barriss felt the palms of her hands growing warm against the trooper's belly. She didn't have to visualize
the processтАФshe knew that healing energy was pouring from her into him. NoтАФnot from her; through
her. She was only the vessel, the conduit through which the Force did its work.
An unknown time laterтАФit could have been a minute or an hour, as far as she knewтАФshe opened her
eyes and lifted her hands.
"Wow," Zan murmured behind her. He was looking at the readout panel. She saw that the trooper was
stabi-lizing. Also, the discoloration had vanished; his skin was a healthy color.
"You must've been top in your class. How'd you do that?" Zan asked, without taking his gaze from the
panel.
"I did nothing," Barriss replied. "The Force can heal wounds on many occasions."
"Well, it sure worked on him." Zan gestured at the panel. "His brain wave pattern's within normal limits,
and most of the secondary trauma seems gone. Pretty impressive, Padawan."
The FX-7 guided the gurney out. By the time Zan had finished changing gloves there was another body
before him. "Stick around," he said to Barriss. "There's plenty more where he came from."

Seated on a bar stool, his left foot propped on a rung higher than the right foot, Zan adjusted the tuning
mechanisms on his quetarra, bringing the strings into tune. The instrument had eight of these, bucky-fibers
of varying diameters and texture, and eight was three more than Zan had fingers on either hand. The first
time he had seen his friend play the thing, Jos had been impressed. The Zabrak's fingers had danced nimbly
up and down the instrument's fret board, and he had now
and then leaned way over and pressed his chin against the instrument, using it to fret the strings. The
quetarra was a hollow, ornate, and beautifully grained pleek-wood box, polished to a dull sheen, with several
holes in it, shaped something like a figure eight. A flat board protruded from the box, and eight geared