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

freely, but it kept out the eight-legged, bi-winged in-sects they'd come to call "wingstingers" that constantly
buzzed about the unit. He'd heard that the newer-model fields came with an entropic overlay feature that
bled energy from the air molecules as they passed through the selective barrier, thus lowering the inside
tempera-ture by a good ten degrees. He'd put in a requisition for a batch of them; with any luck, they might
arrive a day or so before the war ended.
Blinking in the harsh light of Drongar Prime, he watched the transport spiral down to the pad. He no-ticed
Zan, Tolk, and a few others emerging from the OT as well. It was a time of relative quiet at Rimsoo Seven,
which meant that triaged patients weren't queued up, waiting for surgery and treatment, and that the
surgeons weren't in a life-and-death race with time to save them. They were enjoying the respite while it
lasted.
A couple of Bothan techs ran up to the shuttle and sprayed the exterior with spore disinfectant. This
 par-ticular batch of chemicals, Jos knew, would probably be good for another standard month; it took about
that long for the spores that attacked the craft's seals to de-velop immunities to the spray. Then various
chemical
precursors would have to be altered, and molecular configurations shifted just enough to produce a new
type of treatment that would once again be effectiveтАФ for a time. It was a constant dance that went on
be-tween the guided mechanisms of science and the blind opportunism of nature. Jos wondered, not for the
first time, what the odds were of the spores mutating into a more virulent pathogen that could strip-mine a
pair of lungs in seconds instead of hours.
Then the shuttle's hatch opened, and so did Jos's mouthтАФin surprise.
The new doctor was a womanтАФand a Jedi.
There was no mistaking the simple dark garb and ac-coutrements of the Order, and certainly no
mistaking the shape beneath them as anything other than femi-nine. He'd heard that the latest addition to
the team was a MirialanтАФwhich meant human, basicallyтАФa member of the same species as himself,
whose ancestors had spread in several ancient diasporas across the galaxy, colonizing such worlds as
Corellia, Alderaan, Kalarba, and hundreds more. Humans were ubiquitous from one spiral arm to the other,
so to see another oneтАФmale or femaleтАФarrive here was no great surprise.
But to see a Jedi, here on DrongarтАФthat was surpris-ing.
Jos, like most other beings intelligent enough to ac-cess the HoloNet, had seen the recorded images of the
Jedi's final stand in the arena on Geonosis. Even before that, the Order had been spread mighty thin across
the galaxy. And yet one of them had been assigned here, to Rimsoo Seven, a ragtag military medical unit
on a world so far off the known space lanes that most galactic car-tographers couldn't come within a
parsec of locating it on a bet.
He wondered why she was here.
Colonel D'Arc Vaetes, the human commander of the unit, received the Jedi warmly as the latter
disembarked from the transport. "Welcome to Rimsoo Seven, Jedi Barriss Offee," he said. "Speaking for
everyone here, I hope you will beтАФ"
But before he could finish his sentence, Vaetes stopped, for a sound was rising in the thick, humid airтАФa
sound every one of them at Rimsoo Seven knew very well.
"Incoming lifters!" shouted Tanisuldees, a Dressel-lian enlistee. He was the aide-de-camp to Filba, the
Hutt supply officer. He pointed to the north.
Jos looked. Yes, they were coming, sure enoughтАФfive of them, black dots against the sky, which at this
time of day was a faint verdigris in color, like the algae that coated the surface of the Kondrus Sea. Each
medlifter could carry up to six wounded menтАФclones and possi-bly other combatants. That meant at least
thirty in-jured, possibly one or two more.
After the first moment of realization, everyone began moving purposefully, each doing his, her, or its duty
to prepare. Zan and Tolk headed for the OT at a run. Jos was about to follow, but instead he turned and
moved quickly to where the Jedi, looking slightly confused, was standing.
Vaetes took her hand and gestured toward Jos. "Jedi Offee, this is Captain Jos Vondar, my chief
surgeon. He'll get you briefed and prepped for what's coming." The colonel sighed. "It's something we're all