Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship

Mass market paperback, 334 pages
Published 2012
Acquired November 2012
Read July 2019

Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship

by Una McCormack

November 2383
Brinkmanship rounds out the eight-book Typhon Pact saga, though the Pact itself will obviously continue to cast a shadow over galactic events. It could feel like an odd coda after Plagues of Night and Raise the Dawn pulled all the previous threads together (I suspect it reads weirdly in the context of The Khitomer Accords Saga omnibus), but it's the best of all these books, and so a good stopping point.

There is no better writer of Star Trek tie-ins than Una McCormack. One of the things that makes her so good is her careful consideration of point-of-view; this book is told from three perspectives, those of Ezri Dax, Beverly Crusher, and Neta Efheny (a Cardassian spy on Ab-Tzenketh). The choice of viewpoint characters isn't incidental, or just done for reasons of plot, as it often is in tie-in fiction, but suffuses the entire book. In both Ezri and Crusher, we get principled women whose principles keep getting broken on the rocks of realpolitik. Both are healers (kind of), and have an earnest belief in what the Federation does; both have made hard choices in their day but refuse to believe that values have to be abandoned in order to be saved.

I liked this depiction of Ezri. I often struggle to connect the character the Destiny-era novels call "Ezri" with the one from television; Brinkmanship threads that needle by showing how Ezri's occasionally foolish compassion informs her command style. The Aventine doesn't get much action here, but we get to watch Ezri do her level best to prevent a war in the usual Star Trek tradition. She's tested by her discovery of what one of her friends from the Academy has become in this dark new era, and that works as a stand-in for what Starfleet and the Federation as a whole have been through. I liked the Aventine's solution to the stand-off, which manages to be humanitarian and manipulative at the same time.

Crusher was an unexpected choice for viewpoint character of the Enterprise-E thread; she's often an observer, not a mover. But this is what makes her work as a main character. As Picard points out, he already knows how to play this game, but Crusher still has her ideals. I liked her interactions with various participants in the negotiations, especially Madame Ilka, the Ferengi ambassador (I hope we get to see her again). Crusher ends up playing essentially no plot-relevant role, but that's not a bug, it's a feature. Like Ezri, she learns what it's like to balance ideals with realpolitik. This book, incidentally, is probably the first to make me feel like Crusher and Picard are actually married, with nice little details of their relationship (such as how they work a room at a reception), though to be honest, I think it would have worked just as well with them as friends.

The remaining third was the best one, about an undercover Cardassian on Ab-Tzenketh. It's got great touches, such as how she recognizes that one of her associates is also a spy, but for the Federation, and how that spy works out that she's a Cardassian. Efenhy is a patriot, but adrift in the less regimented post-Dominion Cardassian society, she finds solace in the strictly regimented Tzenkethi society. This was an excellent spy thriller, as Efenhy makes a number of awful but entirely comprehensible choices-- but one potentially really empowering one.

I also really appreciated the insight we got into Tzenkethi society; this is the one Typhon Pact book to really deliver on the series premise and explore an alien society, doing the kind of thing that I think Zero Sum Game aimed for but missed by using infiltration, as well as by using a pair of Tzenkethi cops.

I'm not sure this series really accomplished its aims on the whole, but this novel did, demonstrating (like Struggle Within) the worth of the concept was there, even if the execution was often lacking.

Continuity Notes:

• Glinn Dygan, a minor protagonist here, originally appeared in Plagues of Night; I kind of suspect he was created by McCormack for Brinkmanship and seeded back into the earlier novels.
  
• There's weirdly little direct references to the earlier Typhon Pact books; the whole time the Federation is trying to defend their skepticism toward the Tzenkethi to the Venette, I kept expecting someone to mention the time the Typhon Pact powers conspired to, I dunno, blow up Deep Space 9!? That might make a little caution justified on the part of the Federation.

Other Notes:

• This is really the only book other than The Struggle Within to take the idea (from A Singular Destiny) of an expanded Khitomer Accord seriously; we get to see what it's like for the Federation, Cardassians, and Ferengi to all work together in common cause, something unimaginable a decade prior. (And still pretty difficult to pull off!)
• Picard might not be a viewpoint character, but McCormack writes him some good Patrick Stewart speeches anyway.
  
• The excerpts from the output of the Venette syndics are touching, and effective in making you fear for this never-before-mentioned race.
• I think one chapter of this book gave Sam Bowers more personality than all previous Aventine-focused novels put together.