Lethal Cargo: A Space Opera Adventure (A Cauldron of Stars Book 1) by Felix Savage

Author:Felix Savage
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knights Hill Publishing
Published: 2018-09-13T06:00:00+00:00

32

As soon as I got to Dolph’s apartment I saw that Martin was right. Rafael Ijiuto’s skin had a blue tinge, and touching him felt like touching a frog, despite the hot and stuffy night. Martin stood back, holding a blood pressure cuff and shaking his head. “Better start thinking about where to dump the body.”

“No way,” I said. “This is the guy who killed Kimmie.”

“You don’t know that.”

“We need to find out—

“If you believed he did it,” Martin said, “you’d just let him die.”

I threw up my hands. “Right, I don’t know that he did it, and therefore taking him to hospital is the right thing to do.”

“On your own head be it,” Martin said. “Shoreside General?”

“Nope,” Dolph said, lifting Ijiuto’s legs. I took his shoulders. “Dr. Zeb’s.”

“He’s a normie, right?” Martin said.

“Yeah, but c’mon,” I said. “They’re not gonna refuse to treat him in this condition.”

We put Ijiuto in the truck. Dolph called ahead. Five minutes later we were unloading him onto a stretcher at the gate of Dr. Zeb’s, officially known as the Tau Medical Clinic.

This was another corner of Shiftertown free from surveillance, because it dated back to an earlier age. Gravelnuts and devil palms hung over the garden wall. A mulched layer of nuts and dead palm fronds made the sidewalk slippery. Pingos chirped in the trees, and cars jostled for places in the vertical parking lot acros the street. We followed the automated stretcher up the drive to a sprawling colonial mansion. Strangler vines twined up the walls, and defunct solar panels pointed every which way, so that the roof looked like a metal coral reef festooned with seaweed, but the windows blazed with light. A pair of nurses stood smoking under one of the murder oaks in the garden. They crushed out their cigarettes and hurried over to help. They asked whether Ijiuto was a Shifter, but when we said no, they just nodded and rushed him inside. They took his vital signs and got him on a drip to stabilize him until Dr. Zeb could come to examine him.

Dr. Zeb is a saint among Shifters, the eighth-generation head of the Tau family. The Taus were among the first Shifters to arrive on Ponce de Leon. They opened a clinic in their big old house in what is now Smith’s End. It was needed, as Shifters were heavily discriminated against in those days. Later on, they bought the house next door, knocked down the garden wall, and built a roofed cloister joining “Building A” and “Building B,” to keep up with an increasing flow of patients … so what does that say about our society nowadays?

From outside, the place looks charmingly tumbledown, not surprising given its age. Almost all the other early colonial mansions in Mag-Ingat have long since been subdivided into apartments, or torn down and replaced with row housing like where I live. But on the inside, Dr. Zeb’s was far more modern than my apartment. Rafael Ijiuto’s room smelled as clean as the inside of a dishwasher.

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