Prometheus: Fire with Fire by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg
This book starts with TOS-era prologue, that reveals some sort of mysterious artifact that makes people angry. Unlike other prologues, it doesn't feel to me like it overstood it's welcome.
Then we meet the crew of the Prometheus, before cutting away to a starbase. We get a short chapter of life aboard starbase 91, before it is attacked and completely destroyed. Back to prometheus, where they are dispatched to figure out what's happened. A terrorist group takes credit for this, who is made of members of an insular species known as the Renao. The only Renao officer, Jassat ak Namur, happens to server on the Prometheus, a potential asset to the crew in helping to interact with the species.
Soon, there's a similar attack on a klingon mining colony, and so the Klingons demand action and send a ship of their own, with Ambassador Alexander Rozhenko dispatched (via the Aventine) to accompany them by Martok. One thing I really liked about this book is how well it does each of these chapters of other ships or the worlds we see get destroyed. Every character we see have a scene feels very alive and the world feels very flushed out. The scene on the Klingon mining planet, I felt it was quite good despite having the hunch that everyone was going to die. There's even a scene with a Renao pilot who doesn't feel sympathy for the federation but is sent to accompany them, and I feel like this is done quite well, and ties into the main theme of the book, which is prejudice and radicalism, and how it can fester and can be enabled by others.
The one complaint I have, is that by the time I got to the end of the book, I had forgotten that the start of the book set up that there is a supernatural cause of radicalism. As the prometheus investigates, there are microagressions (and macroaggressions) against ak Namur from both Renao, who see him as someone who's left their culture (and violated the natural order), and from some Starfleet crew members, who treat him with suspicion or outright hostility.
The climax of the book starts when ak Renao reports some of his childhood friends as distributing fliers for the terrorist group. The joint away team sent to investigate, the starfleet officers deliberately decide to defer to the klingons, who will be more brutal with their interrogations (and end up killing the civilians).
Meanwhile, main bridge crew members of the prometheus who are sent to investigate get kidnapped and used as hostages by a terrorist cell.
The information the Klingons extracted from the civilians is used to pinpoint the location of the cell, and an extraction team is sent. They escape on black market shuttles with experimental propulsion technology, and nearly escape with the hostages, but during the space battle the starfleet officers free themselves by fighting and get beamed back just before their ship explodes.
Spock mind melds with one of the captured terrorists, and determines that their mind was influenced by some mysterious force which prevents them from seeing right from wrong. If only the troubles of the modern day could be so easily explained. I do think that the underlying cultural tension of the Renao's culture with the federation is still well done, and clearly not all Renao are affected by this force.
I am looking forward to starting the next one.
I like Drake.
