In today’s episode, we get to see a little more of Bajor’s most important religious leader doing some Kai Winning in the past, but it’s clear everyone else woke up on the wrong side of the runabout. What is the motivation behind the invaders calling themselves “the liberated”? Is Worf forgetting his roots? And what is up with these super-generic covers? All this and more in The Courageous, the book that has too much head.

The Courageous
Author: Dafydd ab Hugh1Misprinted on the cover as “Daffyd ab Hugh”.
Pages: 235
Published: February 1999
Timeline: The Winn segments are 30 years prior to the present day, which is
Prerequisites: The Conquered (DS9 #24, Rebels 1/3)

The second book in the Rebels trilogy immediately gives us some of what I was hoping for from the first: insight into Winn’s past and her role in the Bajoran resistance against the Cardassian occupation. A slave in the house of a gul named Ragat, she hatches a plan to pass on Cardassian intelligence to the Bajoran resistance by convincing Gul Ragat to travel to the site of a planned action so that he could potentially personally capture Bajoran dissidents for his own gain and ascension, her being part of his retinue. She enacts this by telling him she has intel on an upcoming attack by a resistance cell, which is actually true, and she actually tells him about a real thing they’re planning—but she’s gambling that she can not only sneak away from the retinue long enough to pass her Cardassian intel on to her resistance cell’s leader, but also get word to the dissidents that Ragat is coming in time for them to postpone their attack. The only way it goes off without a hitch is if she succeeds at both. But the trip is the only way she can get close enough to do both.

Sister Winn attempts to sneak out while they are spending the night at an encampment, but accidentally causes a commotion and is observed absconding. Finding a missing girl allows her to cook up a plausible cover for running off, but when they’re found, it turns out the girl, a Cardassian/Bajoran hybrid, is incredibly important for reasons Winn isn’t made privy to. Though it’s not explicitly stated, astute fans will likely quickly deduce that the girl is Gul Dukat’s daughter Ziyal, though it remains to be seen by me if that pays off meaningfully in the third book or if it’s just a treat for eagle-eyed readers. A more intriguing connection comes at the end of the book when Dax and Bashir encounter Ragat on Sierra Bravo 112-II, calling himself “Ragat the Banished”. Guess that means the ambush thirty years prior didn’t go so well for him, though perhaps there are wrinkles in Winn’s side where she didn’t quite get everything she wanted the way she wanted it. Again, remains to be seen by me.

Other subplots move forward at varying odd clips. Sisko and his bunch come up with a plan to knock out all the power centers on the planet and find a herd of giant six-legged ruminants, though their plans to domesticate them are altered somewhat when it’s discovered they pass the minimum threshold for being considered intelligent. The Tiffnakis are no longer the smooth-brained goobers they were when we first met them (a transformation that, by the way, feels in no way earned), so ab Hugh must have thought we were dipping below our quota on stupid aliens. One such instance in a trilogy is one thing, but having two is annoying and unnecessarily enervating. I’ll grant that it may play into a theory lightly brushed by Bashir—namely, that all the sentient species on the planet were put there and left with the tech rather than naturally evolving there—but I can think of little at this point that’s going to make such a payoff worthwhile.

With Dax and Bashir out of the sea and on land, that creates another running thread, in which a trio of green ensigns are left to hold down the fort in the submerged Defiant. I didn’t care about any of these people either, and they have a problem I’ll touch on some later as well, where they don’t seem to have a very high opinion of each other and are often unnecessarily unkind to each other. Their attempts at communication with an unknown being are more interesting, largely because the “sea monster” has the sort of intelligence you can sometimes see in a certain kind of dog’s or cat’s eyes, but it’s a low bar to clear.

I am glad to have gotten more of the Kai Winn lore I was hoping for from the first book, but it’s situated between a lot of other stuff that I don’t need and frankly don’t want. I’ve been thinking about this, and I think some of it comes down to fears on the editorial side and not necessarily any doing of the author—they think people are going to bounce off a book if they’re not getting their recommended daily allowance of Sisko or Quark or whichever more popular character they think readers are really here for. But I’m very much suspecting that this could have been one book and that it could have been entirely Winn’s story placed between occasional scenes in the present anchoring it.

Instead, we also have to endure a bunch of nonsense about the main crew doing a half-assed job of turning a bunch of ragtag goofballs into a highly disciplined military force and, through the magic of storytelling, it turning out to be a full-assed job. We’ll see how they measure up against the Cardassians and Drek’la, the latter of whom, two entire books deep, we still don’t know basically anything about. Same goes for the aliens invading Emissary’s Sanctuary (formerly Deep Space Nine) (formerly Terok Nor), the next book’s titular liberated, although they don’t seem to care that Bajor has also recently been liberated. The Liberated has a lot of work cut out for it in closing several open tickets to satisfaction, and if I’m being perfectly honest, I worry it might not be up to the task.

MVP & LVP

• My MVP for this installment is Quark. I wasn’t entirely sold on The 34th Rule, but everyone’s treatment of him in this trilogy is proving that book’s point over and over. He comes up with some great ideas, and he does some sufficiently amusing diplomacy with the six-legged
• I guess marching across an entire planet and having to train a bunch of basket cases into hardened warriors on short notice is enough to test anyone’s resolve, but my goodness, everyone is so short with each other in this book. Still, the LVP of the trilogy so far remains Odo, whose dialogue is still pulling the greatest number of eye rolls by volume, not least of all because he’s on Quark’s case so much that Sisko idly wonders at one point if he’s going to have to pull him aside later for a private convo about chilling the eff out.

Stray Bits

• It is very funny how, to date, nothing on the cover of either book has had anything to do with anything.
• I forgot to mention this from the last book, but one of the ensigns holding down the Defiant is named Tina Weymouth.
• There is a weird ongoing phenomenon in this book where unusual and/or less-liked characters are referred to somewhat less than rarely as “___-heads”. The six-legged beasts are referred to, depending on the character, as either “split-heads” or “cleft-heads”, and I think even Cardassians get “spoon-head”ed a few times. It would come off as demeaning and, well, wrongheaded in any series, but despite the fact that it’s important to not put its characters on too high a pedestal and understand that they all have their own areas for growth, it’s nevertheless always doubly so in Star Trek.
• “The captain’s plan is bold, thought Worf; it is Klingonlike. No other Starfleet officer would have dared!“, somehow forgetting that he served under Jean-Luc Picard, maybe the most formidable diplomatic force to ever reckon with the Klingons, their most understanding Federation ally, Gowron’s literal freaking Arbiter of Succession (22–23)
• “Ratageena” might be the worst mangling of raktajino I’ve ever seen in print (151)

First Assessment

Bad. Getting more of a peek into Kai Winn’s role in the resistance is a plus, but everyone else is either incredibly annoying or a total cipher. Characters are often very short with each other—perhaps understandable, given the circumstances, but nevertheless, not a lot of fun to sit with. The completion of the Tiffnakis’ transformation from hapless dorks to hardened planetary defenders is mostly handled off-page and entirely unearned. Many questions remain open, and the third book will have to be pretty handy with a roll of ribbon to put a nice bow on all of them.

NEXT TIME: The Liberated