James Review -- Star Trek: Legacies: Captain to Captain

This week I decided to review Star Trek: Legacies: Captain to Captain by Greg Cox.

The story opens with Una, former first officer during Captain Christopher Pike's time in command, arriving on the Enterprise, seemingly just for a visit, but soon after arriving she steals the Transfer Key, an alien device whose existence and presence on the Enterprise is only known to the ship’s captain, first officer, and those who have held one of these positions in the past.

After evading the Enterprise in her courier craft, Una sets course for the planet Usilde where the Transfer Key was first encountered. Eighteen years earlier the Enterprise had approached Usilde after detecting technology far in advance of that found by an earlier survey mission. The ship detects a fortress inhabited by an unidentified species that appears to be altering the world to suit their need, but the ship can’t find any means of interstellar transport for the newcomers.

Una leads a landing party and, after meeting the native Usildar, confirms that the builders of the fortress have conquered the planet rather than being invited. Eventually, the landing party reaches the fortress only to be captured by the Jatohr who built it and are working to convert Usilde into a paradise for their people. Eventually, Captain Robert April beams himself down as part of negotiations and it is revealed that the Jatohr are refuges from another universe fleeing some cataclysm in their home dimension, with the Transfer Key being the core of the device that transported them.

The Jatohr never encountered any other sentient species in their native universe and this has led most of them to view the non-Jatohr they encounter in their new universe as nothing but threats to be conquered or destroyed. However, the creator of the transfer device doesn’t share this view and, with help from April and Una, he manages to return his people to their native universe, entrusting the safety of the key to the Enterprise’s captain. When used as a weapon, the Key shifts its victims to another universe rather than killing them and, in the present, Una believes she has discovered a way to bring the Enterprise crew members shifted by the key home, but Usilde is now in disputed territory claimed by both the Federation and the Klingon Empire.

Fearing what might happen if the Jatohr technology and the Transfer Key fall into Klingon hands, the Enterprise pursues Una with Kirk and Spock travelling to the planet and arriving just in time to rescue Una from the Usildar who have made tampering with the Jatohr ruins a capital offense. Una manages to convince Kirk and Spock to aid her quest, but when a Klingon fleet arrives sooner then expected, the Enterprise is forced to retreat, leading to Una venturing into the universe her crewmates had been banished to long ago while Kirk and Spock struggle to reach her courier ship and reunite with the Enterprise Transfer Key in tow.

I give this book 8.5 out of 10. It does a great job as an adventure story but I feel that it could have used some more action sequences. Also, I think it might have been better for the overall Legacies plot if the flashback had been its own book rather than part of this one, and there is a major plot twist at the end and, while I feel it does a good job of setting up a new plotline for the next book, I also feel it has no foreshadowing.