The server Spider on duty there could do little except dole out an assortment of general-purpose medicines, but there was usually at least one doctor aboard any given train who could be brought on in a medical emergency. In exchange for putting their names on the on-call list, doctors got a sizable discount on their tickets.

Here, instead of being an add-on to the dining car, the second/third dispensary took up a section of the exercise car. Like everything else on the super-express, it was also larger than usual. The glass-fronted drug cabinet was over twice the size of an ordinary one, and in place of the usual examination chair was a Fibibib-designed diagnostic/treatment table.

Bayta and I arrived to find a small crowd already assembled. There were a pair of Shorshians, hovering nervously in the back of the small room, their dolphin snouts silently opening and closing, their smooth skin rippling with little crescent-shaped goose bumps. At the back of the room on the other side, a petite server Spider was silently watching the proceedings. Standing on opposite sides of the treatment table were a white-haired Human male and a Filiaelian female with a graying brown blaze down her long face. The Human was holding a biosensor with one hand while he thumbed ampoules from a dispenser with the other. The Filly was taking the ampoules from him and feeding them into a hypo.

And in the center of attention, lying unnaturally still on the table, was the patient.

A person who had somehow dropped out of the sky from an entirely different galaxy and who had never seen a Shorshian in his life would still have recognized instantly that this one wasn’t well. Someone like me, who’d had the standard Western Alliance Intelligence course in Shorshic culture, psychology, and physiology could see just as instantly that he was in a seriously bad way.