Life is Messy: A Second Opinions Story

The UCP Hippocrates is a hospital ship.Nobody bothered to tell the people shooting at it.Captain Argyle Pyle arrives at Carrow expecting to treat the wounded after a raider attack. Instead, his ship gets fired on during final approach, damages a stabilizer, and ends up parked crooked in a municipal park.Then the patients start coming.Before long, the medical staff is treating casualties wherever they can find room. The Marines are having entirely too much fun outside. Administration is trying to figure out where all the blankets went. Engineering is keeping vital equipment running with whatever parts happen to be available.And one of the nurses kills an armed intruder with a defibrillator.That would be enough trouble for one medical mission.Then Sergeant Wells notices something odd about the people they've been fighting. Their weapons don't match. Nobody can find where the supposed raiders landed. A badly wounded patient arrives with something inside him that definitely wasn't put there by a doctor.Captain Pyle doesn't know what is happening on Carrow.He does know that he has a damaged hospital ship full of patients sitting in the middle of it.Life Is Messy is the first Second Opinions story, a science-fiction medical adventure about the crew of the UCP Hippocrates, where the doctors are overworked, the equipment is questionable, and getting shot at is not covered by the standard operating procedure.