Джо Шрайбер - Star Wars - Death Troopers

"Looks like another miracle recovery," Zahara said, and smiled. "Another one of your many skills, apparently."

"A most irregular approach," Waste intoned, and something deep inside its torso cowling clicked and whirred. "Don't you think that given the patient's ongoing complaints we should run some additional tests?"

"Unless I'm mistaken, this particular patient's main complaint is with the food." Zahara glanced at the Dug. "And maybe one of the several different prison gangs that want his scalp for overdue loan payments. That's about right, isn't it, Tugnut?"

The Dug snarled and jerked one hand up in a gesture that transcended language barriers, then went back to faking its own death.

"Scramble up an orderly droid," Zahara said, "have him taken back to his cell." She looked back at the 2-1B. "You're aware, Waste, that you still haven't answered my initial question?"

"Excuse me?"

"Are we there yet?"

"Dr. Cody, if you're referring to our ETA at Detention Moon Gradient Seven…"

"The Purge is a prison barge, Waste. Where else would we be headed? Wild Space?" She waited patiently to see if the 2-1B was going to favor her with another of its flat, implacable glances. Throughout the last three months of working alongside the droid, Zahara Cody had come to think of herself as a connoisseur of such reactions, the way that some people collected rare pseudo-genetic polymorph species or trinkets from older, pre-Imperial cultures. "We've already dropped out of hyperspace. Our engines have been stopped for almost an hour now and we're just sitting here stock-still, so that can only mean one thing, right? We must be there."

"Actually, Doctor, my uplink to the navicomputer indicates that…"

"Hey, Doc," A blunt finger reached out from behind Zahara and prodded her somewhere in the vicinity of her lower spine. "We there yet?"

Zahara looked over at the Devaronian inmate sprawled languorously on his side on the bed behind her, then turned back at her surgical droid. "See, Waste? It's the question on everyone's lips."

"No, I'm serious, Doc," the Devaronian groaned, peering up at her from the depths of melancholy. His right horn had been snapped off midtrunk, giving his face a peculiarly lopsided look, and he poked himself in the abdomen and groaned. "One of my livers is going bad, I can feel it. Thinking maybe I caught something in the shower."

"May I offer a more likely diagnosis?" The 2-1B scurried eagerly around Zahara, already exchanging tools in its servogrips as the internal components of its diagnostic computer flickered beneath its torso sheath. "Liver damage in your species is not uncommon. In many cases your silver-based blood results in depicted oxygen due to the low-level addiction to the recreational use of…"

"Hey, interface." The Devaronian sat up, suddenly the robust picture of perfect health, and grabbed the 2-lB's pincer. "What are you saying about my species?"

"Easy, Gat, he doesn't mean anything by it." Zahara placed a hand on the inmate's wrist until he released the droid. Then, turning to the 2-1B: "Waste, why don't you go check out what's happening with the Trandoshan in B-seventeen, huh? His temp's up again and I don't like the last white counts I saw this morning. I doubt he'll make it through today."

"Oh, I concur." The droid brightened. "According to my programming at Rhinnal State Medical Academy…"

"Right. So I'll meet you later for afternoon rounds, all right?"

The 2-1B hesitated, seeming briefly to entertain the idea of objecting, then walked away clucking softly to itself in dismay. Zahara watched it go, its gangling legs and oversized feet passing between the rows of bunks that lined the infirmary on either side. Only half of those beds were full, but that was still more than she would have preferred. As chief medical officer on the Purge, she knew that at any given time a large percentage of her patients were dogging it, either prolonging their stay in medbay or faking it entirely to stay out of Gen Pop. But it had been a long trip and supplies were low. Even with the 2-1B, the prospect of a legitimate medical emergency-

"You okay, Doc?"

Looking down, she realized that the Devaronian was watching her from his bed, fidgeting nonchalantly with his broken horn.

"Sorry?"

"I said, you all right? You look a little, I dunno…"

"I'm fine, Gat, thanks."

"Hey." The inmate glanced off in the direction that the surgical droid had gone. "That bucket of bolts won't hold it against me, you think?"

"Who, Waste?" She smiled. "Believe me, he's a paragon of scientific objectivity. Just throw some obscure symptoms at him and he'll be your best friend."

"You really think we're almost there?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. You know how it is. Nobody tells me anything."

"Right," the Devish said, and shook his head with a chuckle. Aboard the barge, there were a few phrases that circulated among Gen Pop endlessly: Are we there yet? and They expect us to eat this stuff? were chief among them, but Nobody tells me anything was also a big favorite. Over months of service, Zahara had adopted these phrases as well, much to the chagrin of the warden and many of the ICOs, most of whom held themselves up as an example of superior species.

Zahara knew what they said about her. Among the guards, no real effort was made to keep it subtle. Too much time spent down in the medbay with the scum and droids and the little rich girl had started to go native, preferring the company of inmates and synthetics to her own kind: corrections officers and stormtroopers. Most of the guards had stopped talking to her completely after the situation two weeks ago. She didn't suppose she blamed them. They were a notoriously tight-knit group and seemed to function with a groupthink that she found downright nauseating.

Even the inmates-her regulars, the ones she saw on a daily basis- had noticed a change in the way she'd started spending extra time training Waste-preparing the 2-1B not as her assistant anymore, but as her replacement. And although there hadn't been any official response from the warden, she could only assume that he'd received her resignation.

After all, she'd walked into his office and slammed it down on his desk.

There was no way she could keep working here.

Not after what happened with Von Longo.

Take a girl from a wealthy family of Corellian financiers and tell her she'll never have a care in the world. Ship her off to the best schools, tell her there's a spot waiting for her in the InterGalactic Banking Clan, all she has to do is not mess up. Keep her nose clean, uphold the highest standards of politics, culture, and good manners, and ignore the fact that compared with what she's used to, 99 percent of the galaxy is still hungry, sick, and uneducated. Embrace the Empire with its quaint lack of diplomatic subtlety and strive to overlook the increasingly uncomfortable squeeze of Lord Vader's ever-tightening fist.

Flash to fifteen years later. The girl, now a woman, decides to go to Rhinnal to study, of all things, medicine-that dirtiest of sciences, better left to droids, full of blood and pus and contagion, hardly what her parents had hoped for. But the decision is made to indulge her, based on the hope that this is just an idealistic whim and soon enough little Zahara will be back to take her rightful position at the family table. After all, she's young, she has plenty of time.

Except it doesn't play out that way. Two years into Rhinnal, Zahara meets a surgeon twice her age, a craggy veteran of hundreds of humanitarian missions beyond the Core Worlds, who opens her eyes to the true need of the galaxy around her. The mismatched love affair runs its course predictably enough but even after that part of it winds down, Zahara can't forget the picture he's painted for her, a mural of staggering need, beings whose desperation is utterly beyond her ken. He reminds her that the poor are out there in their countless millions, human and nonhuman alike, young ones dying of malnutrition and sickness, while the galaxy's upper echelons bask in self-induced oblivion. You can either live with something like that, the surgeon tells her, on what turns out to be one of their last nights together, or you can't.