Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Coda: Oblivion's Gate

July 2387 / 2373, Borg timeline / Intertime / Sept. 1966
There are times that there's a disconnect between what a book says it's about and what it's actually about. Usually, I feel like this happens when the mechanics of the plot haven't been designed to emphasize the themes. Two examples that spring to mind are the third Mistborn book by Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages, and the second Raybearer book by Jordan Ifueko, Redemptor. The former book is supposedly about how to use political power appropriately and trying to stop the end of the world... but unfortunately, most of the book is actually about the main characters standing in a cave trying to get through a door. So though one is told the fate of the world is at stake, it doesn't really feel like it. Similarly, in the latter book, the characters have a stated urgent goal of preventing the spirits of children from being carried off but the way they need to accomplish this is by assembling a ruling council, and that ends up feeling like a distraction from the other goal, and disrupts the urgency of it.

Star Trek: Coda, Book III: Oblivion's Gate
by David Mack

Published: 2021
Acquired: December 2021
Read: August 2025

I think that Oblivion's Gate suffers from a similar problem. In an interview with Paul Semel, David Mack says that "the entire novel is a rumination on what it means to find a 'good' death, a quietus with significance, and an exhortation to remember to live while one can, and not merely exist." (He also goes on to say that it "is meant as a sort of rebuttal to the pervasive hopeless nihilism of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against The Human Race.") But when you read the book, it is mostly a succession of action sequences, the stakes of many of which feel quite arbitrary. It feels like a step back that much of the book is about fighting the Borg—Mack himself was the one who wrote the book that put an end to them, after all—and what does scene after scene on an alternate 2373 have to do with it?

If the book is about "find[ing] a 'good' death" and "liv[ing] while one can," then the plot needs to reflect that more. Which is to say, I think there needed to be more of a conflict about this concept. But the book actually dispenses with this conflict pretty quickly. All the characters look at the temporal evidence (more on that later), decide they need to die, and then they just do it. On the one hand, I guess this is admirable in a Star Trekky, aspirational sense. But on the other hand, it means the book gets very little drama out of the idea of finding a good death. If the book wants to be about the fact that sometimes there's nothing you can do other than die for the sake of someone else, then I think there needs to be characters who don't believe this, but come to.

This, to me, is the real problem of the Admiral Riker plotline, which began back at the beginning of book II and continues for a distressingly long period of time in this one. From a narrative standpoint, it's boring, and it's difficult to believe that all of the other characters let it go on so long. In Star Trek, people are always standing up against commanding officers who have gone crazy; I just don't buy that Troi and Vale and Sarai would put up with Riker's antics for long,* and it's just dull to read chapter after chapter of them going along with what is very obviously the wrong choice. But beyond this—what if Riker and Picard had a real conflict about what was the right decision to make, instead of Riker's opposition coming from him having a technobabble spacetime insanity? And thus the trajectory of the book was about one of them convincing the other of a necessity of finding a good death? Then the book's plot would be married to its themes.

The beginning of the book has to pile on a lot of technobabble about how the Borg caused the timeline divergence that created the "First Splinter"... and I found this all quite tough to take in, because it's so transparently setting up the stakes of the book in a very specific way, and ultimately comes across as too complicated to really buy into. Star Trek time travel (Christopher L. Bennett's best efforts aside) has quite arbitrary rules. Having all your characters decide to die on the basis of them is a risky choice, because if the reader doesn't believe in those rules, then everything that follows on from them will also fail to convince. Ultimately, I wonder if the trilogy's idea that timeline after timeline was falling to the Devidians was too much, and if a simpler arrangement would have been easier to buy: perhaps just both the "Prime Timeline" and the First Splinter are seemingly doomed to die, and the First Splinter characters realize they can save the other but not themselves. I don't know; it's not necessarily good criticism to say how you would have done it when you're not the writer. But I do know that how the stakes were set up here ultimately didn't work.

Readers of this series of posts will know that I was ultimately not a huge fan of many of the directions taken in the novels post-Destiny. Or perhaps to put it more accurately, the lack of direction; it seems to me that the later novels of the so-called "novelverse" lacked the clear character threads that pervaded (especially) the early Deep Space Nine relaunch and early Titan novels, instead lurching (like a "Big Two" superhero comic book) from big event to big event. 

But I feel like even if you were a big fan of everything the novels did from Typhon Pact onward, it would be hard to be fan of the way Coda wrapped it all up. What makes the novelverse appeal is the sense you're reading an enormous tapestry, one big story that moves forward. But what Coda does is cut this tapestry off. To the extent that there was one big story in the novels, we don't get to see it wrap up. Instead everything just blows up. The problem is, that without this trilogy, it would be much the same; if the last Destiny-era book had just been Collateral Damage, I don't think it would really be any different from what we got here. Why do we need a book to say that we're not going to get a resolution to, say, the Endalla storyline when we already know that we're not going to get a resolution to the Endalla storyline? If we were going to go back to the novelverse for one last spin, then I feel like that last spin needs to do something other than just arbitrarily cut everything off, because arbitrarily being cut off is what we had without this trilogy.

Moreover, I found the trilogy as a whole, and Oblivion's Gate in particular, chose its emphases weirdly. If the goal is to provide one last hurrah to the novels, why is so much of what the novels built up over twenty years since Avatar largely ignored? Why is so much time spent on things that the novels rarely dealt with? Across all three books, we have a lot of time spent on Wesley Crusher, a character largely absent from this era of Star Trek, book III of Cold Equations aside. Too much of this book in particular is spent on the mirror universe, always one of the weakest elements of the Destiny era. I feel like those wanting a wrapup to the books didn't want to know what happened to mirror Saavik or mirror K'Ehleyr.

On the flip side, many elements integral to the success of the Destiny-era fiction are 1) poorly done by, 2) reduced to cameos, or 3) not here at all. If you were a fan of Titan, you get to experience six hundred pages of them standing around like chumps while Riker goes crazy. If you were a fan of S.C.E./Corps of Engineers, you get one chapter of them which largely seems to be a joke about Tev's obnoxious pedantry. If you were a fan of DTI, you get a returning appearance by a character who ought not to have actually made one. If you were a fan of the Deep Space Nine relaunch, you get one last hurrah for the tv characters, but little that draws on the books (aside from the touching Quark/Ro scenes in the previous book). Why does the last-ever book about Kira mostly involve her standing there doing nothing while the mirror Ezri does nothing? If you were a fan of New Frontier (the series that really began the novelverse in any meaningful sense, I would argue), you just get a mention of the mirror Calhoun. I haven't read any Voyager books after Full Circle, but was there really nothing for them but small appearances by Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres?

Ultimately, The Ashes of Tomorrow managed to get enough emotion out of the deaths of some of the characters to kind of get away with it despite the flaws baked into the design of this trilogy. But Oblivion's Gate doesn't have this, so you're ultimately just left with the metafictional necessity of it all—which honestly, can just never be satisfying. 

This is really driven home by the misjudged coda to Coda, where Benny Russell finishes writing Oblivion's Gate and then turns over a page and begins writing The Last Best Hope. Leaving aside that you could never convince me the same person could somehow write a David Mack novel and an Una McCormack one... why would Benny Russell do this? Why would he kill off every character and then just start writing adventures for them in an alternate continuity? 

There's clearly no narrative reason at all. The reason this all happened isn't because anyone thought it would make for a good story; the reason this all happened is because of the perils of franchise storytelling. But Benny's not subject to that, so it makes little sense. The only reason to tell the story of Coda is because a big tv show had to be made, and the novels have to tie into that. 

Possibly in some other timeline, there's a version of Coda that makes this worth; god knows that franchise fiction has often managed to get genuinely heartfelt stories out of what were clearly nonnarrative choices. (The obvious inspiration for this series, Crisis on Infinite Earths, is a great example of this.) But that didn't happen here.

On its own terms as a story, Coda ultimately has no reason to exist.

Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen as Kadohata
(photomanip by Columbia clipper, I think)

Continuity Notes:

• The Defiant is in this book a lot... but did either book II or III of Coda even mention any of the various DS9/Defiant crew that David R. George III created for his post-Destiny novels? I get it, no one thinks those characters were more boring than I do, but it is kind of weird to totally exclude them from a novelverse wrapup.
• One notes that Mack makes sure to establish that the Borg can exist independent of the specific origin he ascribed to them in the Destiny trilogy.
• Totally random cameo from the mirror Kadohata. Why not, I guess.

Other Notes:

• I found this book's seeming claim that K'Ehleyr was the real love of Worf's life honestly kind of weird. They had a nice fling, I guess... and then she systematically kept information from him for years! Why not the woman he actually built a life with? Surely that's what love really is. Spending so much time on this plot was another thing that felt misjudged about the emphases of this novel.
• I thought the scene where René goads all the mirror universe characters into dying for no reason very improbable. Look, I know people in the mirror universe are kind of dumb in general, but one kid calls you a coward, and that's it, you sacrifice your lives pointlessly to prove him wrong?
• I also really hated making Wesley inadvertantly responsible for the Devidians via a bootstrap paradox. First, those kind of things are often dramatically inert; it means people take action for no other reason than that the plot requires them to take action. And second, why put all this on Wesley's screwup?
• I don't really get what was up with the "René gets old" subplot now that we've got to the end of the trilogy. Like, what did it add? It has been suggested to me that this is "because otherwise we have to read how a little kid dies," but of course the Rikers' daughter Natasha does die, and so does—more implicitly—the Siskos' daughter Rebecca. It thus occurs to me that if Coda were going to do weird time shit with a captain character's kid, surely it ought to have been the captain character's kid who already had weird time shit going on? Though that would have required the people writing this series to engage with David R. George's DS9 novels, though, which clearly was not a priority.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The End of This Day's Business by Eleta Preloc

 * On p. 215, Sarai finally reaches the conclusion that Riker "most definitely is not 'all right.'" I actually sighed out loud at this.

Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation by Mike Johnson & Tim Jones, David Messina, et al.

Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation

Collection published: 2010
Acquired: June 2021
Read: October 2025

I spent some time late last year into early this year reading my way through the various "Kelvin timeline" comics and novels. Some of them I reviewed on the TrekBBS, though I fell behind. But what I never got around to doing was posting those reviews here. So, finally, time to do it!

Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation #1-6 (Feb.-Aug. 2010)

screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman, adaptation by Mike Johnson & Tim Jones, pencils by David Messina with Claudia Balboni, inks by Gaetano Carlucci, colors by Giaovanna Niro and Ilaria Traversi, letters by Robbie Robbins and Neil Uyetake

I was kind of worried about this book going in; in my experience, most comics adaptations of films are not up to much, often reading as a condensed version of a story optimized for a different medium.

To my surprise, then, scripters Mike Johnson & Tim Jones and artist David Messina deliver a pretty strong retelling of the 2009 film. I mean, it won't knock your world alight, but it does a good job of hitting the beats of the story via the medium of comics. Probably this is at least partially because it's been given a whole six issues, so (mostly) it's not too compressed. But also Johnson/Jones/Messina have good pacing instincts, sometimes piling a lot of panels into a single page, sometimes using double-page spreads in order to capture a key moment. Clearly also some thought was put into putting issue endpoints at key moments, so that each issue works as a unit.

from Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation #5
(art by David Messina & Claudia Balboni and Gaetano Carlucci)

The result is an adaptation that reads fairly genuinely as a comic. It's probably at its best when covering the earlier parts of the story; it's not until the end of issue #3 that Nero's attack begins, so the early parts of the book have a lot of space to unfold key moments like the destruction of the Kelvin or the reveal of the Enterprise in space. On the other hand, moments like Kirk's and Spock's fight on the bridge are given numerous panels on a single page, really giving them an impact.

Indeed, issue #4 is probably the one compression hurt the most; the drill battle is just not interesting in this format, with key moments like Sulu's unfolding sword going by too quick to leave an impression, and I found the death of Amanda way too rushed to give it the import it needed, and then the issue's final panel, weirdly, does not clearly communicate the destruction of Vulcan. The unnecessary Galaxy Questeseque second climax of the film, where the Enterprise is almost pulled into a black hole, comes across as even more unnecessary here.

from Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation #4
(art by David Messina & Claudia Balboni and Gaetano Carlucci)

The book's solicits trumpeted the inclusion of cut material, but this mostly seems to just be a couple lines of dialogue here and there. David Messina is a longstanding Star Trek artist for IDW, and he mostly does a good job here, though I struggled a bit with his likeness for Bruce Greenwood's Pike. Overall I think this does exactly what it needed to, and did it well. Probably the best comics adaptation of a Star Trek film other than the two by Peter David.

This is the first in a series of posts about the Kelvin timeline Star Trek comics (and novels). The next installment covers More Beautiful than Death.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Coda: The Ashes of Tomorrow

July 2387
My guess is that I am going to reach book III of Coda and decide Coda was a bad idea. Some might roll their eyes at this declaration, but I just want to put my cards on the table as a reviewer. People are allowed to go into works of art with a suspicion of what they will think about them, contra the opinions of some creators. But, also, maybe I am wrong! Certainly I have my own thoughts on what a "novelverse" wrapup trilogy should have done, but we'll see.

Star Trek: Coda, Book II: The Ashes of Tomorrow
by James Swallow

Published: 2021
Acquired: October 2021
Read: August 2025

That said, if it had to be done this way, The Ashes of Tomorrow is probably about the best it could have been done. James Swallow's novel picks up from the end of book I, Moments Asunder, with Devidians devouring the galaxy. Whereas Moments Asunder mostly focused on the Enterprise-E crew, this book begins with them, but as it goes on, increasingly focuses on the Deep Space Nine cast. Yes, Picard and Worf are there, but the series cast who are all there, getting the spotlight, are the DS9 ones.

It's really effective. One of the great things the original DS9 relaunch did was be willing to move on from the tv characters in the configuration we had known them... but this does mean that it's been eleven years of story time and twenty years of real time since Sisko, Kira, Bashir, O'Brien, Odo, Quark, Jake, and Nog got together to solve a problem as a team. Swallow very effectively hits the nostalgia button here; I loved the scene where they all end up together, trying to figure out what can be done about this problem. Swallow has a very strong command of their voices.

If I have a complaint, it's that while most of the novel-original characters (e.g., Taran'atar, Vaughn) had been killed off by this point, we don't get a return appearance by, say, Shar or Prynn. This is the end of the litverse after all; most of these characters could be seen again... but not Shar! There is at least a lot of Ro Laren. (James Swallow can't make the USS Robinson crew interesting, alas, but he does wisely avoid even mentioning most of David R. George's other post–Typhon Pact recurring cast. Sorry not sorry, Jefferson Blackmer. You will forever be Starfleet's worst and most boring chief of security. Your space station is being purposefully destroyed, and your boss doesn't even mention you.)

Almost all of the characters get great moments. Nog dies—but he dies saving Jake. Jake saves the lives of a bunch of civilians (and we learn he wrote a novel based on the events of Rising Son). Quark and Ro have a genuinely emotional scene about growing old together. Odo gets a couple good gotcha moments. O'Brien's death isn't as impactful as some, but he goes out swinging. I found that Swallow captured Quark best of all. I liked that it was Quark who most objected to the plan to destroy the wormhole, and the scene where he says he's staying behind to protect what's most precious to him, which Ro initially thinks means the bar, but turns out to mean her, is great. Quark always comes through when it matters, and Swallow nailed that here. (Also good: "it's very presumptuous of you to assume that I'd just go along with this, without complaint." "I never assumed you wouldn't complain.")

I wasn't a huge fan, though, of how the Bajoran prohecy was just a maguffin, only of relevance as yet another portent of the apocalypse. At its best, DS9 managed to also use stuff like that to say something interesting about faith, but that's absent here.

This book also does the "flashes of random established characters in action scenes to show the scope of the crisis" thing more effectively than Moments Asunder, with appearances by Martok and Klag, for example. No full-on IKS Gorkon, but I'll take what I can get. (Has there been a da Vinci reference in this series? I haven't noticed one yet.) We also get a lot of random callbacks, which I enjoyed because it fits the tone of the series. Who would have thought a key plot point in this trilogy would reference Keith DeCandido's The Brave and the Bold duology!? Or that there'd a passing reference to The Janus Gate trilogy of all things!?! (Had that ever even been referenced by another "novelverse" book before?) (The thing this book needed, though, to really complete the vibe was comic book–style footnotes explaining this references. Those parts should have had a note at the bottom of the page attributed to "Editing Ed" or something.)

My big complaint is that if this book is our last chance to see the novels' Admiral Riker—and especially, the novels' version of the Titan—I'm pretty disappointed with the choice to go with a "Riker is crazy and has to hunt Picard" subplot. Not only did we (as the book itself points out) do this quite recently in Takedown,* but it means we can't really get any POV scenes from any Titan characters, as it would lampshade how little sense it makes that they're all going along with Riker's plan. Disappointing, given how 1) Titan was one of my favorite novel-original concepts, and 2) Swallow is typically very good at writing the Titan crew.

Longtime readers know of my dislike of the novels' version of the mirror universe, so the end of this book has me worried, but on its own, this was about as good an installment as I could have hoped for.

Continuity Notes:

• Because of the way the novels have jumped around in time, you end up with weirdness like Rugiero being Sisko's first officer for (arguably) longer than Kira was. You'll never make me believe it.
• Here we learn Tom Paris is on Akaar's staff. Tom was in Moments Asunder, but I thought just because he had experience with this kind of malarkey thanks to "Year of Hell"; if he was working for Akaar there too, I missed it.
• Here we learn what nickname Wesley has for his half-brother René. Was this preestablished? I can't remember any meaningful interactions between the two in earlier books, but perhaps it was in Cold Equations.
• There is a dog on Picard's vineyard (c.f., Picard season one). It's funny, because I think of the "novelverse" as so separate from the modern shows, it was quite jarring every time there was an explicit reference to them: for example, that Boreth is a source of time crystals (as seen in Discovery). The most effective one is probably when you realize part of Riker's motivation is this feeling that he ought to have two kids and live in a cabin in the wilderness (Picard: "Nepenthe"); I wish the book had leaned into that more, it could have made evil Riker work.
• Given how many books were referenced here, it struck me as quite pointed that the book makes sure to establish that Saavik and Spock are good friends and great colleagues and no more, contradicting Vulcan's Heart and Vulcan's Soul, even though those books have been previously referenced by other Destiny-era books.
• Alexander and Spock previously met (for some reason) in the Prometheus trilogy. I didn't detect any reference to that here, but I also didn't notice any explicit indication they hadn't met; their first meeting here seems to be between scenes.
• When did Odo resume being constable on DS9? Is this something that happened in another book that I forgot about?
• Look, the Andorian transporter duplicates were dumb. I appreciate this book wrapped that plotline offhandedly, but it should have done so in a way that made it clear what a dumb plotline that was to begin with.
• I didn't buy how little Picard seemed to know about Bashir (p. 287). Surely there was a lot of information on him in the Section 31 files released at the end of Control, and surely Picard would have read all about him!
• Counselor Hegol dies in book I of Coda but pops up here. Whoops.

Other Notes:

• Why is the adjutant of the Federation ambassador to the Klingons a Klingon? That didn't make any sense to me.
• At the beginning of the book, a former disciple of Admiral Dougherty (from Insurrection) gets a lot of setup, but I don't really know why, because he promptly vanishes from the story in favor of the "evil Riker" approach.
• There is a Nick Locarno joke here. James Swallow beat Lower Decks to the punch!
• Jake calls Rebecca his "stepsister" (p. 151), but that's wrong, she's a half-sister.
• Endalla being destroyed in gory detail without a single reference to the "what's up with Endalla" plotline that ran interminably through DRG3's DS9 novels just feels like trolling.
• Does every James Swallow Star Trek novel have a bit where someone says "down and safe" after beaming?

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Coda: Oblivion's Gate by David Mack

* Funny moment: Riker points out Picard gets possessed a lot; Vale retaliates that so does Riker.

Star Trek: Return to the Taurus Reach: Vanguard, Books 4 & 5

I am quite behind on my book reviews, so my original plan was to review the first three Star Trek: Vanguard books here on my blog when I reread them because I had never reviewed them before (they predate my bookbloogging; I do feel like I reviewed book one on the TrekBBS when it came out, but if so, I can't find the post). However, I reviewed books four and five on my old LiveJournal back in the day, so I figured I would repost those reviews here as a way of quickly catching up on my reviews...

...but then when it came time to do that, I found that I just had too many thoughts! So I will repost those old reviews, but also I am going to expand those thoughts. Just as I felt the first three books worked as a single unit, so do books four and five: between them, they tie off a number of the character and plot threads set up in the first two books, especially as regards Reyes, T'Prynn, Pennington, and Quinn.

Of book four, Open Secrets, I originally wrote this:

The Vanguard series continues from the cliffhanger at the end of Reap the Whirlwind, and that plotline was probably my favorite of the many strands running throughout this book. Though Commodore Reyes seemed less than active in his own defense, I feel that despite (or because of) that we learned more about him in this one book than in the previous three. The other plotlines continue to chug along, perturbed by the events of the Federation-Klingon War (as seen in "Errand of Mercy") but otherwise not incredibly remarkable, with the exception of the Pennington/T'Prynn story, which added another interesting layer to my favorite journalist. I'm never quite sure what to think of Vanguard, but I'll certainly be continuing along to Precipice. 

Rereading it over fifteen years later, I feel differently about the Reyes plotline; I think this is because the events of books one through three are fresh in my memory, since I read them months instead of years prior. When I reread the first three books, particularly book one, Harbinger, it was very clear to me that these books were commenting on the post-9/11 security state through a science fiction lens much in the same way that, say, the Battlestar Galactica reboot did. Here, Reyes goes on trial for what he's done... but in a nice twist, not for the unethical things he did, but for the one ethical thing he did, allow Pennington to reveal the truth. I like this idea, but in the end, I feel like—just as was true of the earlier books—we don't get much insight into why Reyes ultimately did what he did, what made these decisions feel compelling to him to begin with. Why was he willing to sacrifice innocent lives and civil rights on the altar of Federation security and state secrets? I honestly still don't really know after reading four books about this guy. (I do finally know why T'Prynn was willing to do this, but we'll discuss that when I get to book five.)

Star Trek: Vanguard: Open Secrets
by Dayton Ward

Published: 2009
Acquired: May 2009
Previously read: June 2009
Reread: April 2026

Outside of the trial, I unfortunately found the book pretty dramatically inert. The book begins with a flash-forward to what was happening on Vanguard during the events of the original series episode "Errand of Mercy"—the Klingons are approaching Vanguard, but as seen in that episode, suddenly both sides' controls get too hot to use and the Organians unliterally end the war. This scene is set in 2267, and then we jump back a year and fill in what got us up to this point. This does the exact opposite of open the book with an exciting tease, unfortunately, as whenever the Klingons are up to something in the rest of the book, the reader knows it's ultimately going to go nowhere because of something that happened in an episode from 1967. I mean, the reader might know this anyway, but we don't need to remind them!

Similar choices dog other aspects of the station narrative. Reyes is replaced as commander of Vanguard Station by Admiral Nogura. Nogura was only mentioned on screen twice, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture where he's Kirk's superior, but to fans of a certain age, he's a well-known figure, thanks to his presence in the 1980s novels. Especially in J. M. Dillard's The Lost Years, where he's called "the Old Man," a revered figure known for how hard he was; he comes out of retirement to take over Starfleet and clean it up following a series of scandals in the novels Dreadnought! and Battlestations! When it was announced that Nogura was going to be in this book I was quite excited... but he doesn't do anything for the entire book. He makes no interesting choices. I know he's not one of the series's ostensible leads... but it also seems weird to me that when Reyes is in command of Vanguard, there are lots of hard choices that constantly need to be made, but as soon as he's not in command, basically this all dries up and Nogura spends him time sitting around in staff meetings. Why bother to use this potentially interesting character if you're not going to do anything interesting with him?

The other major station subplots are about the scientific research happening, and they are similarly devoid of interesting moments. A Tholian defects and joins the scientific operation at Vanguard, giving them valuable information on the Shedai... but the novel only considers this from the angle of the scientific plot. How does Ming Xiong feel about working alongside a representative of the people responsible for the death of a bunch of his friends back in book one? Apparently just fine. Are the station crew curious about the mysterious Tholians? I guess not. The Tholian is there to deliver exposition about the Shedai, and beyond that, no thought has been put into their role in the narrative. Also, Ming gets assigned a boss who relieves him as leader of the science investigations on the station (The Wrath of Khan's Carol Marcus), but he's just fine with it and they get along great. In the long run we'll realize that this happens for "lore" reasons (what Carol learns about the Taurus meta-genome here influences her later work on the Genesis Project), but again, it isn't really thought through in any other way. (Also I have a hard time believing that from the way her son David talks about Kirk in the movie that he actually grew up on a Starfleet base!)

Lastly, I also found the T'Prynn/Pennington subplot a damp squib, contra my comments of fifteen years ago. Basically, Pennington and M'Benga take T'Prynn back to Vulcan. Exactly why Pennington is willing to do this is pretty vague, but mostly all the characters just do nothing while a Vulcan mystic works. T'Prynn herself is fairly absent from her own plotline.

Small niggle: while in all previous books (and future books, as far as I know), Ambassador Jetanien was a Rigellian "Chelon," in this one he suddenly becomes a "Chel" for some reason.

Precipice is the fifth Vanguard novel, and the last that I kept up with as the series was released. From this point on, all the books will be new to me. At the time I originally read it, this is what I wrote:

This novel covers almost a full year in the saga of Star Trek: Vanguard, but it feels like it artificially stretches events out in order to do that; it would have been better off with a time-frame of a couple months. I'm not a big fan of the fragmented plotlines either; hopefully the next volume sees a more central focus. It's nice to see Cervantes Quinn get some solid time, even if he did inexplicably turn from Harry Mudd into Butch Coolidge.

You can see me trying to be diplomatic there, I think. This was during my brief period as a writer of Star Trek fiction, and it didn't seem the done thing to be going around slating my fellow authors' work. (I think it was shortly after this that I stopped reviewing new Star Trek books online, actually; I only resumed doing so once it was clear to me I was not going to be writing any Star Trek books ever again.)

Star Trek: Vanguard: Precipice
by David Mack

Published: 2009
Acquired: January 2010
Previously read: March 2010
Reread: May 2026

Anyway, much like Open Secrets, I think some aspects of Precipice are dramatically inert. As I noted in my old review, the book, like Open Secrets, takes place over a whole year. This is done by having lots of things take lots of time to happen in ways I didn't find very convincing. Like, in the Pennington/T'Prynn plot, they have to hike somewhere, which takes forever, then they have to take a shuttle where they want to be, which takes forever, then they have to wait a long time for something to happen, which takes forever. Similarly, Ambassador Jetanien leaves the station to seek discussion with his Klingon and Romulan counterparts; though the Klingon turns up promptly, they wait almost all year for the Romulan. Does he really have nothing better to do? I just don't believe in it. There seem to be no internal reasons for all this, it's just so that the Vanguard series as a whole can fulfill its conceptual mandate of paralleling the original show.

Just as Open Secrets tied up the Reyes arc begun in book one, Precipice seemingly ties up the arcs for T'Prynn, Pennington, and Quinn. I found the T'Prynn arc wrapup particularly bad. First, the book's answer to the question of "why do people do terrible things in service to the security state?" is "mental illness"! The reason T'Prynn made all these awful choices in book one was because ongoing trauma from her failed mating bond and the presence of her deceased lover's katra (p. 240). It's about the least interesting answer I could have imagined. On top of that, there's this whole weird thing about how when T'Prynn is cured following the events of book four, she finds out Reyes is dead and decides to hunt down his killer. (Reyes isn't actually dead, but she doesn't know that yet.) Whose killer does she not decide to hunt down, or even think about? Her lover's! No, she's gotta deal with the death of her Man. Such a weird choice, like the author forgot the very thing that put her into a coma to begin with.

The wrapups for Pennington and Quinn are also quite bad. Pennington was introduced in book one as a good, if kind of cynical and obnoxious, journalist, but a bad person, having an extramarital affair. He's then sent to his lowest point thanks to T'Prynn's machinations; unbeknownst to him, his soon-to-be only friend, Quinn, helped her. In this book he delivers a speech explaining his personality defects that lead him to having this affair and now he's all better (pp. 238-9). It's very pat and it comes out of nowhere; how and when did he learn all this about himself? Certainly not in the intervening three books. I think you can do some interesting stuff with infidelity in fiction, but this series has not. Also, Pennington learning that his friend betrayed and lied to him also goes nowhere. Quinn's plotline here is even weirder; suddenly he has a previously unmentioned backstory as a principled mercenary and he's a badass commando operative. Like, where did this come from?

Continuity grumble: This book goes to great pains to work in the events of the 1980s novels The Vulcan Academy Murders and The IDIC Epidemic into its continuity. I don't know why, because I wouldn't have any expectation that those books were "in continuity" with these ones. But it does so in a way that makes absolutely no sense, setting them both before the television episode "Journey to Babel." But Vulcan Academy Murders is a sequel to "Journey to Babel," which entirely depends on the Enterprise characters' familiarity with Spock's parents, who they only met in "Babel." Weird choice.

Star Trek: Return to the Taurus Reach: Vanguard, Books 1–3

Star Trek: Vanguard was a series of original novels (plus some novellas) from Pocket Books, released from 2005 to 2012. I read the first five novels (roughly) as they came out... but when the sixth book came out in 2011, my progress through my reading list had gotten quite bogged down, and as of 2026, I still haven't read it! I've been slowly digging my way out recently, though, and am at last ready to tackle it... only at this point the last time I read a Vanguard book was in 2010, over fifteen years ago. I am hardly ready to jump straight into book six in the tightly serialized saga.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Harbinger
by David Mack

Published: 2005
Acquired: July 2005
Previously read: September 2005
Reread: March 2026

So, before moving onto book six, I am rereading the first five Vanguard novels. The first three predate my bookblogging, so I have no written reviews for them. Thus, in this post I'm going to (briefly?) cover all three at once.

Vanguard is a sort of parallel to the original Star Trek television series. The first book starts shortly after the second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before"; I think that the final book takes place around five years later, when the five-year mission is about to come to an end. At the time the series was announced, many fans wondered if it would a "Deep Space Nine in the 23rd century": just as DS9 took place simultaneously to Next Generation and Voyager, but was set in one place, aboard a space station, Vanguard was set in one place, aboard a space station. No traveling across space, with a new planet every week; instead, every installment is set in the same region of space. Vanguard Station (a.k.a. Starbase 47) is located in the Taurus Reach, a newly opened region of space at the fringes of Federation, Klingon, and Tholian space.

The creators of the series, editor Marco Palmieri and writer David Mack, pushed back against that conception. Rereading the series, it seems to me that everyone back then was comparing it to the wrong tv show: this isn't Deep Space Nine in the 23rd century, it's Breaking Bad in the 23rd century. Well, of course no one in 2005 could have said such a thing because Breaking Bad wouldn't debut for another three years. But Vanguard seems to me to be along those lines: one of those "prestige" television shows were we watch characters (usually white men) make difficult choices, many of them morally dubious, where the stories are willing to show the seedy underbelly of the universe and its inhabitants. I suppose more chronologically appropriate would be The Sopranos (1999–2007) or The Wire (2002–08). Really, a lot of those series came along after Vanguard, so I suppose Mack and Palmieri were ahead of the curve!

That said, shows like Breaking Bad and Sopranos and Mad Men did this to explore American conceptions of masculinity—that's not what Vanguard is doing. (Though, perhaps, it would be nice if it did; there's an emphasis on sexual dynamics here, but the books are in general more interested in reproducing them than examining them. There seems to be a mandatory "man she looks good in a miniskirt!" scene once per book. Similarly, self-descriptions like "[t]he slender, leggy young woman" populate the supposedly close third-person narration of the female characters!) Instead, it's exploring the dynamics of post-9/11 security state. When have people gone too far in pursuit of their political objectives? So, perhaps, what the books really are in the end is "Battlestar Galactica in the 23rd century." 

If that was meant to be the case, though, I find the books frustrating. The narrative arc of the first three books seems to be taking Commodore Diego Reyes to a point where he feels like he's gone too far. In the first book, David Mack's Harbinger, he authorizes some heinous stuff done to Tim Pennington, a journalist seeking to uncover the truth about what Starfleet is doing in the Taurus Reach. Throughout all three of the first three books, he coordinates the Federation's ongoing colonization efforts in the Taurus Reach, knowing that this is just to provide cover for the Federation's attempts to obtain the Taurus meta-genome, which places those colonists in grave danger. At the end of book three, Mack's Reap the Whirlwind, this plotline culminates in Reyes's ex-wife and her entire planet dying, and Reyes thus permitting Pennington to publish a story that reveals what should have remained classified, resulting in Reyes's arrest. His court-martial is covered in book four, Open Secrets, so I'll cover that later, but I found this arc unsatisfying. The problem is, as I see it, is that we don't really go into Reyes's head as he makes these decisions; we don't really know how he justifies them to himself or how he ended up in this position. If this is a commentary on the post-9/11 security state, we don't get to see the logic that causes people to make these kind of decisions to begin with. In Reap the Whirlwind and Open Secrets, we're told Reyes has lived much of his life carrying secrets for Starfleet, but why does he believe this is the right thing to do? I'm not sure. Without that justification, the reversal at the end of book three falls flat.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Summon the Thunder
by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

Published: 2006
Acquired: June 2006
Previously read: May 2007
Reread: April 2026

Indeed, I would say that the main thing that stops me from getting invested in Vanguard is the characterization. I think in principle, the ideas are fine. I do very much appreciate that (as was later done on screen in Discovery) that "main cast" is not necessarily the senior staff, but the set of characters who are influencing and influenced by events. In addition to Reyes, that's: Rena Desai, the JAG officer assigned to the station; Ming Xiong, the scientific lead assigned to Project Vanguard; Jetanien, the ambassador posted on Starbase 47; T'Prynn, the Starfleet Intelligence officer posted there; Cervantes Quinn, a smuggler operating out of the base; Tim Pennington, a journalist based on Vanguard; Ganz, an Orion smuggler whose ship is docked at the station; Ezekiel Fisher, the chief medical officer; and Anna Sandjeso, a Federation attaché who is secretly a Klingon spy. (There are lots of other characters, and not all of these characters play as big of roles as others, but these are the ones we get bios for at the end of book one, so they seem to be the ones Mack and Palmieri considered the leads.)

My issues with the characters, as of book three anyway (I'll have more thoughts on this in my writeup of book five, Precipice) is twofold. The first is that Harbinger seems to be trying to set up that these are more complicated, conflict-prone characters than you might be used to from Star Trek, especially the original series era. Unfortunately, it accomplishes this somewhat ham-handedly, in that the early parts of Harbinger are mostly about character walking around thinking about how much they don't like all the people they meet: Ming doesn't like his roommate on the USS Bombay, Reyes and Jetanien spend meeting scenes grumbling about what the other characters say, and so on. It makes everyone seem passive-aggressive and unpleasant.

My other issue is that there are just too many characters. There are the eight "main" characters, that would be fine... but there are tons of other point-of-view characters sprinkled in here, too. Random crewmembers on the Bombay in Harbinger (presumably to make us sad and surprised when they die), a whole bunch of USS Endeavour crew in book two, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore's Summon the Thunder. Why do I care about, say, the Endeavour's chief medical officer? We also get the addition of the S.C.E. characters on the USS Lovell. Too many of these characters are generic Starfleet types, without any interesting hooks, the precise kind of thing it seems to me the series's main cast was designed to move away from. I would have liked to have spent more time with our supposed actual leads, instead of cutting away to all these random people all the time.

Also, maybe I wasn't reading carefully enough, but was there a discontinuity between Harbinger and Summon the Thunder when it came to the relationship between T'Prynn and Sandjeso? Near the end of Harbinger, we find out they're sleeping with each other other—the Intelligence agent and the Klingon spy—but there's no indication that T'Prynn knows Anna's true identity. Suddenly in Summon the Thunder, T'Prynn not only knows but has turned Anna into a double agent at some point in the past. Weird transition, and also weird undermining of the premise's potential drama. (Also the tone in Harbinger was very much convenient-sex-buddies, and then in the Reap the Whirlwind they're apparently actually in love?)

My original reason for doing these three in one go was that they were simply the three I hadn't reviewed before, but I actually think they work pretty well as a complete unit, a trilogy with beginning, middle, and end, as it ends with the "secrecy" arc that began Harbinger being blown wide open. Similarly, books four and five seem to work as a duology as the series shifts its focus—more on that next time.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Reap the Whirlwind
by David Mack

Published: 2007
Acquired and previously read: August 2007
Reread: April 2026

Other Thoughts:

The cover to Harbinger is solid, giving us a nice view of the setting of the series, and I appreciate the inclusion of diagrams of the station in the book. I also like the cover to Summon the Thunder well enough. But the cover to Reap the Whirlwind is excellent, a work of art. Rarely has a "ships in space" cover to a Star Trek book been so dynamic and striking; never has a D7 battlecruiser looked more formidable. Unfortunately, I felt like after this point, the series's covers became pretty generic and mediocre, almost always just a picture of Vanguard with a Constitution-class starship somewhere. (Presumably so your casual bookstore punter would go, "oh, the Enterprise!")

I did not reread the prequel to the series, the crossover with S.C.E., a novella called Distant Early Warning (collected in Corps of Engineers: What's Past*). What is funny to me is the novella came out between books one and two, but takes place before book one... thus in book two everyone starts going on about the "Jinoteur carrier wave," a thing they for some reason never brought up in book one! 

My copies of Harbinger and Summon the Thunder are both signed by the authors; in Summon the Thunder, Kevin Dilmore wrote what is definitely my favorite thing an author has ever inscribed to me: "M-O-L-L-M-A-N-N... see I can spell it!"

Reap the Whirlwind contains a "minipedia" with entries for all the characters and places of the series thus far. I appreciate the assistance in trying to ground the reader in this sprawling saga... but unfortunately you can't use it as reference while reading the book because it contains spoilers for it! Weird call.

* This is in fact the reason I didn't reread it... I don't own it in a form where it's a complete "book" and thus I wouldn't count it as a book read on my reading list! Gotta keep those numbers up, can't waste time on reading that won't contribute.

Star Trek: Encounters with the Unknown by Jeffrey Moy, W. C. Carani, et al.

Star Trek Classics #3: Encounters with the Unknown

Collection published: 2012
Contents originally published: 2000-01
Read: April 2026

Written by Nathan Archer, Janine Ellen Young & Doselle Young, Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, Kristine Kathryn Rusch & Dean Wesley Smith

Pencils by Jeffrey Moy, David Roach, Robert Teranishi
Background Assists by Philip Moy

Inks by W. C. Carani, David Roach, Claude St. Aubin

Colors by Dan Brown (with Nick Bell)

Letters by Ryan Cline (with Jenna Garcia) & Naghmeh Zand

Like Enemy Unseen, this "Star Trek Classics" release on Hoopla from IDW takes a Wildstorm trade paperback from the 2000s and rebrands it. While Enemy Unseen collected several otherwise unrelated Next Generation stories, this one collects four Voyager stories, three double-length one-shots and one three-part miniseries. I was surprised that the obviously intentionally vague title Encounters with the Unknown is actually pretty applicable to all four stories even though it feels like it could be applied to almost any Star Trek story if you squinted hard enough!

The first story is "False Colors," whose basic premise is that Voyager encounters what seems to be a Borg ship, but turns out to be something else entirely, and then Seven, Chakotay, and Tuvok must infiltrate it in the guise of Borg drones... leading to Seven possibly starting her own little collective. Like Perchance to Dream from Enemy Unseen, it reads like it's written by someone who is new to the comics medium: lots of word balloons, few visually interesting things near the beginning, the kind of stuff that might make for a fine episode of the tv show but is dull on the comics page. When the interesting conceit of the story finally turns up—would it be ethical for Seven to establish a "collective" of her own if it helps protect Voyager? how would she feel if she did?—it's not really used in an interesting way, the characters don't seem to actually face a dilemma due to it.

I felt like the whole comic might have been constructed around the idea of the shocking cover image of Seven as a Borg—which to be fair, was similar to how several actual Voyager episodes were developed.
from Star Trek: Voyager: False Colors #1 (script by Nathan Archer, art by Jeffrey Moy & Philip Moy and W. C. Carani)

The second story in this volume is the one story I can say I've wholeheartedly enjoyed across both volumes of Star Trek Classics that I read. "Avalon Rising" is about the Doctor being sent to an alien planet to recover an artifact blocking transporters; the planet is in a medieval time period, and its knights and squires interpret the Doctor as a wizard from a distant land, a role he ends up leaning into. It's delightful stuff: visually interesting (artist David A. Roach proves every bit as adept with this Doctor as the one he normally illustrates) and the dialogue and character arc for Bob Picardo's Doctor are pitch perfect (the writing is by the unknown-to-me wife-and-husband team of Janine Ellen Young and Doselle Young). It's the kind of premise you could image them doing on screen, but they never did, reminiscent of some screen episodes (sort of a mix of "Heroes and Demons" and "Muse" and "Living Witness") without being derivative of them. Neat conceit as the Doctor retells stories of Voyager's adventures through a medieval lens, a nice heartwarming ending. Honestly, one of the best Star Trek comics I've ever read.

Unlike any other story in the volume, this one was clearly constructed around interesting visuals suited to the comics medium.
from Star Trek: Voyager: Avalon Rising #1 (script by Janine Ellen Young & Doselle Young, art by David Roach)

Next comes "Elite Force," which I guess must be an adaptation of the videogame of the same name. Despite writing by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, stalwarts of space adventures comics in general (e.g., Legion Lost) and Star Trek comics in particular (e.g., Early Voyages), I found this hard to grab onto; the "Hazard Team" characters just don't give us enough to care about. Plus (and this isn't their fault) two stories about derelict Borg and scavengers in one volume is too many!

This guy's entire personality is "dumb jock."
from Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force #1 (script by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, art by Jeffrey Moy & W. C. Carani)

Lastly there's Planet Killer, a three-part miniseries about Voyager coming across another iteration of the same weapon as in "The Doomsday Machine" from the original series. The beginning is too slow and obvious considering the reader already knows what's up even if the characters don't; the second issue wastes half its pages on Harry Kim laboriously recapping "Doomsday Machine" for some reason; the third issue is very rushed, with a lot of stuff happening in reported speech or narration, instead of on the page. Like "False Colors," too talky for a comic, and despite some good efforts by artists Robert Teranishi (who I don't know) and Claude St. Aubin (who did strong work on DC's R.E.B.E.L.S. a few years after this), the action sequences lack the necessary intensity to make the premise work. The guest character feels like an afterthought (contrast them to Commodore Decker in the episode this story very closely mirrors).

Probably the best part of the art were all the ship-in-danger shots; very well done.
from Star Trek: Voyager: Planet Killer #3 (script by Dean Wesley Smith & Kristine Kathryn Rusch, art by Robert Teranishi & Claude St. Aubin)

So, on the whole, aside from "Avalon Rising," there's little here I'd call "classic." (Oh, also my Hoopla edition has a mistake where what's included as the first page of "False Colors" is actually the first page of "Elite Force." I think the first page of "False Colors" is missing as a result.)

Star Trek Adventures: Adapting Dayton Ward's Available Light into an Original Scenario!

Often, when I read a Star Trek novel I think to myself, "This would make a good Star Trek Adventures scenario." Novels that have made me think this include John Vornholt's The Next Generation: Masks (1989), Jeffrey Lang's Deep Space Nine: Force and Motion (2016), John Jackson Miller's Prey: Hell's Heart (2016), and especially many of the Next Generation works of Dayton Ward: Armageddon's Arrow (2015), Hearts and Minds (2017), and Available Light (2019). (It's probably not a coincidence that Dayton himself has written a lot for STA.)

That last one I thought would not just make a good STA adventure in general, but would make a good fit for my campaign. The premise of the novel is that the Enterprise finds a derelict ship in deep space. It seems abandoned, but the crew eventually discovers that it's carrying 60,000 refugees from an alien planet, they're just suspended in the ship's transporter buffer—where they can actually live until the ship arrives at its destination. Things are complicated, though, when a group of scavengers turn up.

This would work well for a couple reasons. One, I wanted to make the scavengers into Ferengi instead of an original race. One of my player characters is a Ferengi woman, and she has a brother who works as a successful businessman. If her brother was among the scavengers, it could lead to some good character conflict for her. (Additionally, one of my players requested more familiar races from the show.) Second, way back in our fourth episode, the players acquired an alien superintelligence living in their computer system, the "Engineer" named "Mercury." Unlike most of their people, Mercury wanted to explore the universe; they had briefly done so in an android body (which the players found way back in episodes 1 and 2). However, Mercury had honestly not done a lot since coming aboard, aside when the players briefly consulted them in episode 6. I had the idea that Mercury might complicate things here by uploading themself into the derelict's transporter buffer, which would then let them materialize themself as a living being.

I also did a B-plot, as I've been doing more of this season. The players have been dealing a lot with the Haradin and the ways their nativist movement is disrupting the entire Ekumene sector. I wanted them to help shape Starfleet's response to this, so my subplot for this episode was a conference on the player ship's home base of Deep Space 10, where Rukot and Mooria would be summoned to participate.

Also, at the beginning of the summer, one of my players, Cari, had been torn whether to continue playing her regular character of Jor, the Diversitas's security officer, or a new one-off character she'd played in our ninth episode, Rina K'var, the blue Orion pickpocket, who'd ended up exiled by her aunt. I suggested she could play Rina once, an idea she went for, because I had a good idea how to fit the character into the B-plot of this episode.  

“Captain’s Personal Log, Stardate 55020.9. Consul Vrossaan has invited Mooria and me to a conference on Deep Space 10 to discuss growing Haradin tensions in the Ekumene sector. Professor Orven Jadrel’s understanding of Haradin history, trade, and the meanings of Harad will be essential. The Haradin are not simply facing piracy. They are facing a crisis of identity....”

This is who I had per session:

• Ryan as Rukot, captain (sessions 1-3)
• Debi as T'Cant, first officer/science officer (1, 3)
• Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer (2-3)
• Claire as Mooria Salmang, pilot (1, 3)
• Austin as Frector, Intelligence analyst (1-3)
• Andy as Gurg bim Vurg, medical officer (1-3)

...with special guest stars: 

• Cari as Rina K'var, freelance Orion (1, 3) 
• Hayley as Charley Lee, DS10 science officer (2)

I'll write this one up act by act. I did change the episode title to "No One in Here" to fit with my usual pretensions, but maintained Dayton's original title as the title of Act I. To keep with his usual theme of using Rush song titles, I used two other track titles from the same album as "Available Light" as the titles of Acts II and III. 

Act I: Available Light

Mercury appears to Gurg
(image generated by ChatGPT)

It's been an ongoing subplot in our campaign that Gurg, the Diversitas's chief medical officer, has been trying to make contact with Mercury; it was the whole reason he snuck aboard the Diversitas and finagled an assignment there. The episode began with Mercury presenting a genetic problem to Gurg; once Gurg solved it, Mercury appeared on his screen and asked what he wanted. Gurg's big technological goal is to connect people's brains to each other for the sharing of information (a collective, he is always quick to point out, not the Collective); when Gurg told Mercury this, Mercury gave Gurg a set of nearby coordinates.

It took a bit of persuasion for Gurg to convince T'Cant, who was acting captain with Rukot away at the conference, to go there, but he eventually did. There the players discovered the derelict. The three scenes were basically 1) examining the derelict from the outside, 2) beaming over and exploring it, and 3) discovering the Ferengi were aboard. (Kenyon, who plays Nevan the chief engineer, was away for this session, so we just said they left him in command when the players beamed over.) I had to come up with a bunch of Tasks for the players, of course, but I very much benefited from being able to take a bunch of description and such right out of Dayton's novel!

Nejamri derelict
(adapted from the Available Light cover by Doug Drexler)

My players were convinced this was an Alien-esque scenario, so they proceeded very cautiously. I had a bit where I played some Ferengi laughs they heard from the other side of a door, but they were convinced it was something creepy and malevolent! I had planned on having scene 3 be about them dealing with the Ferengi, but things went slightly longer than expected, so I just ended the act with the Ferengi turning up and one of them hugging Frector and exclaiming "sister!"

In Available Light, a fight breaks out between the scavengers and the Enterprise crew, and a mysterious emitter seemingly evaporates the character of T'Ryssa Chen; if there had been a fight, I would have done something like this, but this didn't happen, so I had an emitter evaporate T'Cant seemingly at random—because Debi would be out of town next week! 

In the B-plot, my goal for this act was mostly to establish the NPCs and the parameters. There were a lot, since I wanted a bunch of different possibilities represented for the conference, but most of them were returning. These were:

• Captain Akul, Klingon (episodes 3, 5, 8)
• Professor Orven Jadrel, Haradin academic (episodes 7, 8)
• Lt. Commander Mazio Sanna, Starfleet Intelligence (episodes 5, 8, 10)
• Subcommander Taleria, Romulan (episode 10) 
• Consul Vrossaan, Federation diplomat (episodes 5, 6, 8, 10) 

conference attendees

Plus there were three new NPCs: Della Robbia Roman, the admiral running the conference, (my players were delighted by my southern accent); Commander Derzir Ban, a Trill logistics expert (I wanted a joined Trill who could be snobby about Mooria's failed Initiate status); and Ashrevi, a Return to Harad agitator protesting the conference. And also Gregin Shrek, DS10's bartender, would put in an appearance (he previously appeared in episode 5). Each NPC would have a different take on what Admiral Roman should do about the Haradin: a military solution, a diplomatic solution, an Intelligence solution, and so on.

My other goal was to get Rina K'var involved. Since being kicked out of her aunt's pirate guild, she'd been playing Orion tambourine in Gregin's bar; he asked her to sneak into the conference and get him some information. With some judicious use of Threat, I got the players to intersect, and Rina even overheard some of Taleria's subordinates plotting. The act ended with Professor Jadrel giving a keynote at the conference... and then a bomb going off, injuring Jadrel, Mooria, and Rina. (Mooria's and Rina's players would be out of town the next week, so this worked well with my preexisting idea for a bombing subplot.)

Act II: Hand over Fist

Assistant DaiMon Tozal
(Tog from TNG: "Ménage à Troi")

In the A-plot, I had three basic scenes planned out. The first was the negotiating between the Starfleet crew and the Ferengi; Frector excels at this kind of thing, of course... but I put the whole Federation crew at a Disadvantage in Social Conflict with Ferengi because they were hanging out with a female. So it was difficulty 6... but she still did negotiate to allow continued access to the derelict. Her brother was Assistant DaiMon Tozal, working for DaiMon Plen of the FCA marauder Trickledown Economics.

In the second scene, the players investigated the derelict with some technical Tasks, alternating with social Tasks to deal with the Ferengi—they got up to shenanigans that the crew would have to deal with to proceed. The players were able to pretty quickly put together the clues to figure out that the Nejamri was carrying 60,000 people in transporter buffers, but they were suitably impressed at the concept.

In the third scene, I had an Extended Task planned. I didn't know exactly what it would be, just that it would be Magnitude 5, Work 30, Resistance 1, Intervals 12. I was going to play it by ear based on what was happening: they wanted to open up a communication channel to T'Cant, so I had this cause the derelict computer to recognize she didn't belong and attempt to purge her. Nevan and Gurg took care of this, while I occasionally spent Threat to have the Ferengi do stuff Frector would have to deal with.

At the end of the act, Mercury used their connection to upload themself into the derelict computer, which also shut off the power. Commercial break! 

Lt. Commander Charley Lee
(image by ChatGPT)

Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Admiral Roman tasked Captain Rukot with investigating the bombing. I had known we'd be down to just four players this week, and suggested to my wife that she could play: she was in my old campaign, but now cares for the kids while I play usually. This would mean bringing the kids and them having a late night, but we thought we could make it work... beside, Kid One was interested in playing! I suggested to my wife she make up a character who could be stationed on Deep Space 10 and help Rukot investigate.

She decided to build a science officer with a Focus in chemistry, a human with a cybernetic hand that gave them an enhanced sense of touch. Kid One designed the visual appearance using an online Star Trek token generator, and Kid Two came up with the name: Charley Lee. A family undertaking!

When it came time to plan the mystery, I thought the only two real possible culprits were either the Romulans or the Haradin agitators. But how to make this not obvious... yet not so complicated the players would struggle to solve it? The idea I came up with was that Ashrevi had planted the bomb, but she had been given it by Romulans posing as Haradin. So the players would find some clues incriminating the Haradin, and some incriminating the Romulans, and some absolving each group: footage of Ashrevi carrying in a package she didn't carry out... but strong evidence she couldn't have brought an explosive on the station. They did a good job making their way through the clues and figuring it out.

I made the third scene an Extended Task as well, a chase where Ashrevi ran away and they had to catch her. Something interesting I did was to play both scenes at the same time, going back and forth. As Kenyon pointed out, this mean the players had to be thoughtful about using Momentum, because they needed to save some for the other group! 

Act III: Presto

DaiMon Plen
(Lurin from TNG: "Rascals")

Debi was back, so we began our third session by showing what T'Cant was up to in the Nejamri "Heaven" (it's called "Haven" in the novel, but c'mon, let's go big). This let her get some key exposition. 

Scene two then set the stage for the finale: The DaiMon of the Ferengi ship ordered Frector's brother to disconnect the Starfleet connection to the computer core of the derelict, so Frector had to stand up for herself. Austin killed it, rolling something like 11 successes, some of which he spent to establish an Advantage countering the Disadvantage I'd set up. They also made contact with Mercury and communicated with T'Cant inside the derelict computer.

I wanted the final scene to be all about transferring power to the Nejamri derelict, but I didn't want to do yet another Extended Task. So I adapted the Extended Task mechanic:

• Every round, the players could attempt a Daring + Engineering Task to transfer power to the derelict.
• On a success, they could roll Challenge Dice like an Extended Task, and the power flow would increase by that amount, on a scale of 0 to 20.
• The difficulty would start at 5, but every time they succeeded it would go down by one.
• But also every round, I would roll Challenge Dice, and the power flow would go down this amount, representing the Ferengi doing things to interfere. 
• I could spend Threat to do things like increase the difficulty of the main Task or add to my Challenge Dice rolls. 
• But the players could also undertake Tasks to either create Resistance on my rolls or stop me from rolling altogether.

If the power flow went back down to 0, the materialization process would begin without enough power to sustain it. If it went up beyond 20, then there would be enough power to sustain the process.

the Trickledown Economics
(image from Star Trek Online)

This I think was pretty fun! There was some grumbling about the fact that since it wasn't an Extended Task, Nevan couldn't use his relevant talent, but I pointed out that if I let him use it, I would have just designed the whole thing to be harder to compensate. There was a nice tug-of-war, but they won in the end. Frector broadcast to the Trickledown crew, pointing out the downsides of their undetaking, causing a work slowdown; T'Cant bent the power transfer beam so the Ferengi couldn't block it. There was one very exciting round where between them all, the players rolled five 20s, giving me 10 Threat!

In the end, the players saved the Nejamri, had some exciting showdowns, and convinced the Ferengi to lay low. My adaptation got looser as it went, but I think overall it worked well.

I'd like to make the A-plot a publicly available mission, but my notes are mostly written for my own benefit and have a lot of stuff specific to my players and campaign, so I would need to do a lot of cleanup first. Maybe someday!

The first scene of the B-plot was mostly to wrap up dangling thread from the investigation: the players got to question Ashrevi, and hear Taleria's side of the story. (The latter told them she'd already sent her subordinates home to Romulus... on a shuttle she feared wouldn't make it!) Then in the second scene, I had them hear each NPC's take and then come up with their own plan. They very much wanted to amplify Professor Jadrel's anti-nativist message... but how?

This was sort of the crux of the episode for me. I could think of a lot of ways to do this, but didn't want Starfleet to just tell them—hence the conference idea. They came up with the plan of hacking into the Haradin transmitter network, and transmitting Jadrel's message through that.

Scene three, then, was convincing other people to go along with the plan. If they could convince four of the six NPCs, they then could convince the Admiral. They worked their way from easiest sell to hardest, making good use of Talents and information to lay out their argument... and then they convinced the admiral. So now I know what to base the season finale around! 

Star Trek: Ekumene:

1. "Patagon in Parallax"
2. "A Terrible Autonomy"
3. "Stinks of Slumber and Disaster"
4. "Angels in Your Angles"
5. "A Thousand Miles from Day or Night" 
6. "When I Get through This Part…"
7. "Only Trying to Do Right in This Wicked World" 
8. "No Place in the Processional"
9. "Legend Grew about Their Daring" 
10. "On the Edge of Nobody's Empire"
11. "No One in Here" 
12. "Your Enemies at Your Side" 

Specials:

1. "Hear All the Bombs Fade Away"
2. "The Word for Word Is Word"