Captain Jean-Luc Picard just showed up at a sector captains’ meeting with a serious case of imposter syndrome. He’s all of 28, and the only reason he’s a captain is that everyone higher else up on the command chain got killed and he  made good acting-captain decisions when he was suddenly thrust into the chair.   No one takes him seriously at the meeting, except for Admiral McActeer, who has inexplicably and publicly declared that Captain Picard is now tasked with taking down the White Wolf, some pirate who’s been plaguing the sector.   It’s nice to have higher command believing in him, he supposes, but this feels a bit much for a first jo  – wait. Admiral McActeer just assigned him seven new crewmembers without Picard’s input,  and they’re all Breakfast Club level problematic?    Welcome to Gauntlet, the first in the Star Trek: Stargazer series!

Michael Jan Friedman is one of the earliest Treklit authors I got attached to, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this series wasn’t responsible for that.   In another book, Valiant,  MJF depicted the circumstances that saw a young Picard take emergency command of the good ship Valiant,  leading to his promotion to Captain and his receiving the Stargazer. Gauntlet begins very soon after Picard receives his first command, and the outlook is not good.  His first mission is seemingly impossible: to take down a pirate who three outstanding captains have failed to capture,  in large part because the White Wolf holes up in a Badlands-type system where space is not vast and mostly empty, but a minefield of energy distortions that cripple sensors and can destroy ships. However – The White Wolf lives there.  There must be a way to navigate. But can a young captain and an untested crew – worse, a crew partially hobbled by new problem children the Admiral wants to get rid of – find the way?

There’s a lot going on in this little novel, as we see Picard struggling against his own self doubt but relying on a mostly-memorable ensemble cast to improvise solutions through the not-Badlands’  wild array of hostile space phenomena.  This is truly an ensemble story, because while Picard does take the center stage,  he does not dominate the novel; instead we follow a security officer with disciplinary problems but a heart of gold,  another officer who is perfect paragon of Starfleet virtue who…is also a bully toward crewmen who look like dressed turkeys, and a second officer who is so punctilious I can’t help but cast her with Kim Cattrall’s Valeris. There’s an interesting mix of “bad officers who are good, good officers who are bad, and bad officers who, yep, were really bad” present here, and not everyone is dealt with in this first novel as I remember.   This series had one of those scenes that I SWORE I REMEMBER BEING IN THE SHOW but apparently only happened in my head:  Picard orders a retreat, and then a sudden stop that coincides with a full broadside of phaser  and torpedo fire. When his crew asks, politely, ‘The hell was that, sir?” he says he got the idea from a fencing maneuver called a stop-thrust, which often begins with a feigned retreat.

Good stuff all around. I suspect I’ll be reading Progenitor, too, because it’s got a bit of poetry or song in it that I’ve remembered for 25+ years and have always been frustrated by because I’ve hoped to find the full thing and am hoping it’s not something MJF just made up one single verse for.

Related:
Stargazer: Three, Michael Jan Friedman. Somehow I skipped this novel when I was reading the original run of the series, and in 2010 when I began trying to catch up on the Treklit universe buying used paperbacks, this is one I went after.