Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Department of Temporal Investigations: Shield of the Gods

Published: 2017
Acquired: March 2019
Read: October 2020

Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Shield of the Gods

by Christopher L. Bennett

April 2385
This, the final DTI book (thus far, anyway, but probably also forever) wraps up the "Vault trilogy" in a tale of the DTI trying to track down Daiyar, the rough Aegis agent who staged the heist in Time Lock. The book starts decently if not excitingly, with the DTI undertaking some policework to track down Daiyar.

Unfortunately, the policework never really goes beyond policework. In their best moments, Watching the Clock and The Collectors were fun because they transposed police procedural tropes to time travel shenanigans. For the most part, though, this is just an actual police story; the DTI is hunting down a fugitive, and there's not really any temporal shenanigans at all. They stake out a place she might go, shake down known contacts: it's all too familiar and all too uninteresting as a result.

The book feels like it's building toward a climax at least, but in the end, it all fizzles out. Daiyar has kidnapped DTI agent Ranjea and taken him into the past with her; our heroes don't know if the timeline has been changed because they're in a subspace bubble. They inch their way out of it and learn... yes, everything's fine. Then we have a lengthy flashback where we learn that Ranjea just kind of talked her out of it. It's a huge anticlimax.

It also felt morally reprehensible. The end of the book means that Daiyar has to just accept that genocides happen. Ranjea lectures her:

"[S]ometimes adults who go out into the world meet terrible fates. There is no avoiding that in every case."
     "And sometimes they go out and choose to inflict terrible fates on others."
     "Yes. That cannot be helped either. Once they are given the choice, the choice is theirs, and that means there is no guarantee that it will be the one you wished for. That is the self-determination prized by the Aegis, and by the Federation in its own way: The right, not only to succeed, but to fail. Not only to make the right decisions, but to be free to make the wrong ones. There cannot be one without the other. But what matters, what both our civilizations prize, is that all beings have the right to choose for themselves. To take responsibility for their own fates, and the fates of those they affect."​

That last line there does a lot of work. "Those they affect" is really those they commit genocide against! I know Star Trek's Prime Directive is pretty often dumb, but this felt like a particularly egregious example. I am perfectly fine with infringing on a species's right to self-determination if it stops them from committing a genocide, just like I'm perfectly happy with infringing on an individual's right to self-determination if it stops them from committing a murder. Yet this is supposed to be a positive outcome! 

The author responded to an earlier version of this review where I said, "You can't even plead that usual Star Trek canard, 'the timeline must be preserved' because the species in question wouldn't have survived to commit its genocides without temporal interference!" This isn't quite true, in fact; as Bennett pointed out, the species in question played a role in the Titan novel Orion's Hounds, where they were a pivotal part of an alliance against a cosmic threat. But I think this failed to register on me because it feels very abstract; Orion's Hounds came out in 2005, almost twelve years before Shield of the Gods. Relying on my memory of a decade-old tie-in novel (and one that wasn't a pivotal event story like, say, Destiny or Federation) just doesn't work. You can tell me it's important, but I don't feel it. 

Bennett argued that, "it's supposed to be a morally ambiguous outcome," but again, I didn't feel this. When the story turns on the protagonist giving someone a lecture, and that person accepting the lecture, it made me feel like the book wants me to accept that Daiyar did the right thing in standing down her plans, when in fact it seemed pretty clear to me that Ranjea and the DTI were morally the villains of the piece.

This left a sour taste in my mouth. This is a plodding, lecture-heavy book-- The Collectors showed that the DTI e-novellas had real promise for telling entertaining time travel stories, but I feel that Time Lock and especially this book hugely squandered that potential.

Continuity Notes:

• Shield of the Gods digs some into the Aegis, the mysterious alien backers of Gary Seven. There's some interesting logistics and such here that Bennett picks out; I wish the story had used them slightly differently

Other Notes:

• There's this one scene at the beginning where Dulmur updates the temporal agencies of all the other local powers on Daiyar and the DTI's search for her. It's really there to provide exposition (none of these other powers are relevant to the story), but it rankled me when Dulmur justifies why the DTI won't just let the Aegis handle it internally: Daiyar stole the time drive from the DTI, so it's their responsibility to get it back. But why should the other temporal powers be persuaded by the idea that Dulmur's pride is important?
• There's a bit where the DTI agents call out the fact that people mistake the Federation for a Starfleet dictatorship: "Sometimes it seemed that the rest of the galaxy--and even some Federation citizens--mistook Starfleet for the whole thing." This feels more like an out-of-universe complaint than a plausible in-universe one: this is a mistake fans make, not characters. Except that Captain Pike claims in Star Trek (2009) that the Federation is a "humanitarian and peacekeeping armada," so clearly some very smart people who should know better can't tell the difference in-universe either!

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Q Are Cordially Uninvited... by Rudy Josephs