In today’s episode, the Starfleet Academy Band’s performance at a competition earns them a new biggest fan. But he’s not interested in waiting to book a private gig, and drags them into the worst USO Tour ever. Can Riker withstand a gauntlet of light hazing? Will Geordi make the leap from roadie to band member? Is Phish’s influence still being felt in the 24th century? All this and more in Crossfire, the book where reversing the polarity still works.

Crossfire
Author: John Vornholt
Pages: 103
Published: December 1996
Timeline: Ten years before “Encounter at Farpoint”
Prerequisites: Do you remember that Riker plays the trombone? If you didn’t, now you do, and you’re all caught up
Not to be confused with: “Crossfire” (DS9 4×13)

Often, one can get away with spinning multiple extracurricular plates simultaneously for much of their childhood, but once you reach high school, you have to start narrowing your focus. As I recall, it comes down to two major choices: sports or band. Some choose the former, which in my neck of the woods usually meant football. Others go with music. An ambitious handful try to juggle both for a while, but are usually forced to make a difficult cut sooner rather than later. William Riker would definitely have been the kind of guy to march with his pads on at halftime, but which path would he ultimately choose: the athletic or the artistic?

The only thing more surprising than John Vornholt taking Riker the band nerd route is the fact that it took a double-digit number of Starfleet Academy installments to get one starring the Enterprise-D’s future first officer. But here he is at last, showing up to join the Academy Band on trombone after a Tellarite named Leshelle vacates the slot and drops out of the Academy under cryptic circumstances. Allegedly, it’s really tough for freshmen to make the band. Some books could spend their entire duration on a struggle like that. It’s barely an issue here, however; Riker is in like Flynn just in time for their next competition, which is being held at a resort planet called Pacifica.

But if Riker thinks he’s going to instantly Night Bird his way into his bandmates’ hearts, he’s got another think coming. The first half of the book has him subjected to some minor but escalating hazing that gets him a bit hot under the collar. Geordi, his new friend and the band’s sound engineer, tries to calm down by pointing out that learning how to swallow other people’s baloney with a smile now will come in handy later when he has to do it on a starship. Riker disagrees, arguing that a jazz band should have more camaraderie and disappointed that it’s just another place where the upperclassmen crap all over the fresh meat. This too could have made for a whole book on its own, especially since Riker has a great point. However, the main conflict lies elsewhere still.

Geordi has been tasked by Captain Webb, the band’s director, with fixing a Coridan phase modulator, an instrument that produces effects via a vaguely defined subliminal connection to the brain that may remind one of Futurama‘s holophonor, but which Webb just wants to use to make the choo-choo sound on “Take the A Train”. An Orion named Jaktu introduces himself to Geordi as one of the competition’s judges and advises reversing the polarity, which works, thus influencing Federation chief engineers for generations to come. Jaktu finds himself blown away by their performance, and asks Captain Webb if they’ll immediately come play a private gig for him. As it turns out, that’s not exactly a polite request.

Jaktu drags the band bus by tractor beam to Elofim, a world in a neutral system where Orion troops have been fighting in a war for several years. Jaktu thinks they’ll loe the Starfleet Academy Band as much as he did, and wants the band to boost the troops’ morale with a concert. He promises the band’s safety, but that isn’t really his to promise, and sure enough, the war hits the amphitheater they’re all in, and Riker and Geordi get separated from everyone else in the titular crossfire. The remainder of the book is about their survival and the grim discoveries they make about the war as they try not to get killed by mercenaries and autopiloted drones.

More than once, as mentioned, Vornholt tables conflicts with smaller stakes to move the plot toward action that focuses exclusively on Riker and Geordi, eventually culminating with them dodging gunfire in an actually pretty dire proxy war between the Orions and the Tellarites. I think the Academy books fare better when they stick to more relatable individual problems, but I understand the appetite for action from both a kid’s and executive’s standpoint. And the action here is not too generic or lame; obviously no one named in the opening credits is going to eat it, but the danger is palpable and credible nonetheless.

Overall, there are components that work and others that don’t so much, and it all shakes out to something reasonably enjoyable. Jaktu is a more layered character than you’re liable to expect from an Orion, and Vornholt is successful in keeping the reader guessing about the sincerity of his motivations until the moment of truth. Less successful elements include the Coridan phase modulator, which is a bit too indistinguishable from magic to be taken seriously,1Though as musical obsessions go, it’s preferable to the chuS’ugh. and Riker’s attempts at ingratiating himself to members of the band who aren’t Geordi, which typically end in cringe. But I had a fine time with it, and it’s nice to finally get a long overdue Riker story in the YA line.

MVP & LVP

• My MVP pick for Crossfire is Riker, for his well-observed comment that bands should be about getting along and not making life difficult for underclassmen. He’s absolutely right! I know which direction I’d have gone with this book if I’d written it.
• My LVP is the Andorian who auditions for the band at the beginning of the book. This guy cracked me up. He comes in, makes all these awful sounds on something called a hyperblat, and then when he gets turned down goes, “OH, I guess you only want TERRAN instruments.” No, dude, we don’t want people who can’t play instruments that sound like garbage! What’s the Andorian word for audacity?

Stray Bits

• Cover Art Corner: This week’s cover art is by Donato Giancola, who did the cover art for Loyalties, the previous TNG YA book, as well, and who, in a crossover with my other beloved hobby, has done loads of excellent artwork over the years for Magic: The Gathering. In fact, I think I’ll go ahead and start calling him my favorite MTG artist now that Seb McKinnon let the mask slip.
  • And speaking of art, I didn’t notice this until after I’d finished the book … but there are no interior illustrations in this one! I can’t say I missed them all that much, but don’t expect it to be a trend: Memory Beta says it’s the only book of the entire YA line not to have them.
• When Leshelle drops out of the Academy at the beginning, your brain automatically pins the idea of the Tellarites resurfacing in some way later. But I like that Vornholt avoided the temptation to make it as simplistic as some kind of coincidental reunion on the battlefield. You can tell that Leshelle isn’t thrilled with it, and that’s enough.
• “A very practical people, the Centaurians played instruments made from household objects. Geordi watched in awe as they coaxed music from vacuum cleaners, inner tubes, and pots and pans.” — I wonder if John Vornholt is a Phish fan or if the idea of vacuum cleaners making music just sounded deliciously outré to him. Fishman was sucking on that hose long before this book was ever published, and though I doubt live Phish was in most kids’ cultural orbit even then, it’s not exactly unprecedented. (p.43)

Final Assessment

Good. Had it stuck to more relatable issues that might resonate more with its demographic, Crossfire would easily have achieved the excellence of his previous TNG YA novel Capture the Flag (his strongest YA effort to date), but even its boilerplate action is palatable enough to stave off most complaints. The Starfleet Academy line was long overdue for a Riker story, and though John Vornholt didn’t quite hit the peaks of Capture the Flag, he came pretty close.

NEXT TIME: The final crossover event of Star Trek‘s 30th anniversary, Trials and Tribble-ations