Wounds: Star Trek Corps of Engineers

Starfleet Corps of Engineers #11

by Ilsa J. Bick, Keith R.A. DeCandido

The Dominion War has been over for a year, but its legacy lives on. Commander Sonya Gomez, former Starship Enterprise™ engineer, and her crack Starfleet Corps of Engineers team on the U.S.S. da Vinci find themselves dealing with many permutations of that legacy.

Two mysterious murders on the da Vinci lead to the Gamma Quadrant and a Dominion base. A pre-warp planet occupied by the Dominion still has scars from both sides of that conflict. Plus Gomez, computer expert Soloman, and Security Chief Corsi are haunted by demons from their past.

But the greatest threat of all comes from a visit to Deep Space 9™. A fissure has opened up between realities, endangering the very existence of the Bajoran system -- and also stranding Doctors Lense and Bashir on a war-torn planet from which they may never escape.

Genres: Star Trek, Science Fiction, Fiction

528 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2005

About the author

Among other things, I was an English major in college and so I know that I'm supposed to write things like, "Ilsa J. Bick is ." Except I hate writing about myself in the third person like I'm not in the room. Helloooo, I'm right here . . . So let's just say that I'm a child psychiatrist (yeah, you read that right)as well as a film scholar, surgeon wannabe (meaning I did an internship in surgery and LOVED it and maybe shoulda stuck), former Air Force major—and an award-winning, best-selling author of short stories, e-books, and novels. Believe me, no one is more shocked about this than I . . . unless you talk to my mother.

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

An omnibus of the SCE stories, books #50-#56.

Malefictorum: a decent mystery about the mysterious death of a crewmen.
Lost Time: a bit too weird and quite difficult to understand, but a nice little mix with some of the DS9 crew.
Identity Crisis: good fun and introduces the concept of spam and malware to the Star Trek universe!
Fables of the Prime Directive: kind of mediocre story about going undercover among a primitive culture, and not very interesting (at least until the final parts).
Security: a great story that delves into Corsi's past.
Wounds (Book 1 and Book 2): an interesting but messy story about Dr. Lense and Julian Bashir getting thrown into an alternate universe and barely surviving. It's gritty and grisly and ties into the DS9 relaunch, as well as hinting at the origin of the Borg. Often difficult to follow at times due to the overly technical writing, and the author really does like mentioning the smell of faeces a bit too often.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A spinoff of the Star Trek family, the collection of short stories and novellas are centered around Federation engineers as the Federation is in a cold war with an alien empire. The works by various authors is a litter confusing at times but still a good sci-fi read.

[Tommy Verhaegen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mystery, psychology, ... Again too much character deepening and thinking but still supported and sometimes replaced by the action and tension that i prefer. Falling back more and more on the first known characters which is on the one hand nice since they are quite familiar but leaves on the other hand a lot of room for the new characters to get acquainted with. Varied stories with a clear chronographical line through the whole omnibus. Addictive as is the whole series and by extension the Star Trek franchise.

[BBFlyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting Star Trek short stories. not all about Star Trek engineering.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit meh

It was fine, but compared to any of the previous omnibus it wasn't all that good. The stories were interesting but a few were a bit of a slog to get through.

[Sarah Eckert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cool book. Interesting that though the series is called "Star Trek Corps of Engineers" there's a whole story dedicated to security (and what they think about engineers, which isn't high at all) and two dedicated to the story, taken from two different angles, of two medical personnel (with the ensuing blood and gore -- spoiler warning! They actually took two pages to described amputating a guy's leg without anesthetic! Gross!). Also, it may just be me, but the guy who comes across as the author's example of what she views as a character befitting the title happens to be a stereotypical arrogant bookish engineer named Tev. Not all of us are like that.

Oh, well. I still enjoyed reading the stories and one thing I enjoy about the Star Trek series is that the characters continue from book to book, so you feel as if you get to know them better with each one. Also, it's cool for me as an amateur writer to be able to see many different authors figure out how to write a series about the same characters and the stories be consistent. I think that didn't happen in one of the Star Wars spin-offs that I read once. The author wrote his book after reading only the first (published, the fourth chronological) book of the Star Wars series, so there were quite a few inconsistencies with the second (real published, fifth chronological) Star Wars book.

[Jimyanni · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fine collection of short stories, each focusing on the "Corps of Engineers", a group within Starfleet specializing in solving technical problems that have stumped the "normal" run of starship engineers. The only quibble that I have, and the reason that I've only rated the book as a whole at four stars rather than five, is that unlike in most of this series so far, the continuity between stories is a bit choppy; one story does not always smootly lead into the next, but instead the epilogue to one story may occur AFTER the events of the next story. This was a bit confusing, and also spoiled a bit of the tension in the next story (we would know, for example, if certain characters survived if they were seen in the epilogue of the previous story, AFTER this one ended) but it was a relatively minor problem. And certainly, the final offering, from which the entire collection draws its name (Wounds) is by far the best-written, most powerfully moving Star Trek story that I've read in a long time, possibly ever. That story by itself was worth buying and reading the book for.

[James Bertler · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was amazing
One of the best books in the series