Chapter By Chapter> Star Trek: The Vulcan Academy Murders chapter 13

Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as a read-along book club.

In our previous chapter, T’Mir made her move on Daniel. We also have a “romantic” rival for the de-aged doc, but all of that is about to get eclipsed by another emergency.

This is may finally be the point where we get push the mystery forward. What are the odds that two stasis fields are going to collapse so close together? While an important part of the experimental procedure you’d think they’d work hard to keep the others working, especially after already losing one patient. Vulcans aren’t completely emotionless and they do believe in protecting life, especially their own. Things may start getting interesting now.

I exaggerate. All the flavor and character introduction have been interesting thus far. There’s just this impatient part of my brain that wants to get into the main plot of the story the title’s been pushing for. That’s not on Jean Lorrah, but on me for wanting to get to things. All the info have been interesting and potentially important to the mystery at hand. So let’s get on with that.

I’ll save the suspect update for later, and you’ll see why. Right now our focus at the start of the chapter is Sarek and Elena. I guess they either haven’t heard of another fault or we’re flashing back a bit to just before it happened. That’s what I thought at first, but it turned out it was after…after Remington died. After building up why he was important to Kirk it was almost animesque in how that meant he was about to die. It’s the same failure as the last time, only with nobody to sense Remington dying nobody knew until the nurse heard his body hit the ground. It’s a sad end but right now the focus is on making sure Amanda doesn’t join him and T’Zan. Eleyna is using Sarek’s computer that allows access to more than the regular computers, and I have a feeling this will be a clue given what they find, or rather don’t find.

As our cast tries to figure out what happened, Kirk is the one to give voice to something Spock suspected due to his time in Starfleet and the assembled Vulcans wouldn’t consider because it’s unthinkable on this world…Kirk suspects it was done on purpose. Yes, we finally have our murders at the academy on Vulcan. Murder is something supposedly removed from Vulcan society, but Kirk mentions almost in passing that he was almost murdered on his last visit. The statement is quickly forgotten, and I’m not sure it would count given that, while T’Pring used the rules of the ritual to her advantage, it was still part of the ritual. This is straight up murder. Someone was able to disable the monitors so they couldn’t stop the stasis field shutdown in time. The question is who’s the target and what’s the killer’s motive?

Personally I think Lorrah is leaning a bit too hard on “Amok Time”, as she’s referenced it more than once so far. Admittedly by this point in the book series we’ve only been to Vulcan two, maybe three times. “Amok Time” showed us the Vulcan mating ritual, but honestly said so little else about Vulcan society. “Yesteryear” from the animated series gave us a look into a Vulcan rite of passage, proved teasing does happen with Vulcan children (possibly also mild racism, which is odd from the culture that gave us “infinite diversity in infinite combination), and gave us the most views of Vulcan. It’s also the only animated story that was considered canon at the time, though I believe the whole series should be canon. The first movie gave us a bit of Vulcan but not much, and if the third movie came out it only gave us the katra. I like “Amok Time” but it’s not the only interesting story set on Vulcan. “Yesteryear” probably offers more on Vulcan society than anything up to that point outside of possibly comics and novels. And yet in any Star Trek novel I have involving Vulcan, “Amok Time” is going to be the one referenced at least once.

During the search for answers one of the tests shorts out the equipment, injuring Solon but knocking out Daniel. Believing she can help, T’Mir (who arrived with Solon so he and McCoy can take over Soren and Daniel’s duties) believes he needs a mind meld to wake him up. T’Min is a xenobiologist, as Sarek notes when he wonders why she’s here because he doesn’t know about her relationship with Daniel. What she is not is a healer, so this is a mistake, especially when she picks up on Daniel’s fear that all of this was his fault. Daniel earlier blamed himself and the untried technique for what happened to T’Zan and now Remington, and T’Mir picked up on that hard. I don’t believe this makes him a suspect. We saw him blaming himself, and he has no motive for killing either person. Remington is a stranger and T’Zan was practically family. Curious to see where that goes as the story goes on. Mind melds are tricky things between Vulcans, and Daniel is not Vulcan.

So, who WAS the target? That’s going to be important to the investigation. It could be one of the murders was to cover up the other, but that doesn’t make sense. Nobody believed T’Zan was killed. It was blamed on malfunction. Eleyna didn’t know anyone besides Amanda was in the hospital undergoing the procedure, and she only knew about Amanda because she works for her husband. Maybe the killer was after the human? We’ve seen negative reactions to humans thus far. It could be a rival or someone against this new procedure trying to sabotage things. Right now we don’t have much to go on. Let’s see if more clues develop and T’Mir can put together the difference between blaming oneself and actually being guilty next time.