This week, the Furies are back, and they’ve traded scaring the hell out of people for scaring it into them. But the Enterprise crew has to find a way in through the out door if they ever want to see snowy Idaho again. Can the Furies really be negotiated with? Are they truly as afraid of the Alpha Quadrant as the A.Q. is of them? And why aren’t they more baffled by Data? All this and more in The Soldiers of Fear, the book that reminds us why we don’t get attached to redshirts.

The Soldiers of Fear (Invasion! #2)
Authors: Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Pages: 2341Not including the DS9 preview, which is nearly forty pages long, and which I did not read, because I want these things to be as fresh as possible when I come to them.
Published: July 1996
Timeline: Voyages of Imagination has it right before Generations, which doesn’t feel right, but I can’t pin down why, so take my gut feeling with a grain of salt. It’s at least some time after “Chain of Command” (S6E10+11), since there’s a mention of Deanna having recently started wearing the uniform; I pictured it as being not long after that episode.
Prerequisites: First Strike (TOS #79, Invasion! #1)

Nothing ever happens at Brundage Station. Situated at the point where the Furies emerged eighty years before and announced their intention to take their old turf back from the “conquerors”, the assignment to sit and wait for their promised return is a brain-meltingly boring one—right up until it’s not, that is. At last, just as they said they would, the Furies come back through. And this time, they’ve got a new trick up their sleeve: instead of relying on dust-caked cultural and racial memories to frighten their adversaries, the Furies now have a beam that draws directly on people’s internal fears and cranks them up to eleven.

Riker and Geordi are wigged out by the vibe on the station when they beam over to investigate, but Data, naturally, remains unfazed. He wonders why everyone is so on edge if the Federation has spent so long preparing for this eventuality; his calm and collected assessment of the panoply of horrors surrounding them, such as a message written backwards in Hebrew declaring the powerlessness of God and a woman scared literally to death by being engulfed in (but, curiously, not burned by) a pillar of fire, actually amplifies the creep factor a fair bit. Data wants to keep looking around, but Riker gets too frazzled and cuts it short—and that’s about the last we get of Data’s connection to the Furies, which is unfortunate, because I think it was an angle more worth pursuing than any the book actually did.

Nearly everyone on the ship is paralyzed by a wave of terror when Picard hails the Furies, but most of them are able to recover enough to remain useful, and in fairly short order they realize that the Furies’ fear beam is operating via interspace. Armed with that knowledge, the Enterprise can block it long enough for Picard to think straight and maybe hash out a plan for negotiation. But words may not do much good when ship after ship starts pouring out of the wormhole, ready to overwhelm the pittance of Federation ships representing the first line of defense. Who will save the day? Data, with his complete immunity to any amount of fear-based assault? Picard, with his silver tongue? Geordi, with an engineering miracle of some kind? Or maybe it will be Lt. Sam Redbay, a hotshot test pilot and old friend of Riker’s newly posted to the Enterprise—and perhaps he will do so singlehandedly using a maneuver named in honor of his creating it. I don’t know! Who’s to say.

The Soldiers of Fear commits to the Redbay arc only after much fruitless casting about for anything else. Data being completely unaffected by the Furies’ invasive visions seems ripe for exploration, but the Furies are strangely unconcerned with him. As with Kirk in First Strike, Guinan is the lone character who believes a good-faith negotiation is possible, and even nails Picard to the wall a little for subconsciously desiring battle. The book is fundamentally unserious about this charge, however, and battle proceeds as though inevitable. Deanna also suggests that the Furies are as afraid of them as they are of the Furies, but that too is posited with little conviction and amounts to nothing.

I’ve speculated that Smith and Rusch were worked to the bone during this time, and this book only makes me want to push even more chips in on that supposition. This is their fourth Trek novel published in a 14-month span. Dean says in Voyages of Imagination that he doesn’t remember much about it (surprise, surprise), but that it was their best-selling Trek novel. I guess the mere promise of epic literary ambition still had a pretty strong magnetism in those days, but The Soldiers of Fear certainly doesn’t have the weight of part of a generations-spanning epic. It is ruthlessly lean and swift, and while that might be fine for a standalone story, and generally has been to this point, the downsides of that leanness are much more apparent when it’s one piece of a four-part mega-event.

I was initially a bit put off by how some parts of First Strike dragged their feet, but I appreciated it a lot more after absolutely storming through The Soldiers of Fear without even trying. First Strike may have plodded some, but it aspired to at least some kind of idea suited to the saga’s scope, and it took its time building a complex moral dilemma. This book feels like it wants to be anywhere other than where it is. I can’t help but feel a little slighted, if I’m being perfectly honest: I was promised majorly serialized series-hopping action, and it’s just the tiniest bit galling for one of the parts to feel treated like something to get out of the way in the middle of whatever else they had to do.

MVP & LVP

• Our MVP this week is Lt. Sam Redbay, who enters the Fury gate using the piloting maneuver named after him after Riker and Worf fail to slip in and sacrifices himself to destroy the wormhole machine. You can tell the instant you meet Redbay and understand his connection to the main cast that he is destined for an imminent end. He never feels more like a three-dimensional human being than like fodder for drama. I considered making a cheeky joke that redshirts are like stray animals: if you give them a name, you start to get attached. But then I thought, Nah, that’s kind of cruel. Redshirts are people! Which is more kindness than this book ever showed him before throwing him to the wolves.
• I’m picking Guinan for LVP this week. I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence yet, but so far both Invasion! books have had one small thread of hope that maybe instead of fighting these things, we can talk to them. With Kirk it makes sense because that’s the captain’s job, to try to exhaust all other options before resorting to force; plus, he was dealing with that sort of emotional conflict you see sometimes in Star Trek where he empathizes with the enemy captain and could even be his friend if things had worked out differently. The Soldiers of Fear does, to its credit, add one fascinating philosophical question to the situation—i.e., is fighting the Furies truly inevitable or a failure of imagination—but I don’t know. Like, I know Picard seeks Guinan’s counsel often, but this seems like one of those times where it’s not really much of her business.

Stray Bits

• There are a lot of Idaho shoutouts in this book. Like, a lot. Brundage Station is named after a ski hill in McCall; the lieutenant in charge of the station loves nothing more than skiing in Sun Valley; and there’s even a whole ship called the Idaho. Feels a little like they wrote in the vacation they knew they’d be taking once they finished. The Soldiers of Fear: Star Trek novel, or SECRET IDAHO TOURISM BROCHURE??
• Can we safely assume Barclay spent this entire book huddled in a corner in the fetal position, cowering in a lake of his own urine? We can, right?
• Of all the references that sneak into these books, one of the last ones I expected was one to Data’s comedy “career”.  The hazy smoke on Brundage Station reminds Riker of that which filled the air in the holodeck comedy club. (p. 41)
• Beverly’s study of ancient medicine on various planets is neat, especially the throwaway detail that Vulcan and Earth developed acupuncture at the same time, independently of each other and in different stages of societal growth. (p. 70)
• “‘Heaven’ was the term the first Fury’s captain had used for this area of space…” — Was it? I don’t recall seeing that. Maybe a holdover from the basic outline, or from an early draft? (p. 81)
• Riker, when Picard mentions he’s trying to figure out how to communicate with the other ships without the Furies catching on: “Oh, I know how to do that, sir. Captain Kiser is quite a poker player. I met him on Rigel in a galaxy-wide tournament.” — I know this is not a callback to The Big Game, Smith and Rusch’s first Trek novel. That took place on Deep Space Nine. But it sure feels like one. If not to that, then to something. But what? Huh, phantom callback. Spooky. (p. 129)

Final Assessment

Bad. The Soldiers of Fear is too fast, too light, and too sloppy to feel like a proper part of a multi-installment saga, especially this one, the first of its kind in Star Trek Pocket Books history. Nothing really gels, the antagonists are not nearly as interesting on this second pass, and there is no time to stop and let the gravity of it settle. First Strike lumbered a bit, but it knew how to stop and smell the roses. This one comes and goes leaving almost no impression whatsoever.

NEXT TIME: Clap your hands and say “I believe in Kahless“