The fourth novelization from the Strange New Worlds show of the Star Trek franchise, Ring of Fire takes place between the episodes “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” and “What is Starfleet?” from this past, third season. It’s the first novel from regular franchise writer David Mack to feature the cast of Strange New Worlds, but incorporates elements from throughout Star Trek canon as is typical for recent novels from the shared, expanded universe.
As expected when writing this type of novel, Mack has limitations within the framework of what the show-runners are doing with specific character arcs in the cast. But Mack has also proven very successful at working within the boundaries of the sandbox to create compelling and entertaining stories that make optimal use of all the objects and details that sit inside that very large sandbox that is Star Trek.
Ring of Fire continues that success. Fans who didn’t care for certain developments in the third season of the television show won’t be able to completely escape those here, but they will be able to enjoy the unique aspects of this particular story featuring the Pike-era USS Enterprise crew. Ring of Fire has a character-driven plot that focuses largely on an investigation by Security Chief La’An Noonien-Singh, but manages to give significant development to other characters, particularly Helmsman Erica Ortegas, who gets an opportunity to step up and shine as acting Number One. But the novel is equally plot driven as a mystery that involves espionage, sabotage, murder, and central speculative elements that make this more science fiction than a standard adventure that just happens to be set in space.
A highly secretive and time-sensitive Federation civilian research project on Kathara Station becomes jeopardized following a string of accidents, and now a death, that increasingly look like sabotage and murder. Caught between a desire to keep strangers away and the risk of project failure as precious time gets short, the director of the station and project (Valkeya) reluctantly reaches out to Starfleet for help.
Pike receives orders for the Enterprise to go to the station and lend aid, but he is uncharacteristically wary and unwilling to return to the location where Kathara Station lies: dangerously close above the accretion disk of a black hole, a location Pike visited years ago on a mission that went tragically wrong, an experience that has haunted him ever since.
Things go wrong immediately upon the Enterprise‘s arrival, but as Pike tries to face his past and contain the situation and Noonien-Singh begins her investigation on the station for a potential murderer and saboteur, the crew finds a disconcertingly evasive, even hostile, group of researchers who seem intent to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate even at the risk of lives.
Ring of Fire definitely recalls the types of politics and interactions that characterized Federation citizen scientists and Starfleet overseers in the classic original series (even some in The Next Generation). Though Pike and Noonien-Singh have some contact with the upper echelons of command or Federation authorities, they’re basically on their own, trying to get a handle on a dangerous situation for his crew (and those he’s charged to help) when lies and walls of top-secret designations block him at every turn.
The novel uses the stressful situation for La’An to delve into her perspective on the new relationship she finds herself in with Spock, what implications that holds for herself, and for the half-human/Vulcan. Not fully able to separate the personal from the professional side of her life she equally has to look into the lives and personalities of those on the station to uncover killers, spies, and saboteurs.
The first half of the novel is akin to a murder or crime mystery series, with the investigator trying to gather facts, establish the reality of what occurred/is occurring, and stop the guilty — but in a situation where basic facts are kept hidden behind veils of political top-secrecy. Nonetheless La’An makes headway as the rest of the crew deals with putting out fires that crop up. Eventually the crew figures out and/or is read into the top secrecy of what is going on at Kathara Station, how it involves the Black Hole, and (not surprisingly as a constructed work of fiction) how that all relates to those events in Pike’s past.
This is where the science aspect of the science or speculative fiction comes into play. I won’t reveal exactly what it is, but it does connect to a recurring speculative and general plot element of the Star Trek universe canon. As the reality of the high stakes become clear to Pike and as Noonien-Singh identifies all the players who have hands in these stakes, the action rises through the second half of the novel until its conclusion.
Any fan of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds would enjoy Ring of Fire and find it worth the read. It’s comprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the show as well (though it would lose a lot if a reader was completely unfamiliar with Star Trek.) David Mack should definitely return to pen some adventures for this crew again. In fact, give him an Ortegas-centric story stat!
