Star Trek TOS Zinedex: Authors (Z)

"The Sun-King's Shadow"     Dagger of the Mind, 1980, p.113-120

Romulan Cytherean Cycle Series

 

* No Cold Wind   (novel) Orion Press, [1995?]. 228 p.

[original date not on my copy, but this was listed in a 1996 Orion Press catalog. Reprinted in Orions Archives #6 and Orion Archives 2001 - First Mission]
     Enjoyable novel with some nice aliens, excellent characterizations, and nice job of tying up some loose ends. The plot is slowly revealed in the reading, but here's the summary...
      The Kelvans are baaaack - this time in their own large, many-tentacled bodies. They gain knowledge by eating others and absorbing their RNA - which they have now done to Rojan and the other Kelvan colonists, as well as to the starship Thalis. They are running around eating people they find interesting and wiping out everybody else. When they encounter the Rycherians, they learn that the younglings of the species, at first maturity, are spectacularly powerful telepaths. So they kidnap them, to eat them later when they get suddenly smart, but since they can't communicate with the kids (who are earless) the Kelvans go off in search of Spock (whom they know about through Rojan) to be their control and go-between.
     Meanwhile... the Rycherians, whom the Federation is anxiously courting to keep them away from the Romulans, have appealed to the Federation to find their children. Keeping it all very hush-hush, Kirk is sent with secret orders to have Spock recruit the Sedolan Vulcans, a colony who practice completely open telepathy - no secrets at all - to help negotiate with the Rycherians. That's where the Kelvans find him, take him, and then destroy the planet while Kirk & crew watch, not knowing Spock has been kidnapped. Kirk is blamed for Spock's death, unable to explain to his crew that he was under orders not to touch the Kelvan ship. Back on Earth, Kirk is "allowed" to resign, under clouds of suspicion of cowardice. He joins the Zephyr, a privateer ship under contract to patrol Gorn space, do battle with Orion pirates, and slurp up any available booty. There he falls in love with the mysterious Talya (T'Alya), who turns out to be half-Vulcan and half Elasian, with a wild temper and no training in controlling her touch telepathy, hence with an aversion to touch that is quite an obstacle. Kirk, of course, is really on a secret mission to find the Kelvan ship and rescue the children. Talya becomes pregnant, then very ill with complications and absolutely refuses to go to Vulcan because she had promised her mother not to. So, Kirk takes her to McCoy, then goes off again hunting for the Kelvans.
     McCoy is unable to save Talya. Spock and mr'Antor, the eldest youngling, undertake to destroy the Kelvan ship and get out with the other kids in a pod. Spock gets a mental message from Kirk as they get closer, so he speeds up the timing. They escape, the Zephyr picks them up, the Kelvan ship explodes, and Kirk collapses when Talya dies. Spock takes the Zephyr back to Enterprise and barely saves Kirk from dying of broken-bond shock by mind-meld, only made possible by using mr'Antor as an anchor. The experience of the broken bond is so powerful that he resolves not to bond at all, since any bond with him, by either a human or a Vulcan, would almost certainly leave one of them to suffer that fate. Instead he will seek out kohlinar, and he deliberately avoids Kirk to keep from being swayed in his resolve.

 

"Music of the Night"     Antares #1, 1997 (p. 71-93)

[Reprinted in: Orion Archives 2001: First Mission v.1]

Uhura is trapped in a musical & mental fugue, and rescued by Spock with the help of tone-deaf Kirk.

* Boy Scout (novel) Orion Press, 1997. 87 p.

[reprinted in Orion Archives 2001 - Beginnings]
Nice job on the background of Kirk & Carol Marcus. After a disastrous tour on the Pegasus, in which Lt. Commander Kirk became a hero by getting everyone home after the entire bridge crew was wiped out, Kirk is being pushed into early promotion and captaincy of the Enterprise. He wavers, wanting to take a ground assignment to have Carol and David back in his life, and slowly wins over David. Things go awry when Kirk accompanies David on an introductory boy-scout camping trip that goes all wrong. Though he's the hero again, and discovers that command comes naturally to him, Carol is unwilling to ever face that kind of worry again. Very nice set-up for the movies.

* "The Red Shirt"     Antares #3, 1999 (p. 6-9)

[Reprinted in: Orion Archives 2001: First Mission v.1]

Kirk attends a dying security guard

Bev Zuk

** The Honorable Sacrifice (novel) 1981. 92 p.

Oh, yum - the perfect McCoy novel. Tightly plotted, dead-on characterization, great relationship dilemmas. Plus a pretty good planet/society. Keywords: pneumonia; sword; kuri (steeds); Tower of the Dead; transporter kidnap; quarantine; hallucinogen; crush; twins; feedback.
     The story is revealed in wonderfully suspenseful bits. When done, we have this sequence of events:
     Post-Vejur, McCoy is feeling unnecessary and overlooked by Jim, leaving him ripe to accept a Starfleet Intelligence mission to go to the feudal, neutral but Klingon-dominated, and epidemic-spawning planet Cyr to come back with viable PXP (a type of pneumonia) bacteria for research to prevent plague spreading through the Federation. Kirk tries to dissuade him, then tries to stop him bureaucratically, leading to estrangement between them. McCoy is set up, with his knowledge, for court-martial on manslaughter, but he is unprepared for the emotional impact of the ceremony. Along with his innoculations, the vengeful Ionii, a Vegan Starfleet physician who had tried to entice McCoy away from Enterprise and is furious at having his judgment proven wrong with McCoy's disgrace, injects him with hallucinogens. This puts him through a hellacious experience he had not agreed to - but it also saves him from the Klingons - the mind sifter can do nothing with a lunatic, and they let him go. A local feudal ruler, Shamere, takes him in through his bout with the pneumonia, and keeps him as lover.
     Some time later, while Enterprise is escorting the hospital ship Mercy to Cyr under sealed orders, Kirk is snatched from the ship by transporter-kidnap and brought to Shamere. Scott and Spock unravel the mysterious orders and face off with the officers of Mercy. On Cyr, McCoy declares Kirk to be his enemy; Kirk doesn't know if he means it, nor if it was McCoy who provided the bioscan to kidnap him. (It wasn't - they got it from the Klingons, who got it from the Romulans.) McCoy is, in fact, hostile to Kirk, believing that Kirk knew about the hallucinogens and didn't tell him. But he drugs Shamere and her piggish brother Brel so that they - and Brel's twin sister Miki - can escape to a safe house and get to a transmitter. (McCoy had clawed his own transponder out while delirious.) While they are on the run, Kirk comes down with the pneumonia and no resistance. Miki and her kuri fall into a crevasse. She escapes but McCoy has to kill the kuri. McCoy has to open Kirk's lung. They arrive in town facing ambush; McCoy stashes Miki and Kirk in the Tower of Death and charges the ambush, nailing some Klingons, but then having to fight Shamere. Spock arrives just in time to save McCoy's bacon, but he has to kill another kuri. They get Kirk beamed to quarantine on the Mercy, then McCoy beams up in full armor, mounted on his kuri, which he presents to Ionii as the culture, telling him if he wants its liver, he'll have to kill it himself.
     The story all comes out as McCoy and Kirk recover in Mercy's sickbay. Ionii has had a well-deserved nervous breakdown on learning just how much he had misjudged McCoy and how much he was responsible for harming him. McCoy presents Scotty with his sword in repayment for the one he'd borrowed, which Kirk broke in his dishonorable discharge ceremony.
    And the perfect last line... McCoy asks Scotty how he looked, demanding "The truth." Scott replies, "Like a flamin' saint."

 

 

** The Third Verdict   (novel) 1982, 132 p.

A Scotty novel. And a very lovely Scotty novel it is. This woman can plot. And her characterization is flawless.
Keywords: Living Goddess; Perry Mason; sacrifice; heart; womanhood; tea; Kali; convert; testify; unproven.
     Enterprise is on ambassadorial shuttle duty, taking Sakti, the young goddess of Kendar, and Ambassador Vetti and entourage to an All Faiths Conference. Sakti and Scotty take a shine to each other and he becomes her guide/daddy. What he doesn't know until too late, however, is that she must make a perfect sacrifice to the gods before she becomes a woman - which McCoy has revealed to her will be in just about another month. She sacrifices Kirk. Scott finds him and gets McCoy & co. there in time. Realizing, he goes to Sakti to tell her Kirk is alive, and in anger takes her by the throat. She is found strangled 25 minutes later, Scott holding her.
     Scott is cleared by the hearing, but Vetti insists on a trial, which Starfleet asks Scott to undergo, in Scotland, for the good of the Service. Scott agrees, hoping the trial will reveal the real killer. Vetti, Spock and McCoy are all suspects in his mind, among others. During the trial, Spock and McCoy are staying at Scotty's house, leaving plenty of opportunity for marvelous S/Mc interactions. The courtroom stuff is very fine. Scott's pre-Starfleet history of violent temper is brought out damningly. Spock and McCoy each testify in a manner that brings public opinion sharply against them and suspicion onto themelves, in order to further the defense strategy of reasonable doubt. McCoy agonizes over whether he has lied to both the jury and to Scotty in painting an unfavorable picture of Sakti. Kirk, still very ill, is transported in as the sole defense witness. Scott, when his case is almost won, insists on taking the stand to correct the bad impression of Sakti the others have created -- and in the process awakens the memories he needed to know the true killer - the scent of Vetti in Sakti's room. As the trial goes on, followers of the growing Kendar religion become violent, seeking the death of the god-killer (as well as the undelivered sacrifice). Revelations are tipped to us in perfect timing; we slowly discover what McCoy was doing when he left his critically-injured captain to leave his prints all over the dead girl's room (searching for the poison to find an antidote) and what Spock was doing that was so absorbing he missed all the excitement (meditating on the probability of a revival of the Kendari sacrificial cult). In the end, Scott is acquitted as "not proven" and Vetti, leading a mob to kill all the Enterprise officers, is trampled to death by his own followers as the E-men are transported away.
     The title has two meanings. Scotland is the only legal system that allows a third verdict other than "guilty" and "not guilty" – "not proven" – which is what Scott receives. And, he is tried in three courts - the judicial court, the media court, and the court of popular opinion. The only flaw I see in the novel is that it is stated that Scotty has won in the third court – but that is not actually demonstrated, and doesn't actually seem like the logical outcome..