Free Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages by Diane Duane & Peter Morwood

patients. I should know; I was one of them, some months back.” McCoy’s eyebrows went up; that was all he allowed himself for the moment, though Jim strongly suspected the Saurian brandy would be flowing in sickbay when they got back. “But we may discuss that later,” Suvuk said. “My chief surgeon will also desire to hear what more you may have to say; the syndrome is a problem for us. My chief surgeon, Sobek; my chief engineer, T’Leiar; my first officer, Sehlk.” One after another his officers nodded in acknowledgment—the slightly stout doctor, Sobek; the willowy, blue-eyed T’Leiar, with her long black hair; and Sehlk, a man much like Suvuk, but younger—small, darker skinned than the others, and with a keen, ready, intense look about him, all very much controlled. “Captains, gentlebeings all, shall we sit? Captain Kirk no doubt has a great deal to discuss.”
    Everyone found his, her or its place. Jim heard Rihaul sit down with the usual bizarre noise in her bowl chair, and had to repress a laugh again. Deirr weren’t really wet—their smooth, slick skin just looked that way, and in contact with some surfaces, acted that way. Rihaul had been complaining since the long-ago days at the Academy, where Jim was her math tutor, that the Fleet-issue plastic bowl chairs were the bane of her existence; sitting down in one invariably produced noises that almost every species considered embarrassing, and getting up against the resultant suction required mechanical assistance, or a lot of friends. Nowadays Nhauris and Jim had a running joke that the only reason she had become a captain was to have a command bowl chair that was upholstered in cloth.
    “I think the first matter before us,” Jim said, “is to briefly discuss the strategic situation. Tactics will follow.” Spock handed him a tape; Jim slipped it into the table and activated it. The four small holoprojection units around the table came alive, each one constructing a three-dimensional map of the galaxy, burning with the bright pinpoints of stars. The map rotated until one seemed to be looking straight “down” through the galactic disk, and the focus tightened on the Sagittarius Arm—the irregular spiral-arm structure, thirty thousand light-years long and half as wide, that the Federation, the Romulans and the Klingons all shared. From this perspective, the Sag Arm (at least to Jim) looked rather like the North American continent; though it was North America missing most of Canada, and the United States as far west as the Rockies and as far south as Oklahoma. Sol sat on the shore of that great starry lacuna, about where Oklahoma City would have been.
    “Here’s where we stand,” Jim said. The bright “continent” swelled in the map-cube, till the whole cubic was full of the area that would have been southwestern North America, Mexico and the Californias. “Federation, Romulan and Klingon territories are all marked according to the map key.” Three sets of very lumpy, irregular shapes, like a group of wrestling amoebas, flashed into color in the starfield: red for the Klingons, gold for the Romulans, blue for the Federation. There was very little regularity about their boundaries with one another, except for one abnormally smooth curvature, almost a section of an egg shape, where the blue space nested with and partly surrounded the gold. “Disputed territories are in orange.” There was a lot of orange, both where blue met red and where red met gold; though rather more of the latter. “These schematics include the latest intelligence we have from both Romulans and Klingons. You can see that there are some problems in progress out there. The alliance between the Klingons and the Romulans is either running into some kind of trouble, or is not defined the way we usually define alliances. This gives us our first hint as to why we’re out here, gentlebeings—unless Fleet was more open with one of you than it was with me.”
    Suvuk shook his