In today’s episode, if you don’t check the veracity of scary new rumors, you’ll look really bad later if they turn out to be true. But no matter how you slice it, while you’re away, the Klingons will play, and you’d better hope the folks you left home are up to the job. Does anyone in 2023 find the Garak/Bashir ship “puzzling”? What does the reading list to just be able to understand humans look like? And is this the fall of the house of Quark? All this and more in Vengeance, the book with the cover appearance so egregious it made me coin the word readbait.

Vengeance
Author: Dafydd ab Hugh
Pages: 282
Published: February 1998
Timeline: Between “…Nor the Battle to the Strong” (5×04) and “The Begotten” (5×12) (Kira is still carrying Miles and Keiko’s second child)
Prerequisites: The above two episodes are referenced frequently. Despite the cover appearance of Kurn, “Sons of Mogh” (4×15) is about as far from required as you can imagine.
Borrowable on Archive.org? No

So anyway, the Klingons started blasting, coming out of the wormhole hot on the tail of a Federation ship, which they eventually blow up, coating the walls of the debris with a fine mist of the crew’s DNA. In addition to the harrowing possibility that the Klingons have finally made good on the ability to beam a bomb over to a ship’s engineering department and detonate it on arrival, a recovered log reveals another terrifying secret: someone stumbled on a secret base in the Gamma Quadrant where Klingons and Jem’Hadar are training together. That’s not the kind of thing you want to take a chance on not being true, so Sisko puts together a team to go check it out on the Defiant. Ironically, he has to leave Worf behind, since no one else is as fully capable of defending the station should something go awry (which, of course, it will).

Once the Defiant is well and truly gone, more Klingons come out of cloak, shear off the station’s subspace emitter so they can’t go tattle to anyone, and take over Ops. The leader of the invasion force is Malach, an old blood-brother of Worf’s from the roughly one-year window after Worf started training at some kind of kids’ warrior academy (in the clumsily named “Emperor Kahless Military City”) but before Worf’s parents died at Khitomer. He never lays his plan out with sufficient specificity, but it more or less amounts to the idea that when the Dominion is finally ready to rumble, who’s the line of defense you want up front? Not any wimpy, squishy humans, that’s for sure. Therefore, it’s necessary to take things into their own hands and make sure that’s who’s standing there when the Dominion shows up and bows up.

Worf “joins” Malach’s cause to take him down from the inside, though it looks to everyone else like he’s in cahoots with Malach, hard as it is for them to believe. Bashir takes charge of the nascent resistance against the Klingon incursion by default, since he’s the only commissioned officer besides Worf who stayed home. Together, he and O’Brien evade the Klingons by crawling through air vents and locate Garak, Jake, Quark, and Rom. The ragtag band puts together a plan to get to the core of the station, turn off the gravity, and jettison all the atmosphere, which will have to do until the Defiant returns and/or they can find a way to get a message out to someone who can help.

Sometimes you can tell Pocket Books knew when they had a real nothingburger on their hands, and rarely has that been more evident than in the fact that the Klingon formerly known as Kurn shows up on the cover of this book. The recently memory-wiped and rechristened Rodek, son of Noggra makes two extremely minor appearances in which he says nothing and gives major lead-poisoning stare, and is only there so that Worf can briefly feel some kind of way about it. Clearly, however, they felt these were noteworthy enough to stick him on the cover, which does not bode well for the events of the rest of the book. A good review is supposed to talk about the work you got, not the one you wanted, but a book about the memory wipe somehow failing and reversing itself and Kurn getting his memory back would have been a lot more exciting than [gestures vaguely] this.

The Gamma Quadrant side of the story is very reminiscent of “Balance of Terror” with its cat-and-mouse dynamic and evocation of submarine mind games (ab Hugh even calls the photon torpedoes they drop like mines “depth charges”), but it resolves fairly quickly, and most of the rest of the book focuses on what’s going on back at the station. Not much happens there either. Without the ability to take on the occupying Klingon force guns a-blazin’, most of the tension comes in the form of riddles and oblique references to facets of Federation/Starfleet life Klingons wouldn’t know anything about, used to communicate in a stilted sort-of-code under their noses, which sounds a lot more fun in theory than it is in practice, especially when Bashir and O’Brien solve one particular piece of wordplay left by Garak with a speed that would be too fast for an episode of the 1966 Batman show.

I felt a mild uptick in interest any time Garak was talking, but for the most part, Vengeance throws into sharp relief how much less compelling Klingon antagonists were at this specific point in Star Trek. It also doesn’t read quite right to me when they’re portrayed as big dumb galoots, which, with the exception of Malach, they are here; Klingons, for all their chest-thumping and bloviating about, can also be clever when the occasion calls for it. There’s just so little here to grab onto. If there wasn’t a joyous, sort of jaunty element I often pick up on in ab Hugh’s prose, it probably would have been even worse, but even with that, it’s still a slog.

MVP & LVP

• My MVP in this one is Garak. ab Hugh’s writing voice is a bit of an awkward fit for most of the characters, but it’s tailored (hah) perfectly to his specific brand of unctuousness, and by far the most joy I got out of the book was whenever he was talking.
• Quark is a pretty useless burden in this one, and there’s something about ab Hugh’s Ferengi-related prose that really grates sometimes. This is also a halfway decent place to mention that Bashir sometimes induces some cringe by getting a little big for his britches as leader of the misfit gang, but it’s not enough to drop him to the bottom of the heap.

Stray Bits

• Hate that it took so long to get the last review before a major milestone out the door, but check out that number up top: two hundred fifty! With 2024’s slate of announced titles, the master list topped seven hundred books, so there’s still quite a ways to go, but to think I’m over a third of the way there is wild.
• I suspect a major reason why it took me nearly two months to crank this one out is that it apparently makes a massive difference in how quickly I’m now able to read one of these books when I don’t have a digital copy on hand. I can sneak a few pages here and there on my phone a lot easier than on a hard copy, and it really adds up. And no, I’m not paying $10 for ebook copies that didn’t cost that much when they were new. For better or worse, it’s Internet Archive or paper.
• The title of the book isn’t exactly the most gripping or SEO-friendly. It also doesn’t make any sense until near the very end, and even then, it barely makes it.
• “Even [O’Brien] had been a little more guarded around Odo since the troubles started…” — This book takes place in Northern Ireland? This is one of a few moments in the book (some of which are also in this section) that made me break out an Archer-style “phrasing!” (p. 35)
• “…even through the plasticity of Odo’s face, Dax could tell that the erstwhile changeling was actually frightened. ‘I think we’re all just being jumpy out here,’ he said in his sexy, gravely [sic] voice.” There are some occasional semi-extended POV passages in this book, so I think ab Hugh is implying that Dax finds Odo’s voice sexy? Otherwise it just sounds like he’s openly editorializing, which, good for him, I guess? But it clangs no matter what. (p. 74)
• Sisko pondering crew dynamics (p. 112): “Then there was the absurd and puzzling coalition between Dr. Bashir and Garak…” — Nothing puzzling about it, buddy:
  
• “The white whale breached by a harpoon, thought Kira, who was working her way through the great human literature of centuries past.” — Always the other races that have to work their way through human literature, of course—and by the turn of the 25th century, the list is likely quite lengthy indeed. Why isn’t Vulcan literature required reading for humans? Why don’t we ever see Bashir slowly making his way through one of those repetitive epics Garak talked up that one time? (p. 217)
• “Humans, who dominated the Federation, prided themselves on their ‘universal’ emergency symbols, which of course no one but a human could decipher.” — I’m all for de-emphasizing the centrality of humans in sci-fi, but Worf did the majority of his growing up on Earth, so I don’t think he’d be one of the ones to be grousing about this so much. (p. 222)
• The number of misspellings and typos jam-packed into a single book notwithstanding, the one moment that really feels like everyone involved just kind of wanted this one out the door and on the shelf as quickly as possible is an extended “Cask of Amontillado” riff in the final pages, which is admittedly kind of cute, but ultimately too precious by half. (p. 262)

Final Assessment

Bad. There are very few toeholds to help you propel your reading momentum forward here. It’s just really hard to read about Klingon shenanigans in the thick of the Dominion War, especially those committed by such brutish and witless ones. The situations of both the Defiant and the station don’t allow for much that isn’t sitting around and talking, and while Star Trek is far from all action, the conversation unfortunately isn’t the most engaging. Worst of all, featuring Kurn prominently on the cover is a pretty egregious bit of readbait that does the actual story contained within no favors. Skip this one.

NEXT TIME: Jake Sisko and Nog become Trapped in Time