This review contains major spoilers.

In today’s episode, a rare double replicator malfunction forces Picard to bend the knee to some dollar-store Ferengi knockoffs. Meanwhile, Riker sets aside his boner to help a starbase commander with a more important matter of the heart. Is there time for hugs in the middle of war? Is Ro Laren looking for a Canuck-buddy? And is it possible to want to spend more time in a part of a book you also wanted to spend less time in? All this and more in Tunnel Through the Stars, the book that makes Jack a dull boy.

Tunnel Through the Stars
Author: John Vornholt
Pages: 269
Published: December 1998
Timeline: Concurrent with the episodes covered in books two and four of this miniseries
Prerequisites: Behind Enemy Lines (TNG, Dominion War #1)
Borrowable on Archive.org: Yes

Picking up from the end of book one, the members of the Cardassian freighter get added to the Orb of Peace’s crew compliment, but shortly after they do, both replicators go down. Whether it’s sabotage or bad luck, they can’t afford to starve, so they head to a rumored starship graveyard (which, thankfully, turns out to be real) hoping to strike gold in a salvage effort. There, they meet the Talavians, who offer to pay handsomely for finding relics like plaques and uniform pips. It’s dirty on several levels, but it’s the only way Picard can see to keep everyone from starving.

One ship seems to show signs of water and life, but keeps phasing in and out. Tinkering with the security system causes the aliens living aboard, who are hiding in a different timeline from someone they call “The Ancient Enemy” and believe that that enemy has found them, to stir to action and defend themselves. The Orb of Peace gets away, barely, plus one replicator but minus one crew member, whom some suspect was murdered due to the timing, which is as they were about to transport Geordi and Ro Laren back. When Picard later finds the explosives they were going to use to take down the artificial wormhole have been tampered with, he has to perform the unenviable balancing act of moving forward with the plan to destroy the collider while trying to root out the culprit.

Most of the book is concerned with the above plot arc. The “Data all by himself hiding from the Dominion on inhospitable planets” stuff is mentioned once early on and then dropped at warp speed. Riker hooking up with a starbase commander only to end up urging her to treat the PTSD she’s in denial about gets “solved” about halfway through. Whether meant as such or not, it feels like a sort of implicit admission that neither of those story threads had any juice in the first place. It took me a long time to power through this book, but I sped up significantly once it started focusing exclusively on the adventures of the Orb of Peace.

Taking this as the second half of a single story, it seems to me that it started off with good ideas and momentum and fell off right in the middle. If you were reading this as one book, you’d get to the part where they were stranded in the Badlands after combining crews and wonder why all of a sudden there was this big detour in the middle of the book grinding everything to a screeching halt. Of course, it makes sense both before and after why this stop has to be made and what it gives the saboteur time to do, but I feel like it should have taken up a lot less than literally half the book (and a quarter of the story overall).

This is going to sound ironic given what I just said, but despite the fact that I wish the salvage plot had taken up less time, I also wish we’d gotten to spend more time learning about the aliens hiding out of phase in the starship graveyard. They have an intricate security system and heads that look like multifaceted jewels, and whatever The Ancient Enemy is clearly has them scared spitless, but the Orb of Peace crew and the Talavians have to scramble to get away from their defensive measures so quickly that there’s no time to calm them down and absorb the lore. On one hand, I get it, because this is already getting far enough away from Dominion-oriented action, but only getting to meet this weird and fascinating race in a brief moment of panic is a brutal tease.

Speaking of Dominion-oriented, I was also never quite able to shake the feeling that even though this is ostensibly a Dominion War story, it was taking place decidedly on the fringes of said war rather than really immersing us in it. This is certainly arguable to a great extent, as the artificial wormhole is clearly central to the Dominion’s plans and any effort to destroy it is putting us right at the heart of the action, but there just wasn’t a lot of Dominion-ey stuff going on for my buck. I’m actually deeply embarrassed to admit it never occurred to me that the saboteur might be a changeling until it was actually happening. I was too wrapped up in catching up with tertiary TNG faves and got completely broadsided by it.

Overall, I liked getting to see these characters again, but that can only carry you so far. I don’t really buy the romance that develops between Sam and Ro, because there’s a lot more of just narratively leering at her before Vornholt seems to start thinking, “Actually, instead of gawking at her and pointing out how hot she is, maybe I can actually take this somewhere.” Riker’s quest to see Shana Winslow take better care of herself, seem hastily wrapped up and/or vaguely mishandled as well. But taken together, these two books aren’t the worst time you could spend in this universe, and of the two divisions of the Dominion War miniseries, it certainly beats watching Diane Carey erase extremely important subplots off of episodes of Deep Space Nine wholesale so she has room to cram in another boring white male captain OC.

Ten Forward Toast

This is a weird one, because this character didn’t actually die, but when he was revealed to actually be the changeling, it hit like a ton of bricks how much he was still suffering back at the internment camp, so I’m going to raise a TFT-in-spirit for Taurik. I don’t think the internment camp was directly connected to the collider, so I don’t think he died when it exploded, but not getting a happy reunion for him and Sam after that was a bit of a bummer. All that good friend chemistry just to realize Taurik is still a slave? What a drag.

MVP & LVP

• This week’s MVP is an MVP in the “when X isn’t on screen, the other characters should be asking, ‘Where’s X?'” sense, and with that in mind, it goes to Hasmek, the one-armed Romulan Picard took prisoner in the first book. He’s always very sardonic, but never fully pooh-poohs their efforts, and eventually comes to believe that the Federation will ultimately win the war just from witnessing Picard’s doggedness. I was often reminded of Tomalak, which should be taken as high praise. My favorite line is near the end when the Orb of Peace crew beams over to the Enterprise-E and Dr. Crusher sees him and says “You’re not regular crew,” and his response is “No, I’m special crew.” That really tickled me for some reason.
  • Data gets a runner-up consideration for going from the most underused character to one of the most important in the space of about two nanoseconds, but Hasmek built that win brick by brick.
• This week we’re giving out a co-LVP, to Enrique Maserelli and Tamla Horik, a human/Deltan pair who don’t get a ton of development. I was afraid they were going to be the saboteurs merely by dint of the fact that they’re pretty quiet and could easily move around without being given a second thought, but their total innocence proves to be the final nail in the nothingburger coffin.

Stray Bits

• Deep Space Nine was also going to do an artificial wormhole storyline, but the novel’s got approved first, so the show graciously let the literature division run with it. (Per Voyages of Imagination.)
• Derek (from the beginning of Behind Enemy Lines) was Canadian, and so was Sam Lavelle’s grandfather. Does Ro Laren have a type?
• The name of Starbase 209’s vice-admiral is Jack Torrance, which, as a name for the commanding officer of a starbase that’s seeing a lot of casualties, is certainly … a choice. Seems like Vornholt might have overlooked some better ones! HI-OHHH! (21)
• “As Shana had told [Riker], Starfleet had no personnel to dispense hugs and reassurance, and that was what he needed most.” — I mean, why doesn’t Starfleet have a dedicated hug officer? They made the Galaxy-class experience touchy-feely enough, it wouldn’t have been that big a stretch. At the very least, it ought to be part of the counselor’s job description. (22)
• Picard says something I found surprisingly poignant in his eulogy for Lena Shonsui: “May her beliefs in the afterlife be fulfilled.” The novels have long been more respectful of religious belief than expected, and this line carries that tradition forward with elegance and poise. (130)

Final Assessment

Average. I enjoyed this book most when it focused on the Orb of Peace, which it eventually realized it’s best at, if a little late. The first part had me primed for excitement, but then this one started out by bringing all of that momentum to a halt and hanging out in the Badlands on a forced salvage mission. Still, it’s good to get to hang with some of these characters again, even if it results in a hookup I don’t quite find believable. Despite not feeling entirely like a Dominion War story most of the time, with the Enterprise-E being sidelined at a starbase and the Orb of Peace having to hunt for trinkets, the spunk of the latter’s crew carries it enough that I didn’t dislike it.

NEXT TIME: The war effort requires a Sacrifice of Angels