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Finished “Legacy” by Michael Jan Friedman.

The Merkaan raider Hamesaad Dreen seizes a Federation mining colony, holding them hostage, and forcing them to mine ore for him. Some 10 years prior, Dreen had attacked Federation transport ships, before he was thwarted by Captain Pike and Spock. This defeat was a humiliation that he's only recently built himself back from.

The colony administrator, Bradford Wayne, served with Spock under Pike all those years ago. He was a helmsman on a different shift, and not a main character, so he and Spock knew each other, but weren't particularly close. He and the other colonists are eventually able to get a distress call out.

Kirk is leading an away team exploring the ruins of a long extinct civilization. The party split up, with Sulu taking a group to explore another area. Kirk's party experiences localized tremors, which Sulu's group doesn't. Shortly after, they discover the cause of the tremors; a giant grub worm of some kind. It attacks Spock, and stings him with its tentacle causing him to convulse and lose consciousness.

McCoy beams up with Spock, while Kirk remains on the planet to regroup with the rest of the away team. But before they could reunite with Sulu's party and return to the ship, another tremor causes them to fall into a sinkhole.

Just then Admiral Kowalski contacts the Enterprise, and orders Scotty to abandon the search for Kirk's party, and respond to the colony's distress call.

Now I'm no expert, but if I were in that kind of situation, what I might do is leave a search party behind on the planet with supplies and equipment to continue the search, while the ship is called off-station to respond to the crisis. Maybe a shuttlecraft, in case they needed to move around, or retreat into orbit. And if the search party manages to recover the missing crew and captain, they can explain that the ship was called away on an emergency, and will be back in a few days. But apparently standard Starfleet procedure is to fuck off leaving 4 missing crew including the captain behind on the planet, buried alive, without so much as a Post-it note, and hope for the best. But what do I know?

Anyway, Spock recovers enough to resume command, or at least fake it convincingly. Nobody's fooled, but it's pretty typical Spock, so they just sort of roll with it. He retreats to the library to study the colony situation, Merkaan culture, and his previous encounter with Dreen to formulate a plan. He occasionally has to meditate to regain control over his wonked out metabolism. And in this state, he relives snippets of his time serving under Pike. We only get a few brief flashbacks to disconnected adventures. Details relevant to their encounter with Dreen, Spock recounts to McCoy and Scotty while lucid.

Meanwhile, Kirk and his party are left to dig themselves out of a cave-in and survive in the jungle for however many days using only their ingenuity, and whatever standard kit they had on them that didn't get buried in the cave-in. 2 communicators, a tricorder, and a phaser with a dead power pack.

It's a pretty standard adventure. Fun enough on its own, but not particularly groundbreaking. There's some clever setup, as the Enterprise tries to devise a means of communicating their plan to Wayne. But the narrative is a bit heavy handed in a couple places about withholding certain information from the reader until the right time.

It was fun to see snippets of Pike's earlier days; pre SNW, but several yars following “The Cage”. They sometimes read like ideas the author had in mind, but had never gotten the opportunity to flesh out. Like a back-door pitch, maybe. A couple bad-ass moments for Mia Colt that would have been fun to see in more detail.

It's pretty standard Michael Jan Friedman, really. He's capable of deep character and theme explorations, but he doesn't always do that. Sometimes he just does fun pulp sci fi, and that's OK too.

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