I will be right back, said Sepha, and went out into the corridor and shut the door behind her.

Meridian Exchange was a trading station of moderate size and no particular importance, hanging in orbit above a gas giant at the crossroads of four shipping lanes.

It had a population of about 11,000 from more than 20 species and a medical bay that was well equipped and rarely busy.

Sepha Illenwith had been its chief physician for six years.

She was good at her job.

She was calm, thorough, and kind, and she had seen most of what space could do to a living body.

She had seen a Skithra bite only once before, early in her training on a research station near the creature’s homeworld.

The patient had been a Liran biologist, a colleague of her teachers.

Sepha had watched helplessly with the rest of the medical staff as the biologist died in three and a half minutes, and she had never forgotten it.

So when the alarm came through from the cargo docks that morning, a Skithra loose in a shipping container, one person bitten, she had known exactly what it meant.

She had gathered her team and run, and when they reached the docks, she had expected to find a body.

Instead, she had found a human sitting on a crate with his left arm wrapped tightly from wrist to elbow in a strip of torn shirt, holding it carefully still against his chest and shouting at the security officers to stop poking the thing with a stick and just shut the door on it.

It bit me, he had told her as she knelt beside him.

Came out of the crate when I cracked the seal.

Got me right on the arm.

I’ve wrapped it, see, pressure bandage.

Keep it still, keep me still, slow the venom down, that’s the go.

He had looked at her expectantly.

You got anti-venom for this one.

No, Sepha had said because it was true and because she had always believed that patients deserved the truth, even at the end.

Ah, Hamish had said, bugger.

Then he had asked for a stretcher because he said it was important not to walk with a bite.

And he had lain down on it with remarkable calm while they carried him to the medical bay.

And on the way he had told her the name of his ship and the name of his sister on Earth, in case anybody needed to be told anything.