Free Hospital Ship (The Rim Confederacy #5) by Jim Rudnick

it came to the session members, and he hoped there'd be some real good stories there too.
    For a moment, he wondered at that from a guilty rationale. If someone was up here in the Psych Ward, they had issues. And enjoying their problems was not a good thing to desire. Least not outwardly , and he grinned to himself. Wonder what the sessions were going to be like , he thought as he stood on the walkway on Deck A. He'd gone all the way down to the big Barony-wide deck. He knew he had to go back up to Deck B to get to the group session room, yet he was dawdling and he knew why.
    Last thing I'm looking forward to is to open up to a group of loonies .
    There, I said it, he finally admitted to himself.
    While I've no idea what caused my flipping out, I do know that it was not me .
    "Not me at all," he said as he watched the Juice Bar that jutted out into the large space opposite the moving walkway. He thought he might like to take a juice up to the session that was in B-288, and to do that, he'd need to take another complete revolution on the walkway.
    Such was life, and if challenged, his excuse he thought to himself, was that he'd gotten lost.
    Yup, that'd do fine. A smile on his face agreed with him too!
    He watched the various other patients, doctors, nurses, orderlies, and many others he didn't even recognize as the walkway continued to turn its way around the base of the Barony areas of the Hospital Ship.
    As the Juice Bar came into view, he sighed and stepped off with only a bit of clumsiness as he tried to shred momentum and not look too much like a ship newbie. He'd thought he pulled it off as he walked up to the Juice Bar, and the fellow behind the counter gave him a raised eyebrow and then stared at him.
    "Can I get a ... a smoothie please? One of those green ones, I think," Tanner said as he perused the menu board above them.
    "And which of the five green ones might that be?" the fellow said, "Most of us know what flavor they want ..."
    His tone was a bit uppity , Tanner thought, just wish he was an ensign of mine .
    "Sure, you decide—whatever one is your favorite, I mean," he said and stared right at the young man.
    He shrugged and in thirty seconds or so, Tanner walked away with a tall plas-cup full of something green.
    He hefted it and realized it was pretty heavy, but he took a drink anyway.
    Sour. With a tang of something from a compost heap that was still good to his taste buds.
    I like it , he thought as he got off the escalator up on Deck B, and looking at the signage, he turned to port and walked until he reached room B-288.
    The door was closed, but he simply waved his hand over the secure key pad at the side, and the door slid open for him quickly.
    Entering the room, he first saw that he knew only one person there, Maddie, his nurse. Everyone else was new to him.
    In about a dozen chairs arranged around a large group of tables that had been moved together, about a dozen other patients sat, all dressed like him in the white patient scrubs. One of them was dressed in a yellow set of scrubs and in front of him was a tablet. He looked up at Tanner and pointed to the one empty seat at the put-together table.
    "Captain Scott, I presume—please take your seat, and next time please remember no drinks allowed here in group," the man said.
    He watched as Tanner circled the table and pulled out his chair to sit. He watched as Tanner took a large drink of his smoothie and said and did nothing. He watched as Tanner eventually looked up at him and then he smiled.
    He was an alien, from Tarvos, as the ears showed so large. Tanner saw he had two thumbs on each hand, and he knew there would be six toes on each foot, but he doubted he'd ever see the doctor without shoes on. Tarvos had some great folks, Tanner knew, as he remembered his CWO Hartford, one of the real leaders on the Ghayth mission, and the discovery of the anti-grav plates. But that was another day, and today, this Tarvian was in charge.
    "Group starts