Chapter By Chapter> Star Trek: The Vulcan Academy Murders chapters 15 & 16

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.

Oh, no. This book is starting to mess with me chapter wise. Last time we had a double sized chapter. This week we need two because chapter 15 is only three pages long once you factor in the formatting and chapter 16 is about six.

Now we have our potential suspects and motives. It’s a lot more relationship related that I would have expected from Vulcans, even with humans involved. This could be (and I’m not insulting, trashing, or being negative about anything here as I’m rather enjoying the story) because women do tend to write more about emotional bonds. None of the suspects’ possible motives have to do with revenge or getting rid of a work rival. Romantic rival perhaps or someone standing in the way of romantic involvement, or at least in the way of merging houses. Every choses suspect is given a relationship-motivated goal, even if that goal is ending a relationship versus cultural rules. It’s all fascinating; just not something I expect in a Vulcan-heavy story with only four humans involved, one of which is dead and a second the person left to protect.

Oddly, nobody has assumed Amanda is the target. Could that be a coincidence or part of the plan? Let’s see what the next two chapters bring us. From this point onward I will be discussing the case alongside events, so extra spoilers here. It should be easy to get at a fair price if my quick skim of Google shopping listings is any indication, in both hardback and paperback. Just don’t pay too much. $92 for the paperback? Really, seller? You’re copy could be in better shape than mine and still not worth that.

Chapter 15 is the short one, and while it’s the length of a segment I do have to agree that this comes with a good chapter break. It starts with Daniel being brought into his office to rest. T’Mir finally realizes that what she read was his guilt over the vulnerability of the procedure, not that he’s guilty. After all, he’d have no reason to kill Remington, or T’Zan for that matter. I get the impression that she wouldn’t be an obstacle to a relationship that didn’t even exist when she died. What this sets up is a conflict between Daniel and T’Mir. It’s the first time she “experienced a human’s feelings directly”, and that phrasing has just convinced Daniel that this is over before it began. It works alongside the story, though in reality it doesn’t have anything to do with the story itself outside of extra motivation if Sendet is our killer.

As Daniel leaves to go home and recover he overhears one of his patients being accused of having gout by the medical computer when McCoy and a healer, T’Sel, are going over it. Apparently nobody gets gout in the 23rd century, which doesn’t matter because the patient, one of Daniel’s is being treated for a foot injury. Something is up with the computer’s human diagnosis system (McCoy hates computers and Daniel just uses it as a “second opinion” as it might suggest something he didn’t think of) and McCoy is smart enough to recognize it as a clue since all of the hospital systems are on the same computer system, including the one that runs the stasis chamber. Here in Connecticut a hospital network went down earlier this year because of hackers seeking ransom. I think I heard they caught the SOB but the hospital, which was annoying as my dad went in for thankfully something minor, took days to recover and get back to normal operations. Computers are a messy deal, and the hacker of this story may have made his or her first slip-up. I also just realized this kind of hits close to home and real world events.

On to chapter 16. Spock and Sarek are still working on the problem as they know it. There’s more relationship focus, this time the continuing father/son theme of Sarek and his growing understanding of his son. It isn’t necessary to the plot and I can see some making the case that there is too much focus on this because it’s basically repeating the same thought over and over, that Sarek unintentionally drove a wedge between them. It doesn’t bother me, though, and it is nice to see, but it is starting to eat up time. Or maybe now that I’m more focused on what Lorrah is doing with the relationship theme whether romantic or paternally, it’s just showing up to me more than in previous chapters.

McCoy comes in as they’re discussing ways to find the problem and McCoy suggests Spock plays chess with it. They recount the episode “Court Martial”, where Spock used a game of chess he should have stalemated the computer with, only to sound it thrash it each time, to prove that Finney had tampered with the computer records to frame Jim for his murder. Lorrah knows her Trek as there wasn’t a Memory Alpha to confirm that such an idea had come up before. Now it’s happening here, with the medical computer, which McCoy alerts Spock to. However, when they start looking at that corrupted program the power goes out. Both Vulcans are not so convinced that’s coincidence, though Spock is the one to state it while Sarek suspects. Spock’s time aboard the Enterprise has taught him to accept hunches and “gut feelings” as a form of logic and is more open about it than Sarek. These are good character moments and it’s nice to see them here not interfering with the mystery angle.

We’re going to have another one of these page count games next time as the next chapter is also six pages and the one after that also three, a reverse of this installment’s duo. Check in next time to see if they get the power on.