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.
Our last chapter was rather short, but it had McCoy telling Spock what Theris and later Korsal found out about the plague. Spoiler-free version: Spock can’t go anywhere near it.
We’re somewhere around a quarter of the way through the book, maybe more, and I’m realizing that so far the Enterprise crew has barely been part of it. Most of the story has taken place on Nisus with original characters, and when we have been on Vulcan or the NCC-1701 we focused on Jorrah’s original characters, both from the previous novel and this one’s newcomers. If I were to make an early criticism that would be it. We have more of the usual crew involved in the early chapters of The Vulcan Academy Murders but even the characters from the previous novel have taken a backseat to the Ninus characters, notably from Korsal’s perspective.
The previous novel’s doctors are characters she’s familiar with, so I understand using them again, maybe showing Daniel and T’Mir’s first years of marriage (well, first weeks given the timeframe), but this feels more like a story set in the Star Wars universe and the classic timeline 23rd century period rather than a story with the usual crew. I’m not against that, but the three characters prominent on the cover have done little more than exposition. Even Kirk’s fight in the gym was part of introducing Sendet’s faction more than involving the story. I’m still enjoying the story personally. It was one of the first novels I got from Star Trek if not the first (it’s in better shape than my copy of Enterprise: The First Adventure) and I enjoyed it enough to get the earlier novel that you’re not supposed to need. From a personal critic perspective, however, I have to bring it up as a flaw in the book. Hopefully they’ll feature more as we continue, but this chapter is focused on Korsal and his son, Kevin. Let’s see what they’re up to.
Here’s the story I expected a couple of chapters ago, Korsal and Kevin going to check out the ice filtration damage. They take the snow from the mountain as it melts and slides down, and that’s how they get water for the turbines. I don’t know if that included drinking water, but Korsal and the dam engineer suspected the ice that damaged the turbines got past the sluices that supposed to break it up.
So we start with Korsal and Kevin waking up to prepare to go. It’s a typical morning for going on such a mission. They make coffee, Korsal’s Orion wife made breakfast that could be heated up rather than using a replicator or something. I’m actually wondering if food replicators was just a The Next Generation invention that got retroactively put into the past after years of classic Star Trek stories involving pattern buffers and the transporter. Both the live-action and animated series used them as medical devices, which TNG even broke out once or twice. It was the same tech that allowed holograms to be completely solid, a bit of science that wasn’t probably thought about in the Animated Series when they introduced the precursor in “The Practical Joker”. (Which of course started the tradition of going nuts and nearly killing the people inside.)
So after the equivalent of breaking out the homemade breakfast burritos, father and son head to the airport and take a hoverer (continuing equivalents, a small scout plane) to check out the damage. One of the lower sluices is indeed damaged, but it just seems to be the one. Of course, since this story can’t have enough things go wrong, a storm hits and getting out of it causes one of the engines to explode, our pilots managing to get out in time, but with Korsal injured and not knowing what happened to Korsal. Cue the cliffhanger stinger.
The story lets us know that Kevin is a good pilot, so nothing can be blamed on him despite his inexperience. The hoverer has two sets of controls, so Korsal can take over when he needs to, and does. We are also shown Kevin is smart when he and Korsal start thinking about an improved warning system to prevent this in the future, and all of the problems they’d have to consider: animals, the cold, other possible false flags, and other engineering stuff like that. Lorrah even sneaks in snippets of Klingon culture, something we don’t usually get in the classic period because the Klingons were just recurring antagonists until Worf in the shows and maybe Konom in the DC comic stories. Only one of those is official material, mind you. The other, like this novel, is licensed, but with nothing official it’s good to see someone try to explore a warrior culture.
So overall a good chapter, but did we need yet another disaster happening to the cast? I am worried about all the extra subplots, this being my second readthrough of this book, and the last one being when I got it back in high, maybe middle school. However, we get some good character moments and the story is advancing. We’re back to the Enterprise next chapter to see how our usual heroes deal with the news about the plague’s favorite incubators.
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