Flinx in Flux by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online Page A

injection, so she was not allergic to the stuff he was dumping into her system. He applied intravenous antibiotic and a spray over the bruises and cuts, then sat back and surveyed his handiwork. The crawler’s air-conditioning had replaced the hot air with a fresh soothing coolness.
    The bruises on her face and body troubled him, but there was nothing he could do for her appearance. The crawler’s medkit was designed to keep people alive, not repair them cosmetically. Well, it would not bother her as long as she was unconscious. The best thing would be to get her to the hospital at Alaspinport.
    She had a slight fever and was badly dehydrated despite the fact that she had obviously spent some time in the river. Either she had been afraid to drink the perfectly potable water or she had been unable to. He had no idea when she had last eaten, but her stomach and intestines felt anything but full.
    After waiting an hour for the medication to settle in and take hold, he gave her two ampoules of multipurpose nutrients and vitamins in a sodium solution. The injected broth would give her strength and allow her system to begin some serious repair work.
    An hour later his efforts were rewarded. She turned her head to her right and moved one arm several centimeters. Her neuromuscular system was functioning, then. The portable emergency scanner had not revealed any internal injuries, the light staying in the healthy pink range as he had run the pickup over her body. It had beeped a couple of times when he had passed it over the severest bruises. If it had gone over into the red or purple, that would have been an indication of broken bones or worse.
    Giving her a last glance, he returned to the driver’s seat. Back in Mimmisompo someone would be worrying about her, be it relative, traveling companion, or research society. He would find out and turn her over to them.
    She really was quite pretty, he thought as he put the crawler in drive. The longer he studied her injuries, the more convinced he became that they were not the result of an accident. Her attire was proof enough that she was no backcountry veteran. He could see her offering a ride to some traveler in distress, only to end up mugged, beaten, and left for dead in the middle of the river. An unpleasant picture with the smell of truth about it. If she had met with foul play of some kind, it would explain everything.
    Except why even a thief would want to beat her half to death. A pro would have simply knocked her out, tossed her overboard, and taken her goods, leaving it to the river and the jungle to clean up after him. Not that he was any judge of criminal ethics. His own criminal ethics, when he had been engaged in petty thievery as a youngster, had been radically different from most. He studied her in the rearview. Her bruises were not distributed at random. They suggested professional work of an unsavory nature.
    He grunted. What did he know about it? It could have been anything from a simple slip on a railing to a lovers’ quarrel. He was hypothesizing on air.
    The crawler slid into the river, the buoyancy compensators humming to life as the treads expanded to function as paddles. He had opted for the durability and longevity of the crawler, but as he studied his damaged passenger, he found himself wishing he had rented a skimmer despite the delay it would have entailed.
    It took three days of traveling with the current before the river bent to reveal the floating docks of Mimmisompo. Not once had his passenger opened her eyes, though she had moaned in her sleep. It did not make him uncomfortable to listen to her disjointed mumbling, because he was concentrating on her emotional subconscious. As expected, it was an incoherent jumble, alternating between pleasure and pain depending largely on how recently he had dosed her. The ampoules were keeping her alive, though, and her body was slowing repairing itself.
    When he docked in Mimmisompo, he turned in the crawler and