“Another world is a big place, let alone another universe…”
Stardates: 3950.1 (2267) and 2249
This year is the sixtieth anniversary of Star Trek so I thought it might be fun to read the trilogy of books published as the “Star Trek: Legacies” series, released in honor of Star Trek’s fiftieth anniversary ten years ago. Each book in the series was published by a celebrated Star Trek author: the first was Captain to Captain by Greg Cox, the second was Best Defense by David Mack, and the third was Purgatory’s Key by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore (published jointly), each continuing an original series adventure stemming from ideas pulled from the earliest iteration of Star Trek, the unaired pilot “The Cage.”
Captain to Captain opens with the return of a familiar face: the Enterprise’s early second in command when it was helmed by Captain Pike, an Illyrian named Una (whose Illyrian name is unpronounceable and so she simply goes by her rank as “Number One”). Her character is further explored in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. At this point in the timeline, Una has served Starfleet with distinction under both captains Robert April and Christopher Pike and she is now captain of her own ship, the USS Yorktown. But after years of deep-space exploration, the ship is undergoing a retrofit and the rumor is that Una is set to be promoted to a higher-ranking Starfleet bureaucratic role in San Francisco. She is currently on leave, conducting research in the Federation libraries on Memory Alpha, but upon learning that the Enterprise would be passing through the region, she says she simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity to revisit her old ship.
At present, the Enterprise is en route to Chippewa Prime for some much-needed shore leave (the crew has the upcoming Organian Peace talks to look forward to) but now the ship has paused to briefly pick up Una in her shuttlecraft the “Shimizu.” However, there is something strange about her visit. During a reception held in her honor, she privately asks Spock about the status of Captain Pike, and while Spock is unable to explain the classified events that took place on Talos IV (as shown in the episodes “The Cage” and the two-parter “The Menagerie”), he merely nods to confirm that Pike is now with Vina. Una seems reassured by this. But her behavior soon turns out to be merely a ruse. Later, we see Una sneaking around the Enterprise and she makes her way into Kirk’s quarters (after attacking Lt. Kevin Riley). She then steals a secret hidden object that has been concealed within the walls of Kirk’s quarters, a MacGuffin called the “Transfer Key.”
“For close to two decades, the Enterprise had held a secret unknown to even Starfleet, passed down from captain to captain, first officer to first officer, until the present day. And during all that time the secret had remained hidden within the ship’s very walls” (26).
Una narrowly manages to escape from the Enterprise with the Transfer Key just as Kirk sounds the alarm. She flees in the shuttlecraft Shimizu, leading the Enterprise toward the Korinar sector, which is a disputed region with the Klingon Empire, now it is “a stellar graveyard,” with a white dwarf at the center of the dead system. She completes a difficult “slingshot maneuver” which the Enterprise had only accomplished for the first time about a year ago (as portrayed in the episode “Tomorrow is Yesterday”).
In Part II, the novel pivots back to 2249 to explain why Una decided to steal this mysterious key. Uniquely during this time period, Captain Robert April is the first captain of the “Space Ship Enterprise” prior to both Pike and Kirk (this is long before April had been promoted to the upper echelons of Starfleet bureaucracy). Captain to Captain offers a rare glimpse into Robert April’s command of the Enterprise which I much appreciated. At any rate, The Enterprise is conducting a routine survey of the remote Libros System but while observing a primitive species on Libros III they notice that there has recently been a huge leap forward in technological advancement on the planet (perhaps not unlike what happened to the H’Ramo, or humans on Earth, or the Vulcan Great Awakening). Before long, the crew discovers that there are mysterious newcomers who visited Libros III and caused all the change. But who are they? And why did they come?
Una leads a landing party down to Libros III along with several other crewmen like Ensign Tim Shimizu, and Martinez and others. Here, they are shocked to find mass ecological destruction, deforestation, enslavement, and the construction of a large citadel in the middle of a lake (the citadel is impervious to the Enterprise’s sensors). Libros III was once a lush forested planet, but now it is filled with is an invasive fungus and algae, especially near the citadel which appears to be a huge smoothly constructed tower with flying pods coming and going from the algae-ridden lake. And the air has even changed its chemical composition.
Una and the landing party encounter the forest-dwelling Librosians, mostly nude humanoids who wear loin cloths. They refer to themselves as the “Usildar” on their planet “Usilde.” Many Usildar have been imprisoned and forced into servitude inside the citadel. Along the way, Una befriends an Usildar named “Gagre” (thanks to the universal translator). However, before long she and the crew also encounter the colonizers (spoiler alert), a race of gastropod “armored slugs” who have six pairs of tentacles and lack a meaningful conception of gender (the “S/he” gender pronoun is used in the book). They are slave-drivers who call themselves “Jatohr” (they can speak “Usildar” via their own translating devices, but even the universal translator cannot understand the gurgling native Jatohr language).
Una is taken prisoner by the Jatohr thanks to a series of hanging globes in the air that the Jatohr use as surveillance. And the Jatohr also unleash their mysterious highly advanced weapon against Una’s fellow crewmen: an abrupt blinding white light suddenly eliminates the other members of the landing party. The Jatohr says they have been “removed permanently” via a “transfer field.” What has happened here? Are her fellow crewmen dead? When a devastated Una is taken before the ruling elite, we learn there is tension between some of the Jatohr, namely the leader Woryan and a scientist named Eljor. Naturally, Eljor is the more sympathetic of the two. And when Captain April beams down to speak directly with the Jatohr, Woryan learns of the existence of the Enterprise, a ship that can potentially transport him from planet to planet. He desperately wants control of it so the Jatohr can colonize other planets. But once in private, the scientist Eljor explains that the Jatohr actually came from another universe, an alternate reality. They are both refugees from that dimension as well as colonizers. In fact, it was Eljor who invented the “Transfer Key” that allows beings to transfer from one “realm” to another. Una is relieved to learn her crewmen have not been killed, but rather simply sent to another dimension.
Eljor feels guilty about inventing the key and unleashing the Jatohr’s reign of conquest. He agrees to help Una and April get to the generator room inside the citadel and use the key to rescue their trapped crewmen. But upon arrival, Eljor suddenly betrays all his fellow Jatohr, using the key on them instead, sending them all back to their native realm: “I undid my greatest mistake… and sent my people back… where we came from” (214). Eljor starts to deteriorate and die, begging April and Una not to let the key fall into the wrong hands. He gives over the Transfer Key which they decide must be hidden inside the Enterprise. Now, the key has been passed down as a secret from captain to captain aboard the Enterprise until Una stole it in 2267.
In part III, we return to Una’s quest, eighteen years later in 2267, as Una escapes from Kirk and the Enterprise, taking the key back to Libros III/Usilde. All these years later, she has still not given up on her missing crew members. When she arrives back on Usilde, she finds an overgrown planet filled with vandalized material left behind by the Jatohr. But she is quickly captured by the Usildar for violating their sacred space near the citadel island. Still fearful of the “despoilers,” the Usildar give her the death penalty, but then her old pal Gagre suddenly rescues her. She explains to him that she is headed back to the old Jatohr citadel, but he is far too fearful to enter, claiming it makes strange thunderous noises (and there are rumors that the Jatohr are still alive inside).
Una is almost recaptured in a night raid through the forest but Kirk and crew suddenly arrive and decide to help her invade the heavily fortified citadel (this citadel reminded me a bit of the citadel from God Emperor of Dune). But to add to the dramatic tension, when the Enterprise arrives, so does a fleet of Klingon cruisers (since a Federation ship is likely to draw their attention than a small inconspicuous craft like the Shimizu). When Una, Kirk, and Spock finally make it to the generator inside the citadel, they open the portal to find an arid alien wasteland on the other side and Una proposes a one-way trip for herself for now. She pleads for them to let her go into the other reality and find her lost crewmen, then meet back at this spot, all while Kirk keeps hold of the key and evades the encroaching Klingons. It’s a daring plan but Kirk agrees. They part ways with Una fully trusting Kirk as he and Spock flee aboard the heavily damaged Shimizu, chased by the Klingon battlecruiser Ch’Tang, before they are narrowly rescued by the Enterprise. It’s a heart-racing end to an action-packed novel.
But in a surprising twist, as the Enterprise returns to normalcy with Kirk at the helm, suddenly an alarm sounds from the wall in Kirk’s quarters for the second time. The Transfer Key has been stolen again! This time by Kirk’s eager young yeoman named Lisa Bates who, as it turns out, is actually a Romulan spy named Major Sadira. Being Kirk’s yeoman, she was privy to extraordinary secret information, particularly Spock’s code to hide the Transfer Key (doesn’t this defeat the purpose of all the secrecy if a yeoman can easily outsmart it?) She quickly escapes aboard a Romulan bird-of-prey before vanishing with the key.
Final Thoughts:
Captain to Captain is another tremendous Star Trek adventure by Greg Cox. Thus far, I have loved all of his Star Trek books and I look forward to reading the other two installments in this series. Captain to Captain offers a terrific defense of the Prime Directive, as the Jatohr decide have no Prime Directive as they run roughshod over a primitive culture. And there are tons of callbacks and references to the original series in this book, such as when Una is captured by the Jatohr and she wonders: “For all she knew, she could end up spending the rest of her life in some alien menagerie” (138), a nice little nod to “The Cage” and “The Menagerie” episodes, or the earlier scene in which Una is interested when she still hears the sound of her own voice aboard the Enterprise as the computer (this is an amusing little nod to Majel Barrett, the actress who played both Number One and later Nurse Chapel, who lent her voice to be used of the ship’s computer in the original series). The brilliance of this story is that we are taken on quite a ride with the characters, first skeptical of Una after she steals the Transfer Key at the start of the book, only to later sympathize with her when we learn the full story. In some ways, it is reminiscent of Spock’s apparent mutiny at the start of “The Menagerie.”
But I had tons of questions about the efficiency and security of storing a secret key that leads to another dimension inside the walls of the captain’s quarters on the Enterprise. And also one wonders why Una wouldn’t simply feel free to discuss the matter with Kirk so that she might work together with him to rescue her crew? And why hasn’t she attempted to rescue her missing crewmen lo these past eighteen years? And why would Kirk and Spock simply store the key back inside the captain’s quarters again at the end of the book, knowing that it has already been easily stolen from that same location? Regardless, this is still a very fun Star Trek novel that offers a unique glimpse into a rarely explored character (Una “Number One”). It’s sure to please Trekkies but it’s a shame there wasn’t a similarly organized literary project for the sixtieth anniversary of Star Trek this year.
Will Kirk manage to retrieve the Transfer Key from the Romulan Star Empire? Can Una track down her lost crewmen in the other dimension? Will the Jatohr return again in attempt to colonize other planets? Tune in next time to find out!
Cox, Greg. Captain to Captain. Pocket Books, New York, New York, 2016. He offers a loving dedication at the start of the novel to his late mother.