While Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are off defending Belle Terre against Olivium pirates, secondary characters Chekov, Uhura, Scotty, and Sulu take center stage in this third novel in the New Earth series. When the Enterprise was forced to crash two of Belle Terre's moons in the previous novel, the landscape and atmosphere of Belle Terre was drastically altered. What had once been a near paradise has now become a harsh landscape with dangerous, unpredictable weather. When a shuttlecraft carrying Chekov crashes during a dust storm, Uhura, Scotty, and Sulu must pool their resources to mount a rescue, despite hostility from local law enforcement. Everything comes to a head in a massive natural disaster modelled after Pennsylvania's Johnstown Flood.
It was nice to see the secondary characters take a starring role in this book, but reading about them, one realizes how little character development they were given on the TV show. We really don't know that much about them, and oftentimes the writers' solution is to make them really, really good at their jobs. Scotty is the best engineer in Starfleet, Uhura is the best communications officer, etc. The character who is handled the best here is Chekov, in his last adventure before taking the position of First Officer of the Reliant. It is Chekov's book in many ways, and he even gets the girl at the end!
While this was a strong entry in the New Earth series, much of it was bogged down with excessive technobabble (particularly in regards to Uhura's and Janice Rand's attempts to construct a working communications network), and, while it was fun to see the secondary characters in primary roles, I was ultimately as relieved as they were when Kirk and Spock finally show up at the end to save the day.
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