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 last chapter, Kevin and Korsal may be about to receive some good news from the Enterprise…if they live long enough. Meanwhile, some idiot breaks medical protocol, and I think I remember who the idiot was. The answer will not surprise you, but I’m not going to spoil it here.
We’re going to be hitting the halfway mark, and it’s good that the regular cast is finally going to be involved with events. They’re who we’ve come to see and so far their absence, in spite of how good the story and characters have been thus far, has been notable. It would be fine if the story were set somewhere in the larger Star Trek universe of the classic timeline. There have been good official and unofficial stories with that idea in mind. That’s not how the book was sold, so they were missed. Now they will be part of the story and that’s a good thing.
With the intro padded out (thank you, article series blurb), let’s get reading the next chapter and see if our new favorite Klingons get rescued, and what they’re about to walk into.
A lot of this chapter is just Korsal and Kevin recovering on the Enterprise. Before that we learn they’ve been there for two days, and the storm is still going on. Some storms don’t know when to go away. With no way to find more firewood and the two slowly freezing to death, Kevin is out…sorry…out cold when they’re beamed aboard the ship. We learn that McCoy isn’t the only doctor here, as a Doctor Gardens is looking them over as acting Chief Medical Officer, McCoy probably already on Nisus with the medical team. I looked up Memory Beta, home of the licensed but non-canon material, but outside of showing up on the novel’s page as just “Gardens”, she doesn’t get acknowledged. I guess Lorah never got to use her again and nobody else did, either.
Korsal’s awake enough to help them recalibrate the medical scanners in sickbay for Kevin, being half-human. I guess it’s something they never planned for because they never saw one before. Klingons and humans don’t traditionally get along to reproduce. They do have information on Klingons to calibrate for Korsal, which someone forgot to do to set this little bit up. It’s a nice bit of worldbuilding to have them reset the scanners. At first I couldn’t figure out how Korsal knew what ship just beamed them out of the cold (nice to see from his perspective, which we rarely get to see), and then I realized he would know that’s the ship bringing in the experts coming to add a new perspective to the problem.
The chapter ends with alarms sounding, but this time it’s someone messing with the engines, Korsal recognizing Scott’s voice from the transporter room demanding to know who’s “mucking around with my engines”. Another cliffhanger, but we’ll have to see how well it pays off. Hopefully it’s not there just to be there, because this was an okay chapter. It’s not a strong chapter but a necessary one to see father and son get rescued and remind us that Kevin’s vital signs would be different due to his mixed heritage. I also have to keep reminding my mind’s make-up department that this is old Trek, and to picture the Klingons from TOS and TAS rather than the movies onward, because that’s what they would have looked like. We’ve grown to picture the Klingons one way…Kurtzman’s blue Klingon nonsense aside, so it takes some getting used to mentally.
With the rescue complete, next time takes us back into dealing with the main issues, the plague and the warrior Vulcans. How do they tie in together? We’ll have to keep reading to find out.
