In today’s episode, Robin Lefler learns her mother is still alive, but first Soleta has to finish checking out the situation on Zondar, and meanwhile Selar is preggers, and she and Burgoyne agree the fun times should end there, so why does that leave Selar feeling so empty? But the warp core also has a bun in the oven, and also Shelby swears she’s not in love, Robin lands in the friend zone, Mark McHenry feels used, and—wait, what? I’m already out of room for the intro paragraph? All this and more in Fire on High, the book that doesn’t forget its Southern hospitality.
Fire on High
Author: Peter David
Pages: 272
Published: April 1998
Timeline: Immediately after Martyr (NF #5)
Prerequisites: The previous New Frontier novels
Borrowable on Archive.org? No
Not to be confused with: The instrumental banger of the same name by Electric Light Orchestra
When last we left the Excalibur crew, the typically chipper Robin Lefler got brought back down to earth by the startling revelation that her mother, going these days by the name Morgan Primus, and whom she had thought long dead, was somehow alive and in the custody of a race called the Momidiums. So that’s what we can expect the next book to be about, right? Well, yes, that and more. Much more. So much more. Almost too much more.
There are some Star Trek novels where not much happens for very long stretches. Fire on High has the opposite problem: there is so much crammed into it that it’s a wonder it can all be satisfactorily addressed in less than three hundred pages. It isn’t until a quarter of the way into the story that Morgan Primus is told by her adorable slug-like prison guard that she will be remanded to the Excalibur, and fully halfway in before she and Lefler actually meet face to face and start working out their issues with each other. In the meantime, you have Soleta nearly getting killed checking out Ontear’s cave on Zondar, Selar announcing she’s pregnant amid she and Burgoyne trying to navigate their relationship, the energy phenomenon first hinted at in Martyr becoming an issue of encroaching priority, and some tertiary and even quaternary romantic business that I found nearly impossible to care about. Some of this is necessary setup for the book’s culminating event, while other parts of it need to be addressed, but bring everything to a grinding halt in the process.
What happens is that most of these situations create a bottleneck that suddenly gets unclogged all at once in the last 10 to 15 percent of the book, which of course is a relief when it finally happens, but in the meantime, you have to read through the clog, yanno? That’s a big part of why it took so long for me to finish reading this one—not because I don’t have the time, but it was a hard one to want to pick up when I was afraid it would find something else to throw in my path that would delay getting to the fireworks factory allegedly main plot thread about Robin and her mother even more. I was here to read about Robin Lefler (a character previously not focused on very much to date even in this new setting) and her mother, and every page that got further and further away from that put more and more mental blocks in my path.
And wouldn’t you know it, those parts that directly address what was set up in the beginning are the best parts. The beginning of the book describes a woman who is telepathically linked to a machine that responds to her thoughts, which are mostly to kill anyone who tries to separate her from that machine. She takes out an entire planet’s population that way. It’s intense! And you wonder, Is that Lefler’s mom? You realize pretty quickly there’s no way it can be, but then who is it? Are they connected? But there are so many side roads and scenic routes to take that by the end, you may very well not care, even though the ultimate confrontation with her is indeed as tense and adrenaline-pumping as you hope it will be.
For a long time I wondered if there was any payoff that could conceivably be worth it, but the book culminates in the Excalibur crew meeting a representative of the Prometheans, who I imagine are being set up as the primary antagonists going forward for at least a few novels in this scene. 1 They appear to reside in that Organian/Metron power tier, but with a decidedly more malevolent streak if they choose to indulge it. It’s bad enough to be the unwitting plaything of a race like that, but Q help you when they actually intentionally set their crosshairs on you. Star Trek sometimes has a hard time with threat escalation, but I think they’ll be able to provide a different flavor of danger than the relative monoliths that are the Borg and the Dominion.
I still like hanging out with this crew a lot, and I think there are plenty of parts that indicate the usual high quality, but previous New Frontier books did a better job at putting them in a succession that flows more smoothly. Here, they’re more in isolation, and so you can see a lot of very obvious good, but it takes much more effort to crack the shell to get to the yummy walnut. It’s suffering from having to tie a bunch of disparate elements together to set up the next phase of the series, and though I feel sufficiently primed to be excited for what comes next for Calhoun & Co., I can’t say this book made it easy.
Ten Forward Toast
Today we pour one out for Ensign Mark Christiano, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time when Sparky (as Burgoyne affectionately names the energy being taking up residence in the warp core) was lashing out in fear in its birth throes, and got pulled into the warp core and disintegrated to nothing but a single hand. In a way, I feel really bad for his significant other, Ensign Ronni Beth. Normally, with very few exceptions, Star Trek characters get to move on from their trauma immediately and never think about it again. But she’s in a highly serialized Peter David series. There’s no way she’s getting off that easy!
MVP & LVP
- My MVP for this one is Si Cwan. Morgan has her own reasons for wanting to end the family reunion early, and takes advantage of a shipwide caused by the warp core baby in engineering to make a break for it. Si Cwan tries to stop her and gets a hypo full of tranquilizers for his trouble, but he shakes it off enough to bust out of the cargo container she locks him in, and then [Jim Ross voice] “BAH GAWD HE’S HANGIN ONTO THE SHUTTLECRAFT’S PORT NACELLE!” If he wasn’t so darn tenacious, Morgan would have gotten away in the chaos and not been around to save the day later, so I think he deserves some praise for hanging in there and stopping her from escaping so easily.
- LVP for this one is Mark McHenry. His complaints about feeling used by Burgoyne were annoying, especially when he would dive right back in the sack mere moments later. Dude, are you fine with being hir rebound or not? Make up your mind!
Stray Bits
- Burgoyne was redrawn for the ebook edition’s cover (pictured at right). I don’t like it. I know it’s hard to tell here, but s/he just looks like a woman who got out of the shower three minutes before reporting for duty. The original cover does a much better job of capturing hir intersex nature.
- Janos gets his own phaser specially designed for his mugato meat mitts. No such luck for the similarly proportioned Zak Kebron, however, who just carries a Type III phaser rifle, albeit with enviable swagger. (p. 51)
- I love the Momidiums, and I love how chill they are about staying in their galactic lane. Shelby asks if they detained Morgan because they thought she was a spy, and their head of extraterrestrial relations responds, “Would that we were that devious a people, Commander. We might have gotten farther than we have in galactic politics” (p. 134). Like, what a sanguine attitude. They know espionage and intergalactic intrigue are things that happen all around them, but they just have no room in their personal philosophy for any of it. I love them so much. I want to hug one.
- The Promethean who visits the Excalibur manifests as a Southern gentleman in a white suit. I pictured him as Jack McBrayer, which I think really gave it some added bite when his inevitable dark side finally peeked out briefly.
Final Assessment
Average. Most of the usual markers of New Frontier quality are in evidence, but this book crams in so many different running arcs and has so much setup to take care of that it really kills the momentum and makes it hard to get invested in what is ostensibly supposed to be the main conflict with Lefler and her mom. As a result, it was really hard to motivate myself to pick it up. Being the lead-up installment for greater things to come is a hefty burden to bear, and Fire on High shows that even the best can sag under its immense weight.
NEXT TIME: Planet X, a modern Marvel of brand crossovers
Steve Mollmann
I think the Burgoynes on the cover go the other way around. The ebook cover was the solicit cover, I believe; the final cover was what you see on the physical book. I guess when years later they released an ebook, someone grabbed the wrong file.