Obrim was upset and angry. She’d only seen the world-weary side of him, never fazed by anything, but this was very personal for him and it showed. He and Skirata were a matched pair. He might have been the only aruetyc friend that Skirata had. They certainly saw the galaxy the same way.
“I’d better call my boss and let him know he’s going to have an unpleasant message from Coruscant Health,” Besany said. “Need any clerks at CSF? Because I’m going to be fired in the morning.”
Obrim moved in to tuck a stray corner of blanket under Fi’s body as the gurney was steered away. “Don’t worry. He’ll never hear about it.”
“Kind of hard to ignore, one of his senior investigators storming into a medcenter and holding patients hostage.”
“I’ll make it go away,” Obrim said. “I’m CSF. I can make all kinds of things go away when I need to.”
Outside, the medical staff had begun to swarm back, some droid and some organics, and CSF officers cleared a path for the gurney to get to the turbolift. Obrim seemed to have mobilized half a shift to extract Fi from the unit. One med droid, whose identitab showed it was the duty administrator, hovered into Obrim’s path.
“I insist you return the patient to our care,” it said. “Once we’ve admitted someone, we have to be able to account for them and show they were discharged properly.”
“Make up your mind,” Obrim said, steering Besany past the droid. “One minute he’s a patient and the next he’s government property.”
“You can’t take him. We’re responsible for him.”
“Until you shoot him full of latheniol, yeah. He discharged himself.”
“He’s incapable of doing that.”
“Okay, I’m ATU. I’ve arrested him for looking at me funny. Now move it, or I’ll book you for obstructing me.”
“Then arrest that woman for threatening my staff, too.”
“Unless you want your rivets felt, tinnie boy, step out of my way.”
“This is an outrage. There’ll be a formal complaint to your superiors.”
Obrim leaned over slightly to make his point to the droid. He had weight and gravitas on his side. “Before you do that,” he said quietly, “ask your chief executive about his interest in Twi’lek artistic pursuits on every fourth of the month, and if he’d like me to give police surveillance holovids of the visits to the cultural center to his lovely wife. Your call.”
The droid paused, then backed off and hovered away. “We’ll see,” it said.
Besany slumped back against the wall of the turbolift, heart pounding again. She would never get her life back, she knew it. She wasn’t sure that it mattered. “Where are we going, Captain? Who’s going to look after him? I’ll do whatever I can.”
“First things first, my dear. Let’s get him settled. We can worry about the rest later.”
“You didn’t answer. Where are we going?”
“Home,” said Obrim.
He wasn’t joking. At the speeder bay, an unmarked CSF transport was waiting with its rear hatch open. The paramedics loaded Fi on board and got in beside him. Obrim followed in his own speeder with Besany.
“It’s amazing what you can rent,” he said, as if none of the drama had taken place only minutes earlier. “You can rent med droids to look after Granny at home. So I’ve rented one for Fi. I mean, I’d look after him myself, but I don’t know how to get feeding tubes and saline in him.”
“What’s your wife going to say?”
“I don’t know. I just said I was bringing someone home she had to keep quiet about. She’s pretty used to some of the irregularities in this job.”
“Thanks, Captain. Thank you so much.”
“It’s Jailer. I think we know each other well enough now, don’t we?”
“Yes. I think so.”
The first hurdle was cleared. She’d managed to get Fi to safety, thanks largely to the conscience of a bunch of cops who were taking a risk themselves, whatever Obrim said. But the real struggle lay ahead, and it might have no ending for a long, long time.
Fi was still in a deep coma, and as far as medicine was concerned, he was dead.
But he was still breathing. Besany was getting used to see-ing the impossible happen. It could happen again.
Arca Barracks, SO Brigade HQ, Coruscant, 483 days after Geonosis
Corr had the air of a guilty man, and Darman remembered that feeling from when he’d first walked into Omega Squad, after the commando brigades took massive losses in the first weeks of the war and squads were re-formed as men died.