Finished “Ring of Fire” by David Mack.

Set during the kindof meh Season 3, between “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” and “What Is Starfleet?”, Enterprise is ordered to assist a top secret research station in orbit around a black hole that has fallen victim to sabotage and murder, as they approach the culmination of their mission.

Pike has a history with this black hole. 16 years prior, when he was second officer of the Chatelet, he pursued an unidentified craft into the accretion disk. He attempted to pull them out with the tractor beam, but the rogue ship tried to escape, and was destroyed. He was cleared of any wrongdoing, but it still weighed heavily on his conscience, causing him to be apprehensive in going back there.

Somewhere around March 2022, I started rewatching Star Trek Enterprise for the first time in like 20 years. I'd just finished TNG, DS9, and Voyager, so it seemed a natural progression.

I'm kindof a stickler for chronological order. TOS was never meant to have any in-universe chronology set to it. TNG and later series did have something of a more coherent chronology that became more or less ridged depending on the needs of the series. When I (re)watched TNG, DS9, and Voyager, all those years ago, I tried to interleave the episodes and movies as they occurred in the in-universe chronological order. So to my mind, Enterprise being the first series in the in-universe chronological order, I was kindof starting over.