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

was working on.
Jos used a healy gripper to dig a piece of metal the size of his thumb from his patient's left lung. He
dropped the sharp metal bit into a pan. It clanked. "Put a glue stat on that."
The nurse expertly laid the dissolvable patch onto the
wounded lung. The stat, created of cloned tissue and a type of adhesive made from a Talusian mussel,
immedi-ately sealed the laceration. At least they still had plenty of those, Jos told himself; otherwise, he'd
have to use staples or sutures, like the medical droids usually did, and wouldn't that be fun and
time-consuming?
He looked down at the patient, spotted another gleam of shrapnel under the bright OT lights, and grabbed
it gently, wiggling it slowly out. It had just missed the aorta. "There's enough scrap metal in this guy to build
two battle droids," he muttered, "and still have some left over for spare parts." He dropped the metal into
the steel bowl, with another clink. "I don't know why they even bother putting armor on 'em."
"Got that right," Zan said. "Stuff won't stop any-thing stronger than a kid's pellet gun."
Jos put two more fragments of the grenade into the pan, then straightened, feeling his lower back muscles
protest the position he'd been locked into all day. "Scope 'im," he said.
Tolk ran a handheld bioscanner over the clone. "He's clean," she said. "I think you got it all."
"We'll know if he starts clanking when he walks." An orderly began wheeling the gurney over to the two
FX-7 medical droids that were doing the patching up. "Next!" Jos said wearily. He yawned behind his face
mask, and before he'd finished there was another trooper supine in front of him.
"Sucking chest wound," Tolk said. "Might need a new lung."
"He's lucky; we're having a special on them." Jos made the initial incision with the laser scalpel.
Operat-ing on clone troopersтАФor, as the staff of Rimsoo Seven tended to call it, working the "assembly
line"тАФwas
easier in a lot of ways than doing slice and stitch on in-dividuals. And, since they were all the same
genome, their organs were literally interchangeable, with no worry about rejection syndrome.
He glanced over at one of the four other organic doc-tors working in the cramped operating chamber.
Zan Yant, a Zabrak surgeon, was two tables away, hum-ming a classical tune as he sliced. Jos knew Zan
would much rather be back in the cubicle the two of them shared, playing his quetarra, tuning it just right so
that it would produce the plangent notes of some Zabrak native skirl. The music Zan was into lately
sounded like two krayt dragons mating, as far as Jos was concerned, but to a ZabrakтАФand to many other
sentient species in the galaxyтАФit was uplifting and enriching. Zan had the soul and the hands of a musician,
but he was also a de-cent surgeon, because the Republic needed medics more than entertainers these
days. Certainly on this world.
The remaining six surgeons in the theater were droids, and there should have been ten of them. Two of
the other four were out for repairs, and two had been requisitioned but never received. Every so often Jos
went through the useless ritual of filing another 22K97(MD) requisition form, which would then promptly
disappear forever into a vortex of computer-ized filing systems and bureaucracy.
He quickly determined that the sergeantтАФthe rem-nants of his armor had the green markings that
denoted his rankтАФindeed needed a new lung. Tolk brought a freshly cloned organ from the nutrient tanks
while Jos began the pneumonectomy. In less than an hour he had finished resecting, and the lung, grown
from cultured stem cells along with dozens of other identical organs and kept in cryogenic stasis for
emergencies such as
this, was nestled in the sergeant's pleural cavity. The pa-tient was wheeled over for suturing as Jos
stretched, feeling vertebrae unkink and joints pop.
"That's the last of them," he said, "for now."
"Don't get too comfortable," said Leemoth, a Duros surgeon who specialized in amphibious and
semiaquatic species. He looked up from his current patientтАФan Otolla Gungan observer from Naboo, who
had had his buccal cavity severely varicosed by a sonic pistol blast the day before. "Word from the front is,
another couple of medlifters will be here in the next three hours, if not sooner."
"Time enough to have a drink and file another pa-thetic plea for a transfer," Jos said as he moved toward