Star Trek: The Next Generation #52: Double Helix, Book Two of Six: Vectors

By Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch

While all of the "Double Helix" books were published as Star Trek: The Next Generation novels, the miniseries is actually a crossover, and Vectors primarily features characters from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  According to Jeff Ayers' Voyages of Imagination, editor John J. Ordover says that TNG was the bestselling series at the time, so the decision was made to publish all of the books under the TNG banner.

Vectors takes place a couple of years after Infection, during the beginning of TNG's third season and before DS9 had gone on the air, making it a kind of prequel to that series.  In the book, Dr. Pulaski travels to Terok Nor (the name by which Deep Space Nine was known while still under Cardassian command) in hopes of finding a cure to a strange disease that infects both Bajorans and Cardassians, and which may have ties to the plague virus Dr. Crusher and the crew of the Enterprise combated on Archaria III.  One of Dr. Pulaski's ex-husbands is the Bajoran doctor on Terok Nor, and she must work with both him and the Cardassian doctor to find a cure before the Cardassian government enacts a final solution, destroying the quarantined space station and perhaps all of Bajor.

Setting this book during the years of the Cardassian occupation of Bajor was an interesting choice.  I have always been intrigued by Terok Nor, so it was great to read a book that takes place on the station during this period.  While Starfleet characters like Commander Sisko and Dax were missed, I am a big fan of Gul Dukat, and the writers do a great job with him here, as they do with all of the characters.  Other DS9 characters like Odo, Quark, and Kira are prominently featured, and there are brief appearances by some of the crew of the Enterprise-D.  The scenes featuring Quark and his family are quite funny, and the scenes between Odo and Kira are a lot of fun, subtly hinting at the relationship the two of them would eventually develop.  While I wasn't exactly clamoring for a novel featuring Dr. Pulaski, she made a fine protagonist for this tense medical thriller.

The basic plot is essentially the same as that of Infection.  By the end of the novel, a cure has once more been found, but we are no closer to learning the identity of the person ultimately responsible for the plagues.  I am a little worried that this formula will wear itself thin over the course of six novels, but I remain optimistic for now.  The only real criticism I have of this book is that, like the first novel, it seemed to end rather abruptly once the cure was found, and I wish the writers had gone into a bit more detail, particularly in regards to the various battles between Bajorans and Cardassians that took place during the final third of the book.  One the whole, this sophomore entry in the "Double Helix" miniseries was an improvement over the first, but I'm hoping for something a little bit different in book three.