Legacies: Book 1: Captain to Captain by Greg Cox

Legacies: Book 1: Captain to Captain by Greg Cox
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Secret the spans the decades and holding that secret from a galaxy unprepared for the power it represents are the Captains and First Officers of the Starship Enterprise. Captain April while commanding the ship now famed in legend visits the world of Usilde and observes an alien presence that is corrupting this primitive world and it's people. Lt. Una (aka Number One) a fresh faced officer leads an away mission to gather intel and it goes terribly wrong. Captain April intervenes before the whole landing party is lost but there seems to be no room for negotiation with this alien species who are intent on subjugating the native population and terraforming the world and they seem to have the power to back up their intent. We get a potential tricky Prime Directive dilemma as Uslide is not a Federation world and the alien invaders are unknown, the choice to oppose this wanton destruction or negotiate an understanding is why some people get to don the shirt and sit at the heart of a Starship but as we see logic and reasoning can often conflict with a heart and souls desire to do anything to oppose an injustice or right a wrong.
Legacies: Book 1: Captain to Captain is the first part of a trilogy of novels each written by a different author, in this novel Greg lays the groundwork and background to the events that helped to shape Una into the character of Number One we saw on the original tv pilot. The character has been used in other novels but this trilogy could become the baseline for judging this character who we never really got to know. Greg also make full use of work by Diane Carey who described April's Enterprise in some detail, it was most satisfying to recognise many names amongst this crew. The elements of the story that centered on a much older Captain Una (commander of Yorktown) also paid off handsomely as her interaction with Spock and the mystery of her visit to Kirk's Enterprise has you on the edge, you know something is going on but at the point you are not sure what. In many ways you get lost in the events on Usilde such is the wonderful descriptive world and people Greg presents but switching back to Kirk and company makes you realise the two main aspects of the novel are feeding off each other and offering up an excellent opening to this trilogy.


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