Freshly escaped from the T'Kon crystal, the Wanderer regains her strength and rallies the other Shedai to attack Vanguard.

Meanwhile, Nogura and T'Prynn, having traced the source of the artifacts back to the Eremar pulsar, need to send the Sagittarius out to investigate. But the Klingons and Romulans are waiting for them to do just that.

And to cap it all off, the Tholians start amassing an armada on the boarder.

T'Prynn comes up with a plan to send a decoy out, which the Klingons and/or Romulans will happily destroy, while the real Sagittarius is deployed from the cargo hold of a freighter at another location.

The decoy is destroyed by Romulans, and Endeavour pretends to investigate and gather the wreckage. The Klingons, believing the Sagittarius is destroyed and the Endeavour is busy, think they can get away with harassing freighters again, so they go after the one carrying Sagittarius. But Nogura anticipated this, and has the Enterprise lying in wait to protect the freighter. Everything seems to be going more or less according to plan. Which is how you know it's about to go tits up.

Sagittarius makes it to Eremar, and discovers a the ruins of a Dyson bubble in orbit around the pulsar. Not a full sphere, but a series of platforms; staties holding position around the star, and connected by energy lines. They touch down on one, and discover an array of crystals similar to the Mirdonyae artifact, and begin gathering them.

This gets the Tholian's attention, so a bunch of ships break formation from the armada for Eremar. Endeavor follows, and meets the Tholians at Eremar, but are unable to talk them down before the Tholians start destroying the remains of the Dyson bubble. Endeavor engages with the Tholians, giving Sagittarius time to escape the statite before the Tholians turn it to slag, and they both take off toward Vanguard with the Tholians in hot pursuit. Enterprise arrives en-route to shoo the Tholians off, and Endeavor and Sagittarius are able to make their way back to Vanguard. Though the Enterprise needs to go off and have an episode, so they head out in a different direction.

Back at the station, Carol Marcus and Ming Xiong begin working on how to deploy the T'Kon crystals that Sagittarius brought back. A key element being the equation that the Shedai Apostate gave to Birdy Mac in an earlier novel, but Birdy died before she could bring it back to Starfleet. Quinn saw the formula, but didn't memorize it, and spent the intervening months trying to wash away the whole ordeal with whiskey. T'Prinn manages to get the information by mind melding with him, and in the process helps him back on the wagon.

Xiong and Marcus are able to complete the array, and use it to capture all of the Shedai. Everything seems to be going more or less according to plan. Which is how you know it's about to go tits up.

With the Shedai captured and imprisoned in the array, you'd think the whole ordeal would be over. A major threat has been taken off the board. The Tholians are a little stirred up, but other than that, the galaxy is at more or less it's well-known status quo. But Starfleet Command can't leave well enough alone, and orders Vanguard to see what else the array can do. So against all better judgement, they flip it on again, which causes all Tholians everywhere to collapse and recoil in pain. If they were stirred up before, they're rightly pissed off now, and the Armada decides it's time to wipe Vanguard off the map.

...Aaaaand, a battle ensues, which is as good a point as any to leave the rest to spoilers.

Knowledge seems to be a broad theme of the novel, and to a certain extent, to the series as a whole. The pursuit of forbidden knowledge, the applications of knowledge, the suppression and dissemination of knowledge. The various powers trying to gain what knowledge they can, while denying it to the others. The Klingons because they want to make a weapon of it before someone else does, Starfleet because there could be any number or applications aside from weapons, and it would be best kept from the Klingons or Romulans, and the Tholians who know all to well what the humanoids are dealing with but can't be arsed to elaborate beyond “you don't know what you're dealing with”. In another subplot that I didn't include in the recap, Duras is getting a little too cozy with the Chancellor, so Jetanien and Lugok give Pennington just enough knowledge to drop a truth bomb on the empire, disrupting Duras' ascension in Klingon politics, and probably sewing the seeds of distrust that will eventually lead to the end of their alliance with the Romulans. These subtle manipulations of information weave threads through the whole tapestry, which inevitably comes unraveled when one is pulled too far.

The buildup with the Shedai seemed to be a damp squib, as Xiong was able to round them all up with the T'kon crystals and a little bit of technobabble. Once the Shedai were captured, the novel pivots to make the Tholians the primary threat. Having a threat neutralized and under thumb is one thing, but we'd expect our heroes at this point to say “Great! Now let's see if we can communicate with them, and maybe negotiate.” But Starfleet instead decides to experiment with the technology, which should give any discerning Star Trek reader pause. You would think that imprisoning a sentient species, enslaving them and using them against their will to power the very array that captured them would be more disturbing than it comes across. Kirk or Picard would throw a revolt before acceding to that, but Nogura reluctantly states his objections on grounds of caution rather than morally, before giving the order. And it only occurs Xiong and Marcus as a possible legal avenue to stop ill-advised experiments, and not as a moral imperative. Star Trek generally makes a bit more hay over that sort of thing.

Which I suppose is just as well that that morally and practically ill-advised experimentation is exactly what leads to the final showdown with the Tholians.

#StarTrek #Vanguard