The whole world rang like a giant bell on Empire day. Kia picked herself up out of the shallow swale in which she had thrown herself. The air was thick with sweetly poisonous explosive residue with an undertone of burning pine. The forest around her was shredded and splintered from the hundreds of anti personnel bomblets that had fallen like a pall over the retreating rebels. Smoke billowed in eddying currents as she pressed herself to her feet amazed to find she was still alive.

It hadn't been her job to come out to the line. By rights she should be back at the aid station but the rebel forces were taking far more casulites then anticipated and the su. Until she got back, the ancient 21B droid would have to handle the stabilization of the wounded. She looked at the roiling storm of smoke that lay before her, surely the wounded she had been called for were dead. 

"Mmmm.. mmm," a voice murmured from a nearby, words distorted by agony. Kia scrambled over to the pile of shredded pine and began to tear away branches. Beneath the curtain of branches she found three soldiers. Two of them were dead, torn to pieces by the storm of shrapnel. A third, a muscular human man clutched at his chest. The stink of spilled intestines and blood was overpowering.

"I got you," she said, nerves steadied by the familiarity of the triage sequence. Chest wounds, with internal penetration. She pulled a laser scalpel from her pack and cut the mans body armor away. It wasn't so bad. She produced an imager and powered it on. With meticulous care she began extracting shrapnel pices and applying combat stims to slow the bleeding and reduce the possibility of shock.

"Sweep and clear!" a mechanical voice sounded somewhere to the front. Kia froze, the pattern of storm trooper speech modifers too familiar to be mistaken for anything but. She lay flat against her patient trying not to move. Three scout troopers emerged from the smoke carbines sweeping for targets. Terror surged in her but she remembered the proccedure. Shakily she raised a commlink to her lips.

"Starlight 1-2 I have contact to my front," she whispered raising her unfamiliar DH-15 in trembling hands and hoping any of the real soldiers were close enough to help.