#st dis

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Ahem...

The book starts out with a flashback to 17-year-old Chris Pike. Gawd, I bet he was a cutie. Anyway, the intrepid Chris Pike and his friends have trespassed into a tunnel burrowed out by a twentieth-century miner out in the Mojave. The passage is condemned but Pike and his friends consider it a challenge of perseverance and daring. Of course, the damn thing collapses on them. Pike’s pinned and they don’t have their communicators bc they didn’t want to be tracked. No one knows where they are.

Chris gets two of his three friends to safety but is crushed by the loss of the third, saying he should’ve done more. Guys, I think this is the birth of “I give my life for you. You give your life for me. And no one gets left behind.”

Skip forward 20 years and Pike is Captain and the Enterprise is on its five year mission in deep space. He’s received word that the Federation is at war and he’s trying to get back. But the journey is not easy. They’re in the Pergamum Nebula and it is not easy to traverse. As they’re making their way home, something seriously rocks the ship from behind. Connolly says it seems like a photon torpedo, but their sensors so they’re all alone...

Here we meet the nemesis, the Lurians. First impression is that they’re somewhere between the Ferengi and the Orions temperament-wise and somewhere between the Klingons and the Cardassian physically. They’re raiders and they want the Enterprise to sell to the highest bidders.  A quick google says the Lurians are a passel of Morns (ST: DS9).

They intercepted the war missive and hope to sell the fancy starship to the Klingons for a veritable fortune.The Lurians are not known for their smarts and they definitely haven’t thought through the consequences of handing Starfleet Technology over to the Klingons. 

But it ends up not mattering because the Lurians themselves are boarded by a bigger fish! We’re not immediately sure who the big fish are but they have the ability to cut through ship hulls and create their own docking port. I’m actually kinda glad. I thought this was going to be like the time the Ferengi tried to steal the Enterprise NX-01 in ST: ENT, where bumbling idiots temporarily incapacitate the crew and then they have to strategize to retake the ship. That still might not happen, but at least it’s not to the friggin’ Lurians. But whoever took down the Lurians now have their sights set on the Enterprise, the moby dick of ships for Pirate Raiders

Meanwhile, on the Enterprise, Admiral Terral has figured out what Pike is up to and orders them to stay on their mission. Pike has no choice but to obey as he could feign ignorance in defying the first order to stay put since it was a repeating recording, but now that he’s talked to someone face to face, not so much...

All this dawdling and space exploring allows the Boundless, a space pirate warrior race (think Klingons meet the Borg) to catch up with Enterprise. The Boundless want to take the Enterprise with all its shiny new tech, but the Enterprise is a Constitution-Class Heavy Weight Badass, so the Boundless settle for stealing the Away Team (about 30 people including Spock and Evan Connolly from Season 2 of Discovery) to conscript as soldiers/ cannon fodder in their war.

Enterprise doesn’t even realize the landing party has been kidnapped bc it was hidden by a barrage of nuclear bombs on the planet surface. (Y’all. Pike delivers a eulogy for Spock. MY. FEELINGS.....) They spend three months relentlessly searching for remains before someone realizes they’ve been given the okie doke. 

The Away Team is taken aboard the Boundless ship, unconscious, and they wake hermetically sealed into mech suits that take care of everything (potty breaks, food needs, and general war armor. Like Iron Man but non-consensual). Very quickly the humans start getting claustrophobic, Spock’s a bit stressed because he can’t meditate, etc. But they are forced to fight bc if they resist, the suits can be controlled remotely by the commanders of the force and anyone who tries to escape goes down in a blaze of bullets. 

Y’all, they are stuck there for months before the Enterprise is able to attempt a rescue. And attempt is the keyword. It’s unsuccessful with the Enterprise caught between the Boundless and their mortal enemies the Rengru, a race of sentient, amorphous blobs. They’re fighting over ownership of the same planet. Severely damaged, the Enterprise is forced to do a saucer separation to escape. 

From here, the book splits into 3.5 storylines: 

1) The non-saucer part of the ship which is now captained by Una. This section got all the medical personnel and none of the engineers. This is also the part of the ship that contains the engine room.

2) The saucer part of the ship, captained by Pike. This section got all of the engineers, none of the medical personnel, sick bay, and a five month pregnant crew member. The saucer also landed upside down, lost gravity controls, and everything but impulse drive.

Neither side has much by way of food and water.

3) The Away Team that is still stuck with the Boundless and start to get Stockholm, but struggling to stay loyal to Starfleet Ethics in a war.

3.5) Spock, who managed to escape during the Enterprise’s rescue attempt, but floated off into space. But land on the same planet as the saucer. But on the other side of the planet... And he doesn’t have control of the suit, he doesn’t have any supplies beyond what the suit provides automatically, and the saucer team doesn’t have access to EV suits or transporters to go rescue him.

Y’all. Spock gets stuck out there, frozen in place for MONTHS with nothing but Christopher Pike able to talk to him twice a day when the radiation cloud clears enough for them to make contact. And so they find out that even Vulcans can suffer from sensory deprivation....

So the next 40% of the book is crew A and B trying to repair the ship, unaware that the other half survived, and trying to ward off attacks from the Rengru, Crew C slowly getting indoctrinated (Primarily, Connolly of course), and Pike struggling to run his undermanned, undersupplied staff, repair the saucer with no engineer, take care of his pregnant crew member, and keep Spock sane on the surface of the planet. It’s actually a pretty good read. 

Finally, things come to a head when the Team Not-Saucer captures a Rengru and it forcibly mind melds with Una. The Rengru turn out to be more like Vulcans meet Horta with an emphasis on the Orta part. The Rengru is able to communicate with Una who was raised in Illysia and trained in mental disciplines or something like that. Anyway RengrUna (christened by the crew) kick the plot into overdrive. They find Team Saucer, rescue Spock (who’s marbles are still a bit scrambled from his isolation and a visit from the Red Angel- who did not save him?!?!?), and take them to meet up with Team Not-Saucer.

All this Rengru movement catches the Boundless’ attention and Fucking Connolly lets it slip that Enterprise has transporter technology. Ya know, the kind of thing that would really appeal to a slave trafficking, soldier consigning, pirate raider race. So they decide they’re gonna go still the transporter plans from the Enterprise with Connolly leading the charge. (In his defense, he’s over a year into captivity and being told the Rengru are The Absolute Worst). He thinks he’s saving the galaxy.

But Christopher Pike said: 

They use Spock’s mech suit to convince the Boundless that Spock is a double agent who is still on their side. The Boundless board the Enterprise, only to get confronted by the Man. The Legend. The Captain. 

“I wanted to meet the people who thought they could steal my crew.”

The engineers have reverse-engineered and now they control the Boundless.

“We’re not some tour group that wandered in. I have some of the best [...] operators in the cosmos. You characters just steal stuff... You also seem to like to steal people. Well, now I’m stealing all of you.”

So Pike flies everybody back to K’davu, the home world they’ve been fighting to death over for generations. The Boundless are furious about being kidnapped but excited about seeing the Promised Land. Until they get transported to the surface...

It’s not the lush, tropical paradise they remember. It’s a bone dry dessert. Nothing like the pictures they’ve been circle jerk off to in their endless war. And uninhabitable to the Boundless. But not the Rengru...

The Boundless are in denial. “What is the sorcery?” “Who swapped out our beautiful planet for this hellscape?” “You’re trying to trick us!”

Then some Trekkie stuff happens and it turns out the Rengru control the weather, they drove the Boundless off bc they were destroying the planet with their constant war, they revived the planet and they can literally change it back with a wave of their hand, and have been trying to communicate that to the Boundless for decades but have no verbal communication abilities so the Boundless kept mowing them down. And it turns out the Rengru are the Revered Ancestors the Boundless have been dedicating their “victories” to all story long. The Rengru are a co-adaptive species and just wanted to protect their idiot neighbors from the impending radiation showers...

This is like the Vulcans and Romulans, y’all. The Boundless owe everybody an apology. This war could’ve been an e-mail.

Anyway, one of the Boundless is so in denial, they try to go Logic Extremist and take everybody out with a bomb. Pike, who has borrowed Spock’s battle suit, takes the bomb into a mine shaft to protect the surface city, but beingin a dark cramped place triggers his cave PTSD and he starts having a small panic attack. 

And Vina mentally reaches out to him to help him calm down. 

He ditches the bomb, it goes off, knocking him out and the crew has to rescue him. He tries tot read them the riot act about disobeying his order to clear out, but they’re all like “A wise man once said, Starfleet is a promise. I give my life for you, you give your life for me and nobody gets left behind....”

Anyway, the Rengru and the Boundless have to accept that they share a planet and the only way to live without their mech suit is to co-adapt with the Rengru (let them jack into the back of their skulls Matrix-style). Some people accept the co-adaptation immediately, some are on the fence, and some refuse and leave. Enterprise patches up their ship, Connolly realizes he was complicit in human trafficking and probably a slew of war crimes, and a lesson was learned by all. (Seriously, Connolly apparently learned nothing and earned his karmic death in Discovery Season 2.)

They leave the nebula just in time to learn the Klingon war is over and they can return home. But Spock is still suffering from insomnia, nightmares, and space-time disorientation. Pike tries to have heart to hearts with him but it’s not enough and Spock finally requests to be taken to a mental facility for help, bringing us to season 2 of Discovery!

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The first 70 pages are fairly dry, but after that, it really reads like a Star Trek episode. And a damned good one at that! This was really good characterization for all the ST SNW crew and I like that it was headed by Captain Pike, but really read as an ensemble story. The problem felt classic Trek and the resolution was good. It makes me feel even more excited about ST: Strange New Worlds.