The Enterprise is a plague ship enroute to an independent world for a rare medical ingredient when it answers a distress signal and things get…complicated. As in, this couldn’t be worse, could it? complicated, because the rescue creates a no-win diplomatic scenario that puts Enterprise in the sights of both the independent world (which they need to keep the crew alive) and the Klingons — with an away team exposed to mob nuttiness on the planet, and the Enterprise‘s effectiveness declining by the hour and more and more of her crew become incapacitated with the space-plague, to the point where yeomen are being tasked to bridge stations. Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed.

Greg Cox is one of the earliest Trek writers I ever encountered (his Assignment: Eternity from 1998 was the first adult ST title I read), and unlike others from that period I’ve continued thoroughly enjoying his work even as Treklit became more artistically sophisticated in the mid-2000s Relaunch era. Cox has a particularly good handle on the TOS characters, but here he throws a curve: we’re on Pike‘s Enterprise, shortly after “The Cage”. Reading this after Strange New Worlds is a decidedly odd experience, almost like watching two similar movies on the same film, their images interlaced and vying for dominance. Pike, Una, and Spock are all here, but which actor I see and hear behind their lines varies from scene to scene. There’s an interesting mix of book-lore and anachronisms: Una’s background as an Illyrian, created by D.C. Fontana, is here — but not her name, which didn’t appear until the ST Legacies trilogy, so (amusingly) she’s referred to as Number One every single time she appears. This is hand-waved as her real name being too long for most people to handle, so she suggests people merely call her Number One. Sure, she could go by Majel or Rebecca, but that’s for normies. Cox also tries to accommodate odd details from the pilot, like writing Pike as someone with a preference for hard copies. One wonders if that inspired John Jackson Miller to give Pike a history with a Luddite colony in The High Country. Another curiosity is Cox employing phrases like ‘hyperdrive’ and ‘laser pistol’ which are both charmingly raygun gothic and deliberately anachronistic, presumably to press the point that this is a different era in Trek history.

Storywise, Cox creates an opportunity for Spock to shine by making him the foil of the woman whose existence causes all of the plot problems, as they’re both caught between worlds and cultures. We’ll be skirting the edges of spoiler territory here, but the woman in question was abducted during a Klingon attack on the independent planet a decade before, and effectively raised as a Klingon, self-consciously leaning into stereotypes in the way that Worf would a generation later. The trouble starts when her sister tracks her town and ‘rescues’ her — and only grows, because the indie planet insists that Enterprise return THE WOMEN!!! to them (it’s an election year, so returning the grown-up abductee will be great optics for the incumbent), while the Klingons are insisting the same, but less for principle and more because Klingons gotta Klingon. Spock’s struggling with his own identity works well with this woman who rejected her heritage out of self-preservation, but who now has a real choice as to who to be, and the tight action-adventure thriller made this one a fun romp. It even has a Klingon boarding party on the Big E!

Coming up: …well, same as yesterday. Star Trek, Neuromancer, and other SF! I have another Pike novel (Burning Dreams) warming up.